Anne Hathaway stopped receiving scripts offering her the part of the female lead in rom-coms after she turned 30.
The Devil Wears Prada star, 41, has enjoyed a rich and varied career over the past 20-plus years after finding fame with teen rom-com The Princess Diaries in 2001.
She subsequently appeared in other romances and comedies like Ella Enchanted, Becoming Jane, Love & Other Drugs and One Day, which Netflix has recently re-adapted.
However, the mum-of-two’s move away from these types of properties wasn’t necessarily fully by choice, as she has now revealed that those types of offers simply stopped coming her way.
‘I didn’t notice that it was happening, but I had received a lot of romantic scripts in my 20s,’ she revealed to Metro.co.uk and other media at the press conference for new film The Idea of You.
‘And 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, being an actress while having this really rich personal life, and so I didn’t notice [that] I hadn’t been sent a romantic script in a really long time.’
Her career hasn’t seemed to stumble because of this – Hathaway went on to win an Oscar for her turn in Les Misérables and work with Christopher Nolan on Interstellar and The Dark Knight Rises, as well as explore a number of comedies and indie films in the intervening years.
However, the actress admitted it was still something that she realised had affected her, when she signed on to play Solène, a 40-year-old single mum who strikes up a romance with a boyband’s lead singer who’s 24.
‘When this found its way to me… a part of me did ask the question: But where have these stories gone? Why do they stop?’ she shared.
For the award-winning star, she admitted making The Idea of You then became incredibly personal as it reflected things she had been considering.
‘Those questions – I saw the path to the answers to them in the script and in the story. I just thought, “Whoa, what an unbelievable meta exploration all of this can be”.’
This extended to her own age, as well.
‘One of the first conversations I had with Cathy [Schulman, producer] was, you know, if we hit our targets, we can start this when I’m 39 and I’ll turn 40 when we’re filming – and that’s actually what wound up happening.
‘So, without me even designing it or any of us designing it, it became so personal to me.’
Hathaway stars opposite British breakout star Nicholas Galitzine, 29, as August Moon frontman Hayes Campbell, a member of her teen daughter Izzy’s (Ella Rubin) former favourite band.
The actor is continuing a hot streak after starring in Prime’s LGBTQ+ rom-com Red, White & Royal Blue last year, and opposite Julianne Moore in the raunchy period drama Mary & George.
Producer Schulman admitted she had broken her own rules in pursuing Hathaway as her one and only choice for the lead role, after snapping up Robinne Lee’s 2017 novel of the same name for a film adaptation.
‘I had Anne in mind from the very beginning of the development process – and it’s the thing I always teach my young executives not to do, which is go and develop an entire project hoping you’re going to get one actress because it never works,’ she confessed.
‘Only in this particular case, she’s the only person who read it. She was our first choice, she said yes. And it was a dream come true that that actually happened.’
The Idea of You streams exclusively on Prime Video from Thursday, May 2.
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