For us older members of Gen Z, we may cringe to admit it, but fanfiction was a core part of our early high school experience.
While we may have abandoned our favourite ