Anne Hathaway may be able to set her own boundaries now, but there was a time early in her career when that wasn’t quite the case. In fact, the Oscar winner has opened up about a “gross” moment when she was tasked to kiss ten men who were auditioning to star alongside her in a movie.
“Back in the 2000s—and this did happen to me—it was considered normal to ask an actor to make out with other actors to test for chemistry,” Hathaway said in a new interview with V Magazine., a method she referred to as “the worst way to do it.”
“I was told, ‘We have ten guys coming today, and you’re cast. Aren’t you excited to make out with all of them?’” the Princess Diaries star recalled. “And I thought, ‘Is something wrong with me?’ because I wasn’t excited. I thought it sounded gross.”
Saying ‘no’ wasn’t an easy option for a budding actress, though.
“I was so young and terribly aware how easy it was to lose everything by being labelled ‘difficult,’ so I just pretended I was excited and got on with it,” she explained. “It wasn’t a power play, and no one was trying to be awful or hurt me. It was just a very different time, and now we know better.”
As the actress notes, these on-demand make-outs didn’t lead to much chemistry at all, and while “chemistry tests” are still commonplace in Hollywood, they usually involve some simple scene work on camera these days. With Hathaway now producing and starring in her latest film, The Idea of You, she went about chemistry testing—which ultimately led her to co-star Nicholas Galitzine—in a much different way.
“We asked each of the actors coming in to choose a song that they felt their character would love, that they would put on to get my character to dance, and then we’d do a short little improv,” she shared. “I was sitting in a chair like we had come in from dinner or a walk or something, we pressed play, and we just started dancing together.”
Galitzine chose a song by The Alabama Shakes, which put Hathaway at ease.
“I just started smiling, and he saw me smile, so he relaxed, and we just started dancing,” she said. “Nobody was showing off. Nobody was trying to get the gig. We were just in a space dancing. I looked over and saw that Michael Showalter, our director, was beaming. Spark!”
Watch the official trailer for The Idea of You below.
