Anne Hathaway Denies Harry Styles, Olivia Wilde Inspired ‘The Idea of You’

Anne Hathaway is setting the record straight about whether The Idea of You is inspired by Harry Styles and Olivia Wilde.

“No, just no,” Hathaway told Extra on Tuesday, March 19, about the speculation.

When it was revealed that The Idea of You, based on the 2017 novel penned by Robinne Lee, would be adapted onto the big screen, fans couldn’t help but draw comparisons between Styles, 30, and Wilde, 40. (The pair were linked from January 2021 to November 2022, when Us Weekly confirmed they were taking a break from their relationship.)

The book was rumored to be about Harry Styles fanfiction, but the author shut down the idea in a 2020 interview with Vogue. “This was never supposed to be a book about Harry Styles,” she said.

Instead, Hathaway noted that the film is about “what it takes to recover from a broken heart.”

“My character had her heart just absolutely smashed by her ex-husband, and it wasn’t just that her heart that got broken,” Hathaway explained. “She invested so much in her family. You know, there’s a line in the piece about how she’s a former people pleaser, and I think she made a lot of kind of grown-up choices throughout her life.”

In the movie, Solène (Hathaway) meets 24-year-old boy band member Hayes (Nicholas Galitzine) who unexpectedly falls for her. Hathaway noted that her character, 40-year-old single mom Solène, got pregnant “really young” and took her role as a mother “really seriously.”

“And you know what? She did great,” Hathaway noted. “She’s raised a great kid, she’s built a business … She’s doing like a lot of things right, and then, when her husband does this awful thing to her, she has to wonder if she was ever really loved in the first place. And so that’s a long time to live with that question.”

Hathaway noted that Solène began the relationship with Hayes “thinking it’s just gonna be a bit of fun,” until “she realizes it’s something more, and if she’s gonna actually participate in it, she’s gonna have to let some other things go.”

During the SXSW Film & TV festival on Saturday, March 16, Hathaway explained that she couldn’t pass up the role of Solène after producers Cathy Schulman and Gabrielle Union approached her about the project.

“For some reason, we talk about coming-of-age stories as being something that happens to you in the earliest part of your life, and I don’t know about you, but I feel like I keep blooming,” Hathaway told the audience. “I don’t want to be pigeonholed and don’t want to be placed in a box of what type of films I have to be making because of my age, gender and because I won an Oscar. I want to have fun, dammit. It speaks to me.”

The Idea of You drops on May 2 via Amazon Prime.