Being mercilessly trolled on the internet comes with the territory of being a celebrity, but Melissa McCarthy has learned to never take it personally. In fact, she has sympathy for people who have nothing better to do with their lives than attack other people anonymously.

Melissa McCarthy at CinemaconMelissa McCarthy at Cinemacon

The 'Life of the Party' star has realised in her career that the kind of people that say awful things to other people - even to people they don't even know - tend to be the people who are least happy with their lives. And so, she only hopes that they can find some peace and happiness someday.

'Weirdly, instead of getting mad at them, I always feel like, 'Oh, I hope you meet someone soon that you can talk to, someone that really makes you laugh'', she told People. 'I just root for that person to find a little joy.'

It's a habit that can only serve to make her life better, and it's one that she has passed on to her daughters 11-year-old Vivian and 8-year-old Georgette who are at an age where bullying is pretty much the order of the day when it comes to playground politics.

'It's the same thing I tell my girls, 'If somebody is being mean, they're probably really not happy'', she says. 'If you're having a great day, you don't walk past someone and yell, 'Freak!' If you're happy, you say, 'I love your skirt!''

The actress received some particularly vitriolic online assaults herself following her appearance in the all-female reboot of 'Ghostbusters' with Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones back in 2016. Plenty of misogynistic men attacked her and her co-stars for the movie, but she knew better than to let it colour her view of the people that mattered.

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'I'm never going to change things by sitting in my living room bawling. That's not going to fix or help anything', she explained. 'This has been a tough chunk of history for women. But at one point I just said, 'I'm not going to wallow in this anymore.' It's not my reality-the men I know wouldn't act like this. So I look to the men I know, who have made my life better, and I just keep remembering that they're the norm.'