Anne Hathaway’s name is synonymous with early ’00s rom-coms, but the actress stopped getting pitched romantic scripts as she neared her 40s — until The Idea of You came along.
“I didn’t notice that it was happening, but I had received a lot of romantic scripts in my 20s. And then in my 30s, I was kind of 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, 41, told reporters during The Idea of You press conference earlier this month. “And so I didn’t notice, I hadn’t been sent a romantic script in a really long time. So when [The Idea of You] found its way to me, it was such a beautiful character in such an amazing world.”
Based on Robinne Lee’s 2017 book of the same name, Hathaway plays the role of Soléne in the Prime Video film, a recently divorced 40-year-old who falls in love with 24-year-old musician Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine) after taking her daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), to see her favorite band August Moon play Coachella.
While Hathaway said that she was “honored” to receive an offer to play the part, she admitted that it caused her to wonder, “Where have all these stories gone?”
“Why do they stop? … I don’t know,” she continued. “And then those questions, I saw all of the paths to the answers in the script and in the story, and I just thought, ‘Whoa, what an unbelievable sort of meta exploration all of this can be.’”
Hathaway was 39 when production on The Idea of You began and turned 40 during filming. Reaching the milestone caused the experience to become far more self-reflective than Hathaway expected.
“Without me even designing it or any of us designing it, it became so personal to me,” she shared. “And then the way it came together with [director] Michael Showalter … and then when the cast came together, it was, like, game over. I could go on and on about it.”
Idea of You producer Cathy Schulman led the charge in making sure it was Hathaway who brought Soléne to life. According to her, the development team crafted the entire project around Hathaway before the actress even had a chance to accept.
“It’s this thing that 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. It never works. Only in this particular case, she’s the only person who read it,” Schulman told reporters during the press conference. “She was our first choice. She said yes, and it was a dream come true that that actually happened.”
Schulman noted that once Hathaway was on board, the women were able to “take the character from the book and personalize her in a way that felt like she could be any of us.”
“I believed that Annie would be able to bring that aspect to Len’s character,” Schulman added, “and she really did.”
Much of what makes The Idea of You so special is the story of a woman over 40 finding her happiness, but another main component is the chemistry between Soléne and Hayes. Those fireworks are something Galitzine said came naturally for the duo, who formed an almost “immediate” connection.
“Annie and I felt a chemistry and a connection between us immediately and a simpatico,” he explained, noting that he was “filled with a sense of excitement” coming to set each day, which is “not always the case.”
Hathaway, meanwhile, credits the magic between her and Galitzine to both actors being “very playful people.”
“Once we figured that out, everything else was just kind of establishing a friendship, really,” she said. “So it kind of has worked the way friendships work in that it doesn’t feel like work at all. … I’m just so happy to have made friends with a wonderful person and someone so talented, and he was so much ahead of him.”
She 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 for step. And it was a really, really beautiful, very vulnerable experience.”
The Idea of You debuts on Prime Video May 2.
