The trailer has just dropped for the highly-anticipated upcoming romantic comedy, The Idea of You: a film adaptation of Robinne Lee’s 2017 best-selling novel. It stars Anne Hathaway as Solène, a 40-year-old single mum who begins a romance with 24-year-old boyband member Hayes Campbell after a chance meeting at Coachella (Nicholas Galitzine).
The story, which Lee has previously stated is partly inspired by One Direction member turned solo sensation Harry Styles, is every bit as gooey, predictable and feel-good as you could possibly imagine.
Hathaway’s divorcee Solène takes her daughter to a pop concert, and unexpectedly finds there’s a spark with one of the boyband. Solène returns home, thinking that nothing is going to come of the interaction, but then, incredibly, Hayes Campbell pops up at her work, and a romance begins.
Fans are already going wild over the new clip: “Omg I crying already watching the trailer. Already excited so much,” commented one. “IM GONNA DIE,” said another.
“This is literally a Harry styles fanfic turned into a movie I'm crying,” said another.
But although the novel has been doing the rounds in Harry Styles fan circles, it isn’t actually true that The Idea of You is directly inspired by fan fiction written about the real-life pop star.
In an interview with Vogue, actor-turned-author Lee said that, “This was never supposed to be a book about Harry Styles... It was supposed to be a story about a woman approaching 40 and reclaiming her sexuality and rediscovering herself, just at the point that society traditionally writes women off as desirable and viable and whole.”
However in the same interview she admitted that in order to create the character Hayes, she had partly carried over a character from an unpublished semi-autobiographical novel she had written, and then zhuzhed him up: “I made him into my dream guy,” she said, “Like Prince Harry, meets Harry [Styles].”
“I definitely borrowed some of Harry,” she said in another interview, “but I feel that Hayes Campbell’s a combination of lots of different people: Prince Harry, Prince William, Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch, my husband and about four different ex-boyfriends.”
The novel has been a sleeper hit, with book sales gradually increasing over the last seven years. Its now has a massive online following – which describes itself as #HaySolNuts (a combination of the names Hayes, Solène, and being nuts) – and whose members, according to Penguin House, unite in “online and in private Facebook groups; you can track the characters’ love nests on virtual maps and buy [Hayes’ boy band] August Moon T-shirts.”
