Anne Hathaway opened up this week about her experience “back in the 2000s” being asked to kiss “ten guys” for a chemistry read.
“I was told, ‘We have ten guys coming today and you’re cast. Aren’t you excited to make out with all of them?’ And I thought, ‘Is there something wrong with me?’ because I wasn’t excited,” Hathaway told V Magazine. She didn’t specify what project the audition was for.
“I thought it sounded gross,” she continued. “And I was so young and terribly aware how easy it was to lose everything by being labeled ‘difficult,’ so I just pretended I was excited and got on with it.”
Hathaway said this practice was “considered normal” during the early aughts. “It wasn’t a power play, no one was trying to be awful or hurt me,” she said. “It was just a very different time and now we know better.”
For her new film, The Idea of You, Hathaway served as a producer — and conducted her chemistry reads a bit differently.
“We asked each of the actors coming in to choose a song that they felt their character would love, that they would put on to get my character to dance, and then we’d do a short little improv,” she said. “I was sitting in a chair like we had come in from dinner or a walk or something, we pressed play, and we just started dancing together.”
The film, based on the 2017 novel of the same name by Robinne Lee, tells the story of a 40-year-old single mom (Hathaway) who falls for a 24-year-old international pop star played by Nicholas Galitzine.
During his audition, Galitzine picked a song by The Alabama Shakes, Hathaway recalled. “It was just easy. I heard [lead singer] Brittany’s voice and I just started smiling. And he saw me smile, so he relaxed, and we just started dancing. Nobody was showing off. Nobody was trying to get the gig. We were just in a space dancing. I looked over and Michael Showalter, our director, was beaming. Spark!”
The Idea of You is set for a streaming release on Prime Video on May 2.