Anne Hathaway Says She Stopped Being Offered Rom-Com Roles After This Major Life Event
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Ahead of her highly-anticipated rom-com return in The Idea of You, Anne Hathaway is explaining why we haven’t seen her play a romantic lead in several years after a string of hits including Love & Other Drugs and One Day.
Hathaway, 41, is starring in Prime Video’s The Idea of You, which premieres on May 2. In the movie, Hathaway plays a divorced mom who gets swept up in a romance with a 24-year-old member of her teen daughter’s favorite boyband, played by Nicholas Galitzine.
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In an April 20 press conference, Hathaway revealed that the movie was one of the few romantic opportunities that she was presented with in recent years.
“I didn’t notice that it was happening but I had received a lot of romantic scripts in my 20s,” Hathaway said. “In my 30s, I was so focused on my family life and motherhood and trying to find whatever my path was going to be being an actress while having this really, really rich personal life. So I didn’t notice, I hadn’t been sent to romantic script in a really long time,” she said.
Hathaway married Adam Shulman in 2012 and welcomed their first son in 2016 and a second in 2019.
Hathaway gushed about her excitement at being the only choice for The Idea of You, which was directed and co-written by Michael Showalter, who adapted the script from Robinne Lee’s book of the same name.
“I’m so honored to have been the first choice for this. It was such a beautiful character in such an amazing world,” Hathaway said before explaining that the movie became a means of analyzing why she, and other actresses, were excluded from romantic parts once they left their 20s.
“A part of me did ask the questions, ‘Where have these stories gone? Why did they stop?’ These questions, I saw all of these fantastic answers to them in the script and the story, and I just thought ‘Wow, what an unbelievable sort of meta exploration.'”
Hathaway stuns opposite Galitzine in this role, delivering a captivating performance in a story that is widely speculated to be loosely based on former One Direction member Harry Styles.
In the lead up to the movie, Hathaway has spoken candidly about ageism in Hollywood and how it feels for women to be told their careers have an expiration date. “When I started out as a child, I was warned that my career would fall off a cliff at the age of 35, which is something I know a lot of women face,” she said in an interview in November with Net-a-Porter. “The thing that has evolved during [that time] is that more women are having careers deeper into their lives, which I think is fantastic.”
Before you go, click here to see the steamiest sex scenes between older women and younger men.
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