You may have seen the steamy ads for “The Idea of You,” a rom-com starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine that hit Prime Video on May 2. In case you haven’t, the premise is basically “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” but with a lot more sex.
The main character, Solène Marchand (Hathaway), is a 40-year-old divorced mom who gets involved with Hayes Campbell, a twentysomething (Galitzine) who just so happens to be a member of her tween daughter’s favorite boy band.
If that’s not really the thing that gets you running to the theater, we understand. But you may be surprised to learn that the story that inspired the film was written by Black actress and author Robinne Lee and counts Gabrielle Union as one of its producers.
Lee, who is known for her roles in “Deliver Us From Eva” and “Being Mary Jane,” says she wrote “The Idea of You” as she was turning 40. She saw a shift in the kinds of acting roles she was being offered at the time and wanted to turn the idea of life being over at 40 for women on its head.
“I was learning the hard way that in Hollywood, after 40, women are much less desirable. The assumption was that we ceased to be sexual beings and were thus less valuable. I was eager to prove the industry—and our culture at large—wrong, in my own little way,” she wrote in a May 2 essay for TIME.
For those wondering why she chose to make her main characters white, Lee says the decision was based on what she thought she could sell.
“I spent six years writing a book prior to writing this book. Right before The Idea of You [I wrote a book] that I could not sell. It was a Black protagonist. There was a white love interest. And one of the responses I got from an editor at that time was, ‘Oh, well, no, we already have an interracial relationship that we’re putting out this year,’” she told Refinery 29. “When I thought about this book, I was like, Okay, I’m gonna sell this book. Nothing’s gonna keep me back. If I have to make two white characters, I’m going to make them two white characters, but I’m going to make them very personal and specific to me.”
Lee added that keeping the details of the story the same, the world might not have been ready for a grown-ass Black woman getting busy with some dude in a boy band.
“If Solène was a Black woman showing up with this guy who’s half her age and white, it would have been a whole thing,” she said.