At the end of summer in 2022, Nicholas Galitzine flew into New York for a chemistry test with Anne Hathaway for a romantic comedy called The Idea of You. He was in the running to play the lead role of Hayes Campbell, a singer in fictional boy band August Moon, and had been told he’d have to improvise a dance with Hathaway to a song of his choice.
Hathaway has previously been burned by chemistry tests where she was required to kiss a roster of male actors, and so this alternative arrangement was her idea. “For her, dancing with each other is a great litmus test,” Galitzine tells me.
Terrified by the prospect of which song to pick, Galitzine settled on “Always Alright” by Alabama Shakes. It was familiar enough to settle his nerves, but still felt free and joyful. He remembers being in his hotel room before and thinking, “Fuck it. I just want to go in there and be ready to play.”
But in the room, face to face with an actor he had always admired, the instant connection was “unlike anything [he] had ever experienced”, the music crying out: “So you took me to party, you got me alone / Said you wanna feel good, and you feel like you're gonna explode.”
“We were flying. We were tearing up with each other,” Galitzine says. “We were very ‘yes, and’ with each other, you know?” Afterwards, he went back to his room feeling that even if he didn’t get the part, he had done everything he could.
The chemistry in that room is the white-hot centre of The Idea of You, the latest film to showcase Galitzine's leading-man charm and his ability to play with the confines of masculinity. These talents have earned him a coveted starting spot on the ever-rotating roster of internet boyfriends, and more people in the film industry are sitting up to take notice too. When we meet for lunch in late January, the sense that he is on the precipice of something big is palpable – though admittedly not to the clientele of this south west London restaurant, which definitely skews wealthy retiree. Galitzine arrives with a beaming, proper hello, and drapes himself across the velvet banquette like he belongs there.
Anywhere else, Galitzine’s conspicuous good looks – accessorised by the contemporary siren song of his eyebrow slit and hoop earring – would draw some curious gazes, particularly now the 29-year-old actor is breaking into another, more mainstream level of fame. He played a closeted British prince in last year’s mega-hit Red, White & Royal Blue, and an all-American man-child jock in the lesbian fight club movie Bottoms. This spring, he seduced the King of England in the dark, sexy miniseries Mary & George, and is now adding “boy-band heartthrob” to his CV.
Directed by Michael Showalter and adapted from a notoriously smutty novel by Robinne Lee, The Idea of You is dizzying wish fulfilment: recently-divorced 40-year-old mom Solène (Anne Hathaway) takes her teen daughter to Coachella – only to fall headfirst into a passionate affair with Galitzine’s twenty-something pop-star. Upon release, its trailer broke the record for most views for any original streaming movie: perhaps in no small part due to the replay value of the scene where Hayes slowly wraps his hands around Solène’s thigh to pull her closer. “I’m too old for you,” she says, only for him to reply, “No, you’re not,” without missing a beat.
When the film played at SXSW in March, that scene elicited Avengers: Endgame-level screams from the audience. “I did feel a level of volume that made me almost slide into my chair,” Galitzine says. “I mean, it’s just so, so funny to be regarded in that way.”
But being regarded in that way is not exactly new for Galitzine. The 29-year-old is striking in the proper movie-star way, in that the features of his face are beautiful and interesting, not simply beautiful. That old-fashioned, poster-ready heartthrob look no doubt helped him land early roles in films like Netflix’s Purple Hearts, playing a troubled Marine, and 2021’s Cinderella, in which (naturally) he played the prince. He agrees, easily and without shame, when I ask if he’s had to take a pragmatic approach to advancing his career. “I’ve had to cut my teeth on a lot of projects, which…” He pauses. “I find the result of them, admittedly, maybe not great. But for me, it was always, OK, this job won’t take me from point A to Z, but it is at least pushing me in the right direction?”
He mentions Jacob Elordi and Charles Melton as actors with similar starting points, who “would maybe all be considered romantic leads”, but have managed to break out of the young adult industrial complex. Yet he’s also quick to point out what people don’t realise about those easily derided teen films: “To create chemistry and charm on screen, oftentimes not necessarily having the most lively script to work with, is a skill in itself.”
The “resonance” of his movies is important to him too. “Maybe that [film] doesn’t speak to me artistically, but it speaks to someone else,” he says. Strangers have confessed they felt “seen” by his portrayal of an isolated recovering heroin addict in Netflix horror series Chambers; once, a parent told him that Handsome Devil, in which Galitzine played a closeted gay rugby player, helped their son come out and feel comfortable in his sexuality.
Galitzine, who is from London, came of age in the hypermasculine environment of an all-boys school. As a gifted athlete, he’d planned to play pro rugby until a series of injuries ended his career. “These people in my life who were supposed to be positive masculine figures, I felt their shame in me: shame that my body wasn’t working properly,” he says. When he was 17, he twisted his knee before an athletics competition; Galitzine recalls being forced to run around the field until he physically couldn’t any more, and then being told to his face, “My six-year-old daughter has more mettle than you.”
