The Idea of You spoilers ahead.
“Has anybody here read the book?” Anne Hathaway, star of The Idea of You, asked the live studio audience of The Tonight Show this week. She was met with complete silence, which prompted host Jimmy Fallon to interject, “We don’t read. This is The Tonight Show. You wanna go over to Stephen Colbert if you wanna get people that read books.”
But there is, in fact, a rabid fan base for Robinne Lee’s 2017 novel, which has inspired the movie now streaming on Prime Video. For proof, look no further than a recent screening of the film at New York City’s 92nd Street Y, where a few impassioned audience members audibly corrected panelists who apparently mispronounced Hathaway’s character’s name. Directed by Michael Showalter, who cowrote the film with Jennifer Westfeldt, The Idea of You follows Solène (so-lehn, thank you very much), a divorced 40-year-old art gallerist who falls for Nicholas Galitzine’s Hayes Campbell—the 24-year-old frontman of her teen daughter Izzy’s (Ella Rubin) former favourite boy band, August Moon.
Development on a film adaptation of the book began when Lee, an actor who appeared in the fan-fiction-inspired Fifty Shades movies, handed a copy of her tangentially similar novel to Gabrielle Union, her costar in 2003’s Deliver Us From Eva. Union, who starred in her own May-December romance in last year’s Netflix rom-com The Perfect Find, said at the 92nd Street Y event that she related to the material as someone who is married to “a younger man with a big life.” After coming on board as a producer, Union enlisted Oscar-winning producer Cathy Schulman and Hathaway, who became a staunch supporter of the source material. “I wanted to do right by them,” she previously told Entertainment Tonight of the book’s fans. “They love this thing and I take their love very seriously.”
While the movie remains true to the contours of the novel, there are several changes to be found—from the removal of certain supporting characters to a shift in location from Century City, California, to Silver Lake. “For me, it was like, there’s a great version of this movie that’s more like the book, [but] I’m just not the right person to do that,” director Michael Showalter told IndieWire. “So if you want me to do the movie, it would be a different kind of movie.” Ahead, a look at some of the most noticeable differences from book to screen, plus a dive into whether Galitzine is playing a version of Harry Styles.
The Harry Styles of It All
Although The Idea of You is a work of fiction, Hayes Campbell bears a close resemblance to real-life former boy band member Harry Styles. Though the film enlisted One Direction songwriter Savan Kotecha to write music for August Moon, Galitzine has shrugged off the association: “It was important to create someone who felt new and original and not a shoddy impersonation of this person,” he told BuzzFeed.
“This was never supposed to be a book about Harry Styles,” Robinne Lee told Vogue in 2020. “It was supposed to be a story about a woman approaching 40 and reclaiming her sexuality and rediscovering herself, just at the point that society traditionally writes women off as desirable and viable and whole.”
