The reason behind Anne Hathaway’s worst role: “I’m led by passion and instinct”
No actor gets it right every time, but sometimes you look at a movie and think, ‘What in God’s name were they thinking?’
That’s certainly the case for an Anne Hathaway movie that stands out as one of her worst, which is a shame when you consider that she has some really great pieces of cinema under her belt. From Brokeback Mountain and The Devil Wears Prada to Les Misérables and Interstellar, you can’t deny that Hathaway has some pretty beloved movies in her repertoire, which span genres, her musical talents shining alongside everything from comedy to sci-fi.
You’d think, then, that she might have known better than to have starred in an Amazon movie based on a book inspired by Harry Styles. Yet that’s exactly what happened when she signed on to appear in The Idea of You in 2024, which was, quite simply, not good. There are many great rom-coms out there, and Hathaway has successfully lent herself to several of these in the past, but this was not one of them.
Directed by Michael Showalter, who’d previously found success with the Oscar-winning The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the film fell flat, largely because of the innately predictable and cringe-inducing source material. Based on the book of the same name by Robinne Lee, an author and actor whose biggest credits include the Fifty Shades series (a movie franchise also based on terrible books that initially started out as Twilight fanfiction, don’t forget), The Idea of You was never going to be a masterpiece of a movie.
The premise is as follows: Solène, a 40-year-old gallery owner and divorcée, takes her teenage daughter to Coachella so that she can see the boy band August Moon and attend a meet and greet. Wandering off to find a toilet, Solène somehow finds herself in the trailer of Hayes Campbell, a gorgeous 24-year-old Briton who just so happens to be a singer in August Moon. Cut to Hayes dedicating a song about liking an older woman to ‘someone he’d met earlier that day’, and soon the pair begin a relationship, inevitably hit by the strain of their age gap and his fame.
The tattooed Hayes is so clearly inspired by the older-woman-loving Styles that it’s hard to take the movie seriously, and as you witness Hathaway playing the conflicted Solène, you can’t help wondering why she decided to take on such a cheesy role. The actor just can’t resist certain parts, though, and it seems like going into The Idea of You, she knew it’d be no masterpiece.
Talking to USA Today, she said, “It probably would be advantageous if I was a little bit more strategic about my career”, stating that the film “just released something inside of me when I read the script”. The film was received pretty well when it premiered at South by Southwest (somehow), and Hathaway was really pleased, admitting that she loves to “see women so lit up [because] they’ve just seen something that speaks to them”.
The actor claimed that she is simply “led by passion and instinct”, which is how she ended up in such a role. While the film tackles the complexities of navigating an age-gap relationship pretty well, and I’m sure many women resonated with the film’s depiction of finding love following divorce, even if it comes to you in such an unexpected form, it’s still not a particularly well-made movie when it boils down to it. There are many better age-gap movies out there, like Babygirl, also released in 2024.
The Idea of You is full of clichés, its main flaw stemming from the fact that it was adapted from such weak source material, but Hathaway clearly saw something in the story that she believed to be worthwhile.