Acting came into his life a little bit out of nowhere. It was his last term of school, and Galitzine had almost been kicked out a couple of times for being “disruptive” – behaviour he attributes to the terror of feeling his sporting career slipping away. After watching The Motorcycle Diaries, he’d become convinced the only solution was to find himself while biking across South America. When friends asked him to come up to Edinburgh for the summer and act in their play at the Fringe, he thought it could be a fun stop along the way.
“I did this production, and I just loved it. It superseded any feeling I had when I was a sportsman. It was community; it was the adrenaline rush,” he says. “It felt like pure life.”
Through acting Galitzine has become a player in the modern-day school of movie masculinity: one that’s multifaceted, vulnerable, queer, satirised, played for laughs, played for truth. He’s fascinated by men who are “trapped” by masculinity, because he felt the same for a long time. “I was a very scared young man,” he says. “And I think a lot of men are really scared. I think they’re scared of their own mortality. I think they’re scared of being found out. There’s this notion in masculinity that you have to be in control and certain of everything.”
One of the most Googled things about Galitzine is people asking whether he is actually a prince. He’s played royalty several times, and we instantly believe Julianne Moore when she says to him in Mary & George, “If I were a man and looked like you, I’d rule the fucking planet.”
What does it feel like to have that face, the kind that studios bankrolling films believe could launch a thousand ships? I try to approach the subject with Galitzine, but any insinuation of his beauty slides right off him. “Look, I can speak about this ‘cause Taylor’s a close friend of mine,” he says, referencing Taylor Zakhar-Perez, who played his love interest on Red, White & Royal Blue. “But Taylor is like an Adonis. It was difficult in some aspects, being so closely compared to him.”
Galitzine lists his insecurities matter-of-factly: the way he used to be “disgusted in some ways” by his own face; his cheekbones, brows, sunken eyes, “rugby-player thighs” and “big arse”; how people comment online about the dark bags under his eyes, saying he needs to get some sleep. I wonder if he knows these are precisely the things people go mad about over him, but I can tell it wouldn’t change much.
After a pause, he says, “I guess that doesn’t really answer your question. Are you basically asking how embodying a character who’s supposedly good-looking makes me feel as Nick?”
Let’s go with that. “I think the most important thing to me is that I’m taken seriously as a performer. I’m not gonna ask you to cry me a river here, but it’s been difficult being part of a conversation that feels very much like I am a cut of beef at a meat market.” During casting, or is he talking about people’s reactions to his work? Both, he says: “I think that being my defining feature is something I’m constantly terrified of.”
Galitzine’s good looks have been depicted on screen as dangerously tempting, but he often plays characters whose own desires are policed. From Hayes in The Idea of You and Prince Henry in Red, White & Royal Blue to George Villiers in Mary & George – who wields his sexual prowess to exert control over the King of England – he has played men whose conflicts are shaped by wanting. Even Galitzine’s Jeff in Bottoms, a caricature of the himbo jock archetype, defines himself by his position in the sexual hierarchy: he goes out with the prettiest girl in school, is homoerotically coddled by his football team, and says things like, “Shut up nerd, I fucked your mom!”
The Idea of You sensitively explores the sense of entitlement that some fans feel to the private lives of celebrities, something Galitzine has brushed up against in the men he has portrayed. “I am Nick, and I’m not my role,” he says. But surely he’s had to deal with people conflating him with his characters?
“I think I have,” he says. “I identify as a straight man, but I have been a part of some incredible queer stories. I felt a sense of uncertainty sometimes about whether I’m taking up someone’s space, and perhaps guilt. At the same time, I see those characters as not solely their sexuality.”
Hand-in-hand with his ongoing exploration of both sexuality and desire is the fact that Galitzine has become something of an ambassador of the sex scene. He sleeps with 14 different characters on Mary & George, and Red, White & Royal Blue apparently educated the masses on the fact that gay men could have missionary sex. In The Idea of You, Hayes and Solène’s romance is far from chaste. Focused entirely on female pleasure, the film understands that sometimes the sexiest thing happens right before sex, or right after: there’s a refreshing intimacy to the post-coital ordering of room service and dishevelled karaoke they share. “You don’t see any bare body parts, you don’t get thrusting. Hayes is kind of worshipping her,” Galitzine says. “That aftercare scene was so sexy. Someone asked me once when I feel most loving, and not to be too crass, but it can sometimes be after sex, because that’s when you shed all your vulnerabilities.”
He jokes that after both The Idea of You and Mary & George, he’ll now be known as the guy who will have sex on camera. What does he make of recent suggestions that Gen Z want less sex on screen? “I wonder if it’s the pornification of our generation,” he says. “Or maybe the fact that due to the digital age, something so human as having sex feels like an affront.”
I feel a little stunned by this insight, but Galitzine has already moved on to Saltburn. “A lot of people were really squeamish with the sex scenes in it,” he says. “You know, clearly Mary & George fucked me up, because I thought they were very normal.”
