‘I wasn’t excited, it was gross’: Why Anne Hathaway had to kiss 10 men at a casting call

Anne Hathaway is happy with one change in Hollywood – that she doesn’t have to kiss dozens of her co-stars trying to get a role in a movie with her.

“At the turn of the century – and this happened to me too – it was considered normal to ask an actor to push themselves with other actors as a test of their chemistry. And this is actually the worst way to do it,” says the actress in front of V Magazine.

She remembers how she was already cast in a movie (she doesn’t say the name of it) and they had to choose her on-screen partner. The crew told her that ten men would be auditioning for the role and asked her if she was excited to kiss all of them.

“And I thought, ‘Is there something wrong with me?’ because I wasn’t excited. I thought it sounded gross,” Hathaway says.

According to her, she was young at the time and fully aware of how easily she could lose everything in Hollywood that she had worked for until that moment if she was labeled as “difficult” to work with.

“That’s why I pretended to be excited and I did it,” the actress recalls.

She points out that it was not an attempt by the film crew to show who was in charge, nor that anyone wanted to hurt her. It’s just that “times were different” and now everyone in Hollywood had learned their lesson.

Hathaway, 41, knows what it’s like to lose roles because of the fame that comes your way. In late March, she revealed to Vanity Fair that the hate she received online after winning an Oscar for “Les Miserables” in 2013 cost her potential projects.

“A lot of people didn’t want to cast me because they were too worried about how toxic my identity had become online,” the actress commented at the time.

Christopher Nolan is the one who gives her another big opportunity by choosing her for the science fiction “Interstellar”, and this stabilizes her career. And we come to today, when Hathaway now has over two decades of experience as an actress and in the role of producer as well.

Thanks to this, she is aware that in order to find a “spark” with a fellow actor for a given role, it is not necessary to kiss a whole group of men. That’s why for her new film – The Idea of ​​You, they approached in a different way.

In the film, the actress plays a single mother who goes with her daughter to the Coachella music festival. There he accidentally meets one of the members of a popular fight band, and this leads to an unexpected love affair.

To find the young actor to play the musician, Hathaway and her team rely not on test kisses, but on music.

“We asked each of the actors who were coming [на кастинг], to choose a song that they feel their character would love; which they would play to make my character dance, and then we would do a short improvisation. I’d be standing on a chair like we’d come back from dinner or a walk, and we’d hit play and just start dancing together,” Hathaway says.

The actor who got the role is 29-year-old Nicholas Galitsyn. He played in “Red, White and Royal Blue” (2023), and this year he will also co-star with Julianne Moore in the film “Mary and George”.

Galitzin chose a song by the band The Alabama Snakes for the audition, and Hathaway says she smiled the moment she heard the singer’s voice. The two of them with her younger colleague started to dance, without fuss or unnecessary strain.

“I looked over at Michael Showalter, our director, and he was glowing. Sparkling!” Hathaway recounts.

They had already met with several young men for the role in The Idea of ​​You, but Nicholas Galitzin turned out to be “perfect”. Naturally, they checked how he would cope with lines from the script, whether he sings well, they found out that he also plays the guitar. He charmed everyone at the casting and was eventually chosen.

The Idea of ​​You will appear directly on the Amazon Prime Video streaming platform on May 2. You can see the trailer here:

When it comes to sequels to some of her most popular films, Hathaway is 50:50. From what she said, it is clear that there is a chance for a potential third film in the series “The Princess Diaries”, although “there is nothing to announce yet”.

Fans of “The Devil Wears Prada” will be disappointed, however, because according to the actress, there will hardly be a sequel.

“We all love each other, and if someone figured out how to do it, I think it would be crazy not to film it. But there’s a very big difference in the world today in terms of technology,” she says. She adds that she would still shoot another project with her colleagues from “The Devil Wears Prada”.

But before that, something new is certainly waiting for her – to play a single mother in a relationship with a younger man. Without having to test-kiss all the candidates for the role.