Hathaway said, “I hadn’t been sent a romantic script in a really long time.”
While Anne Hathaway captured out hearts as Mia Thermopolis, Princess of Genovia, in the 2001 movie The Princess Diaries, the actress revealed that past her 20s, she wasn’t being considered for roles in romantic movies anymore. That changed with The Idea of You (on Prime Video May 2), starring alongside Nicholas Galitzine in Michael Showalter’s newest film.
“I had received a lot of romantic scripts in my 20s and then in my 30s I was so focused on my family life and motherhood, and kind of trying to find whatever my path was going to be, being an actress while having this really, really rich personal life,” Hathaway told reporters. “So I didn’t notice I hadn’t been sent a romantic script in a really long time.”
“When [The Idea of You] found its way to me, and I’m so honoured to have been the first choice for this, it was such a beautiful character in such an amazing world. Part of me did ask the question, ‘But where have these stories gone? Why do they stop?'”
As producer Cathy Schulman explained, Hathaway was the actor in mind to play Solène in the film from the very beginning of the movie’s development process.
“It’s the thing I always teach my young executives not to do, which is don’t develop an entire project hoping you’re going to get one actress, because it never works,” Schulman said.
“Only in this particular case, she’s the only person who read it. She was our first choice. She said yes. And it was a dream come true. We wanted to take the character from the book and continue to personalize in a way that she felt like she could be any of us, and I believed that Annie would be able to bring that aspect to Solène.”
What is ‘The Idea of You’ about?
Based on the novel by Robinne Lee, 40-year-old Solène works at a Los Angeles art gallery, and she’s a divorced mom to her teenage daughter Izzy (Ella Rubin), after she found out her husband Daniel (Reid Scott) was cheating on her.
At the beginning of the film, Daniel was supposed to take Izzy and her friends to the Coachella music festival, but bailing on the plan for a work obligation, Solène has to step in. That’s where she meet 24-year-old Hayes (Galitzine) from the boy band August Moon, when Solène mistakes his trailer for the public restroom. Izzy has also been a fan of August Moon since she was a kid.
Playing out a sort of fanfic-esque fantasy, Hayes and Solène have this instant attraction, that begins as a secret relationship while Izzy is away at camp, but eventually is revealed to the world.
‘Women shouldn’t be put in boxes’
While there’s been a lot of attention on the chemistry between Hathaway and Galitzine, the actors stressed that it was really a circumstance of creating a really great friendship.
“We both are very playful people,” Galitzine said. “The communication was always a very open channel.”
“I’m just so happy to have made friends with a wonderful person, and someone so talented and who has so much ahead of them,” Hathaway added.
“I felt really, really cared for and supported on this movie. I just knew that whatever I was doing, Nick was there with me step per step. We always kept it light with each other. We were allowed to make mistakes with each other. Nothing had to be perfect. It wasn’t tense in that way.”
One significant change for the film from the novel is that Izzy is an older teen about to go to college, not a 13-year-old girl. As Schulman explained, the team behind the movie thought that was necessary because they wanted a character for Solène to talk to that she could be open with, including in conversations about her relationship with Hayes.
“The message in the end is that women shouldn’t be put in boxes,” Schulman stressed. “You can be more than a mother. You can be more than a grandmother, … you can work, you can do a lot of different things, and it was really important that we could look at what it was like to be going from one phase of mothering and a first marriage, into the possibilities of more happiness. While also bringing a young person into her womanhood.”
“I just think, for women, you hit a certain age where it’s pretty easy to say, ‘Hey I did it. I’ve been a mom, I’ve had a job. I’ve been a wife and now I’m really happy and fine to just shut everything else away. And that would have been fine. But just to be able to say, ‘It’s not done. There’s so much more.’ And that was the message.”
