A short clip of Anne Hathaway being handed a copy of the Quran on the red carpet at the London premiere of The Devil Wears Prada 2 has become the latest flashpoint in a week of overlapping controversies surrounding the actress and the film itself, according to Britannia Daily. What might, in another context, have passed as a small gesture from an enthusiastic fan has instead been read through the prism of a separate online argument over Hathaway’s recent use of an Arabic expression — and landed in parallel with a far broader religious backlash from Christian viewers over the film’s marketing.
What happened on the red carpet in London
Video circulating on X and other platforms captures the Oscar-winning actress pausing to receive the religious text from someone in the crowd, exchanging a few words before moving on down the line, according to Britannia Daily. The encounter itself was brief and without incident, but it was amplified within hours by users who tied it directly to an interview Hathaway had given to People magazine only days earlier.
In that interview, Hathaway had used the word “Inshallah” — meaning “God willing” — while speaking about her hopes for a long and healthy life. The phrase is among the most widely used expressions across the Arabic-speaking world and is heard routinely well beyond it, from the Balkans to South Asia, and has long since passed into the casual vocabulary of many non-Muslim speakers. Even so, its appearance in a Hollywood press interview was enough to divide commentary between those who welcomed it as a harmless courtesy and those who questioned whether the actress appreciated the religious resonance of what she had said.
Why a single word has provoked such a sprawling response
The answer lies in the speed with which cultural commentary now compounds itself. The premiere gift, arriving within days of the interview, was immediately framed as a response to it — a symbolic handoff rather than a coincidence. “She said one word in an interview and someone showed up with a whole Quran at the premiere,” one widely shared post on X observed, capturing the mood of users who treated the sequence as darkly comic, according to Britannia Daily. Others were sharper: one commenter argued that Hathaway appeared unaware of the ways in which religious doctrine has historically been used to justify the oppression of women, while another noted wryly that the incident was almost inevitable given the city in which the premiere was held. More sympathetic viewers described the exchange as a wholesome or generous moment, though several queried whether the actress was the natural recipient of such a gift.
What the debate illustrates, more than anything concrete about Hathaway’s own beliefs, is how unforgiving the online ecosystem has become for public figures who reach beyond their own cultural register. A phrase used unremarkably by millions of people in daily conversation is, when spoken by a Hollywood star, treated as a statement requiring interpretation.
A film already fighting its own religious backlash
The Quran clip has entered public conversation at a moment when The Devil Wears Prada 2 is already contending with a quite separate and considerably more sustained religious controversy, this one driven by Catholic and other Christian audiences. Much of their anger has fixed on Hathaway’s character, a pop star whose stage name in the film is “Mother Mary”, and on promotional material that pairs Marian iconography — including a radiant crown of the sort associated with traditional depictions of the Virgin Mary — with costuming and staging that critics have described as sacrilegious, according to Britannia Daily.
The studio and film-makers have pushed back, insisting the project is a fictional portrait of a pop artist in crisis and is not intended to represent the biblical figure. That explanation has not stemmed the reaction on social media, where Catholic accounts and religious Facebook groups have organised sustained complaints and accused the entertainment industry of treating Christian symbols with a latitude it would never extend to other faiths. The knock-on effect has been visible on review platforms: IMDb scores in the film’s early-release window have sat between 3.6 and 4.2 out of 10, depressed by a wave of one-star ratings citing offence to Christianity, many of them posted before the picture had reached wide audiences, according to Britannia Daily.
A further wrinkle has emerged in the form of MOTHERMARY, a real-world electropop duo of former Mormon artists from Montana, who have publicly raised concerns about the overlap between their group’s name and branding and the visual identity deployed in the film’s marketing. The duo is reported to be weighing legal options.
For Hathaway personally, the week’s coverage has inevitably returned attention to her own religious background. Raised Roman Catholic, she has spoken previously of her faith as a continuing evolution, and her family is understood to have moved away from the Catholic Church after her brother came out as gay, citing the Church’s stance on homosexuality. None of that biographical detail has much to do with the man in a London crowd who handed her a Quran, or with the pop-star character whose costume has so enraged viewers elsewhere. But in the compressed logic of modern celebrity controversy, each thread has been pulled into the same knot — and, for now, shows no sign of untangling.
