«Today 10 kids will arrive. Aren’t you excited to be able to kiss them all?” It was the early 2000s, and Anne Hathaway, auditioning for a movie, wasn’t thrilled at all about kissing a whole bunch of potential co-stars. Nevertheless, back then, it was quite «normal to ask an actor to make out with other actors to test the chemistry», «chemistry», he explained in an interview with V Magazine. “Which is actually the worst way to do it.” Faced with that request, the actress thought: «”Is there something wrong with me?” Because I wasn’t excited at all. On the contrary, I thought it sounded disgusting».
Anne Hathaway, who won an Oscar for her role in Les Misérables and who will soon be the protagonist of the romantic comedy The Idea of You, he finally agreed to kiss them all. «I was so young and terribly aware of how easy it was to lose everything by being labeled “difficult”, so I just pretended to be excited and moved on. It wasn’t actually a power play: no one was trying to be terrible or hurt me. It was just a very different time and now we know better.”
Hathaway, who is also a producer on her new film, about the relationship between a single mother and a boy band star played by Nicholas Galitzine, explained that Now these specimens are designed differently. «We asked each of the candidate actors to choose a song that they thought their character would love, and that they would choose for my character to dance to, and then we did a short, little improvisation. I was sitting on a chair as if we were coming back from dinner, or a walk, or something, we pressed play and started dancing together.”
Galitzine chose a song by the rock band Alabama Shakes, by Brittany Howard. “I heard Brittany’s voice and I started smiling,” the actress explained. «She saw me smiling, so she relaxed and we started dancing. Nobody was showing off. Nobody was trying to get the part. We were just dancing. I looked at Michael Showalter, our director, who was beaming.”
