I’m so honoured to have been the first choice for this...
ANNE HATHAWAY IS LOVED UP IN BOYBAND ROMANCE THE IDEA OF YOU, LEARNS
ROMANTIC comedies are littered with young 20-something ingenues navigating their tumultuous love lives on the path to a happily ever after, despite the fact the genre is popular with audiences of all ages.
It is also common to see younger lead actresses paired with an older male actor, think Julia Roberts, 22, starring opposite Richard Gere, 40, in 1990’s Pretty Woman or Sandra Bullock, 30, in 1995’s While You Were Sleeping, falling in love with 41-year-old Bill Pullman.
In the new Prime Video movie The Idea Of You the trope is reversed, as 40-year-old Los Angeles gallery owner and single mother Solene strikes up a steamy romance with the lead singer of fictional boyband August Moon.
The idea of an older woman in an on-screen tryst with a younger man was a rare prospect for the film’s star, 41-year-old Oscar winner Anne Hathaway.
“I didn’t notice that it was happening,” she says frankly. “But I had received a lot of romantic scripts in my 20s. Then, in my 30s, I was so focused on my family life and motherhood and trying to find whatever my path was going to be as an actress while having this really, really rich personal l
“So I didn’t notic been sent a romantic a really long time.
“And so when this way to me... I’m so to have been the first for this, it was such beautiful character i such an amazin world.”
Based on the 2017 book of the same name by Jamaican Chinese writer, pro ducer and actres Robinne Lee, th bestseller did n immediately take off
Vogue later hail the novel as “t sleeper hit of th pandemic”.
The new film directed by The Bi
Sick’s Michael Showalter, stars rising British star Nicholas Galitzine, 29, as 24-year-old musician Hayes Campbell and charts the love affair between Solene and the pop star after a chance encounter at Coachella music festival.
Solene ends up going on tour with Hayes and grapples with the attention that comes with his level
whose long career films such as The Diaries, The Devil da, One Day, Ocean’s s Miserables – for she took home an demy Award – veals that her new lm became “peronal to me” as she aced questions bout why she had not got romcom itches.
“I saw all of the path the answers to them he script and in the y,” she says. Nicholas, best known r playing lead roles in storical series Mary George and romance m Red, White & Royal ue, says: “We’re used to seeing, when there’s an age g it’s usually the man who’s older.
“I think it’s refreshing to see it t way and very much a comment on where we are and where we moving as a society; how we p ceive love and the nuclear relatio ship, and that chemistry transcen age.
“People who are in two differ places in their lives can actua have an incredible amount of co monality and be simpatico.”
Anne, who has two sons with h husband of almost 12 years jew lery designer Adam Shulman, s she and Nicholas established friendship during the filming wh made filming feel not “like work all”.
“I think what’s happening Nick and his career is so excitin she adds.
“I’m just so happy to have mad friends with a wonderful person someone so talented and who ha so much ahead of them and I fel really, really cared for and sup ported on this movie.
“I just knew that whatever I was doing, Nick was there with me step for step. It was a really, really beautiful, very vulnerable experience but 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 challenge the film posed was Nicholas had to be believable as a pop star, who, like Korean boy band BTS and One Direction star Harry Styles, attracts women in their 40s as well as a younger audience.
Music supervisor Frankie Pine, who worked on Daisy Jones & The Six, was drafted in to help the boy band members along with choreographer Dani Vitale and the songs were created by Savan Kotecha, who has worked with One Direction and Britney Spears.
“The dancing and performing especially was tricky, because it’s something I’ve never done before,” Nicholas says. “You always want more hours in the day to be able to hone those skills but, when it came to the sort of the human side of Hayes, which I think was the side that I was most interested in, I just had such a wonderful partner and I think that Anne and I felt the chemistry and a connection between us immediately.”
Produced by Cathy Schulman, Robinne Lee and her husband Eric Hayes, Michael Showalter and Anne herself, the ensemble is rounded out by Veep actor Reid
Scott as Solene’s self-obsessed husband Daniel, and Ella Rubin as Solene’s daughter Isabelle.
Cathy says the message of the film is that women “shouldn’t be put in boxes” and hopes the audience is left with “the importance of keeping yourself vulnerable to allow happiness back in”.
Recalling meeting Ella, to whom she bares a striking resemblance, Anne said: “I turned to Michael and Catherine and was like, Oh my gosh... ‘I didn’t know that I had a daughter.’
“It was just so wild where timing was so similar and Ella’s just got funny bones and also like crazy crazy, dramatic talent. We just struck gold with this cast.”
The Idea Of You is on Amazon’s Prime Video now