“That’s exactly how I feel about this film. That’s how I felt about the script,” film lead Anne Hathaway said in an interview with Blavity’s Shadow and Act. “That was the opportunity that I saw in it, was the idea that, you know, I think we’re handed stories like, ‘Your life is gonna go like this.’ And a part of me can’t help but just want to argue with that whole premise. None of us know what’s about to happen, and the idea that I got to play a woman who thought that maybe the important parts of her life were behind her … watch her step into something so unexpected and have it become so meaningful to her — it just seemed like a great story.”

“That’s kind of the point of the movie,” Reid Scott, who plays Dan, the ex-husband of Hathaway’s character, told Blavity. “We’re at a really interesting time in our society, aren’t we? In that there’s a lot going on, old standards are being questioned, the establishments are being reworked and rebuilt — I think this is a time, even on the most basic level, that the least we can do is check our judgment at the door. This movie I think does a great job of just showing that you have no idea what goes on in a person’s love or relationship, and who are we to judge that?”

Starring opposite Hathaway is Nicholas Galitzine, who recounted the biggest lesson his character, Hayes Campbell, taught him.

“It’s just the sort of reckless abandon you have to live your life with when you find someone who is your soulmate and your life partner,” he told Blavity. “There’s something very difficult about this job that we do. It’s wonderful in so many ways, but sometimes cultivating romantic relationships, family relationships, it gets difficult because you can’t always see these people. But when you find someone who really gets you and embraces your oddities, you’ve really got to fight for it and you’ve got to follow that.” 

The Idea of You follows the romance between a newly 40-year-old woman, Solène (Anne Hathaway), and a 24-year-old pop star in the biggest boy band of all time, Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), as they navigate a relationship that receives serious judgment from the public and even from themselves.

“A lot of people feel like they’re very different from each other,” director Michael Showalter told Blavity. “There’s all these ways in which we have differences from each other, and I think in a lot of my films I tried to explore the idea that we’re not as different as we might think we are. And so, I think that’s a little bit of what’s going on there for me in terms of the coming-of-age part of it. The story between these two characters is about realizing that just because you are of different ages or what have you, that doesn’t mean that you might still not have a lot in common with that person.”

Similar to Hathaway’s take on her character providing a different narrative to a newly divorced 40-year-old single mother, Ella Rubin, who plays her daughter Izzy, wanted to offer a unique portrayal as she stepped into the shoes of a teen girl.

“With playing teenage girls, often they kind of take the same paths over and over, like she’s stomping through the house and she’s annoyed, or this angst,” Rubin told Blavity. “I always feel a bit of frustration in the portrayal of teenage girls as if they’re not fully capable or really smart. It feels like one of smartest, most interesting points of your life. The most fun part of bringing my character to life was the script being so good and Micahel (Showalter) being so amazing to work with that I kind of got to, hopefully, infuse it with these nuances of she has this calmness to her, but obviously a deeper anxiety about her family and making sure everything’s OK and she’s taking care of people, but it’s not like a massive weight on her shoulders.”

The Idea of You premieres on Prime Video on May 2.