Anne Hathaway is on the cover of the new issue of V Magazine and it’s a glorious photo shoot. Her hair has been styled very, very, very short. Which only highlights how incredible her face is right now. The bone structure, her skin, those lips. I never noticed it before but as she’s gotten older, more and more, and especially when I was watching The Idea of You, I kept saying to myself, Jesus, she and Angelina Jolie could play sisters. 

 
 

And, by the way, it’s not just in pictures. I was face-to-face with Anne Hathaway this weekend and I can confirm, in person, THAT FACE is real. And she is exquisite. More on that later.

 

The V Magazine interview was done with Derek Blasberg. He comes up often in Maria’s Celebrity Social Media roundups because he’s best friends, or it seems, with everyone famous, which is why there’s really not that much insight to this piece. Come for the photos, and then you can go. 

But it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this post because I’m here to talk about the movie. I LOVE THIS MOVIE SO MUCH. As you know if you’ve been reading this site regularly, I had highhhhh hopes for this movie. And sometimes high hopes result in, well, Anyone But You. This movie is anything but Anyone But You. The kids on TikTok might say that that’s because I’m an old c-nt and they would be right. 

 

After all, this is a movie about a woman over 40 who falls in love with a much younger boyband popstar once idolised by her teenage daughter. In other words, it’s a movie that was made for old c-nts which is basically what Anne told me during our interview, only of course she’s much too classy to say the word c-nt, at least not on camera. 

The Idea of You is a SWOON in the best sense. You are swooning over HER, over the fact that she doesn’t need the swoon, that she has her life together, that she is, yes, still working through some pain and disappointment, but who isn’t. She didn’t need to be swept off her feet to be whole – she was a whole person when the romance arrived, accidently of course, it’s a rom-com after all. 

But Anne Hathaway didn’t need the rom-com either. Anne Hathaway didn’t have to make this movie. We know Anne Hathaway is getting work. She made this movie, though, because it was a great opportunity, and because she had noticed something. 

 

As she said in the press conference this weekend:

“I didn’t notice that it was happening but I received had received a lot of romantic scripts in my 20s. In my 30s, I was so focused on my family life and motherhood and trying to find whatever my path was going to be being an actress while having this really, really rich personal life. So I didn’t notice, I hadn’t been sent to romantic script in a really long time.” 

Later on she added that: 

“I’m so honored to have been the first choice for this. It was such a beautiful character in such an amazing world,” Hathaway said before explaining that the movie became a means of analyzing why she, and other actresses, were excluded from romantic parts once they left their 20s.

“A part of me did ask the questions, ‘Where have these stories gone? Why did they stop?’ These questions, I saw all of these fantastic answers to them in the script and the story, and I just thought ‘Wow, what an unbelievable sort of meta exploration.'”

 

Anne Hathaway was making rom-coms, several of them, and many of them pop culture standards, in her 20s. She is now in her 40s and still making rom-coms for women who were in their 20s when she was and are now in their 40s. She’s not the only actor who gets to do that but there aren’t a lot of them, not enough of them, so this is indeed exciting. And hot. And horny. And fun. 

The movie is sexy and stylish and it’s funny. They remembered the comedy in the rom-com. And I haven’t even gotten to the boyband parts yet! This will come later, closer to release date. For now, just know, as some who considers herself a rom-com expert, the movie delivers. 

As for my interview with Anne and Nicholas Galatzine, it’s airing on ETALK this week but I’ll be writing the Show Your Work about it in this week’s Squawk newsletter that will be sent out on Friday. Yes, shameless encouragement for you to subscribe, sorry not sorry, but that’s the kind of exclusivity we promised for The Squawk! 

Click here for more on Anne in V Magazine.