Galitzine is hopeful that the reactions to The Idea of You’s racier scenes will be thoughtful, as he’s already garnered from some audiences. “Certain people might just see this as a smutty movie they’re gonna get titillated by for a couple hours, and I think it’s so much more than that,” he says. Unlikely viewers (boyfriends, husbands, and the romcom-averse who have been dragged along) have already told him as much: “The amount of people who have come up to me and said, ‘I had my reservations, but it completely surprised me,’ or ‘It has an immense depth to it, as well as just being a lot of fun.’”
Hayes and Solène’s romance has stirred up the internet’s eternal obsession with dissecting age-gap relationships, which Galitzine speaks on elegantly. “I think some people want movies to reaffirm parts of themselves that they’re unsure about, and that’s not the purpose of movies,” he says. To Galitzine, The Idea of You is most importantly a coming-of-age story for both its protagonists. Hayes and Solène, after all, are two people still trying to discover what it might be like to live, and desire, authentically. As a 40-year-old woman, Solène’s sexuality is deemed obsolete, and as a singer in a mega-famous boy band, Hayes’ desires must remain public property.
Galitzine is an excellent person to have lunch with. “Piece by piece! That’s good service,” Galitzine says admiringly to the waiter positioning individual segments of butternut squash on my plate. Afterwards, he whispers to me: “Was it just me, or was that kind of forceful?” he jokes. “He’s like, ‘I am putting this on your plate, and I am dripping it around!’”
This winning charm, and knack for making you feel like the centre of his attention, is perhaps why he is so believable as a popstar. “I love BTS. I love Blackpink. I very much had a crush on Jennie for a long time,” he says. “They were a really interesting reference point for the physicality in the show, because I’m not a professional dancer, and all the boys in my boy band are. I said, ‘You fuckers better not make me look terrible!’”
Seeing him on stage, you would have no idea that he was freezing in his little vest top during August Moon’s Coachella performance, filmed in the dead of winter in Atlanta in front of a crowd of 500 extras. “There was this one move where I guess I thought I’d seen someone do a swipe down the chest, but upon seeing the footage, no one was doing any swipes,” he says. “I was finally called out for it. They were like, ‘You’ve been doing your titty swipe for the last few weeks of rehearsal.’ Thankfully, I cut the titty swipe.”
We arrive at that much speculated-over subject of whether Hayes is based on Harry Styles. Galitizine wants to set the record straight: “He’s an obvious comparison, knowing that the author was inspired by the fact that Harry seemed to be kind of in his own bracket as a young man dating an older woman.” He says, too, that August Moon’s music feels “more nineties” to him than One Direction. (Though it’s worth noting that, presumably not for nothing, the producers of The Idea of You’s original songs also produced the 1D hit “What Makes You Beautiful”.)
But for Galitzine it was important to maintain some distance. “I think it's very important that we don't draw too much of a comparison to him because [Harry Styles] is a real person, within both the music industry and the film industry,” he says. “I think we need to normalise [keeping them separate] as opposed to drawing a direct parallel to someone who already exists.”
The Idea of You’s open ending is a little more grown-up than you’d expect: Hayes and Solène don’t get that traditional romcom resolution, where the sheer power of love means everything works out the first time around, but it’s in keeping with the film’s nuanced optimism about second chances. Galitzine loves the bittersweetness of the ending, likening it to that of one of his favourite films, La La Land.
“It’s a very real-life ending,” he says. “The implication is they get another shot at it, which just felt like the right ending, I think. Timing is everything for people. Sometimes waiting and re-approaching something later on works out, and sometimes it doesn't. But for this unconventional love story, we wanted a hopeful message.”
Galitzine has a certain gift for sensuality – an instinctiveness, and willingness to play, that was switched on from his very first day on set. He and Hathaway were shooting a honeymoon-on-steroids romantic scene on a beach in the south of France. “In reality, we’re in Savannah, Georgia. We’re in the water, we’re freezing, he says. “She’s kind of lying there and I’m holding her.”
Then he had an idea.“I’m thinking, OK, I’m gonna do something very sexy here. I’m gonna kiss her stomach, and people are gonna go wild for it.”
The fates had other ideas. “At the moment I go to do it, she dips her stomach below the water, and I swallow a whole mouthful of seawater and start choking,” he says. That stomach kiss made it into the final cut of the movie (minus Galitzine coughing and spluttering). It’s a split second long, but is so charged with lust that – even with stiff competition – it might be the horniest moment of the entire film.
At a time when the sex scene is critically endangered in today's movie ecosystem, sex and sensuality is thankfully something Galitzine is helping to keep alive and well. “I think you can gain a lot of insight into [characters] at their most primal, their most emotionally and physically vulnerable. So, yeah,” he says. “I’m all for the sex scene.”
Styling by Martin Metcalf
Grooming by Petra Sellge
Set design by Georgia Currell
