Anne Hathaway Shuts Down Harry Styles ‘Idea of You’ Rumors (Exclusive)

In “The Idea of You,” Anne Hathaway plays a 40-year-old divorced mom who finds love with a 24-year-old boy band singer played by Nicholas Galitzine.

“Extra’s” Mona Kosar Abdi spoke with Anne and Nicholas about the movie, which shows off Nicholas’ impressive singing talents!

While many speculated that the story was inspired by Harry Styles and Olivia Wilde’s past romance, Anne shut down the rumors!

She simply said, “No, just no.”

For Anne, the movie is about “what it takes to recover from a broken heart.”

She explained, “My character had her heart just absolutely smashed by her ex-husband, and it wasn’t just that her heart that got broken. 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. She got pregnant really young and she’s like, ‘I’m gonna raise this baby,’ and she took it really seriously. And you know what? She did great. 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.”

“And so, in this relationship, I think she begins thinking it’s just gonna be a bit of fun,” she went on, “and then 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.”

The movie required Nicholas to sing.

Anne raved, “He’s got such a good voice… You owned that part from the very beginning.”

Recalling his audition, Anne revealed, “He had to sing in the audition, and not only could he sing, he brought his own guitar and he was just absolutely… There was an audition song that we were like, ‘If you guys could prepare this.' He’s like, ‘I have a different song.’ He said it with that kind of cockiness… ‘You’re gonna listen to me sing this.’”

Nicholas admitted, “I actually completely forgot about that. I remember the song that was chosen I feel did not necessarily represent the artistry of what Hayes wanted to be.”

As for the possibility of taking the film’s boy band August Moon on tour, Nicholas quipped, “There's one small issue in that I'm the only one in the band who sings, but the rest of them are incredible dancers. I’m open — I love those dudes so much. They’re so wildly talented. You guys see a fraction of what they’re capable of as dancers. Hell, yeah — we’ll go on tour.”

Anne is a fan of pop music. She said, “One of the best parts about the era that I grew up in, it was so pop music-rich. I think because we were all living in Madonna's world.”

“I remember driving my mother insane singing Madonna like all, all, all the time,” Hathaway shared. “I loved Madonna. I loved Britney. ‘Total Request Live’ was really popular when I was in high school, so I used to love to go home to see all the music videos.”

Nicholas added, “I miss that golden era. My sister and I used to come home, we just used to switch on MTV, watch music videos for hours… When we’d go to Greece on holiday, everything would be in Greek, apart from MTV, which we’d just absorb all the amazing pop artists.”