Ella Rubin and Reid Scott Break Down the Dramatic Moments of ‘The Idea of You’

Ella Rubin and Reid Scott play Izzy and Daniel in The Idea of You. The movie, which is based on the book by Robinne Lee, is now streaming on Prime Video.

Based on the acclaimed, contemporary love story of the same name, The Idea of You centers on Solène (Anne Hathaway), a 40-year-old single mom who begins an unexpected romance with 24-year-old Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), the lead singer of August Moon, the hottest boy band on the planet. When Solène must step in to chaperone her teenage daughter’s trip to the Coachella Music Festival after her ex bails at the last minute, she has a chance encounter with Hayes and there is an instant, undeniable spark. As they begin a whirlwind romance, it isn’t long before Hayes’ superstar status poses unavoidable challenges to their relationship, and Solène soon discovers that life in the glare of his spotlight might be more than she bargained for.

“I think everyone was just really committed to approaching it in a way that obviously would, hopefully, be interesting and enticing and entertaining but not melodramatic or false in any way. I think it was honestly, for me at least, very satisfying to do those scenes because Michael does this incredible job of not showing everything immediately. There’s this slow kind of like, he shows and not tells basically, and I think it was really wonderful for me to get to be like, ‘Okay, yeah, this is where she has this moment. This is where she expresses this anger. This is where she cries or does whatever,’ rather than it being sort of homogenous. There were these really specific carved out moments where the characters got a chance to really express and I think that, at least for me, it makes so much more of an impact that way when it’s a little slightly more rare,” Rubin expressed.

“I remember when we saw that in the theater at SXSW, you could feel the sort of energy building and then there was that shot of Daniel sort of coming up the walk, and the audience gave this great reaction. They were like, ‘Ohhh, here it comes,’ and it was fun to see that the movie had sort of earned that reaction by that point in the film,” Scott shared. “That scene in particular was really, really fun because it was my first chance to sort of go head to head with Nick’s character and so much stuff just gets laid bare between Daniel and Solène, even his verbal foible of calling her his wife. There’s just so much subtext going on in there and yet we approach these scenes very simply, nothing was overdone.”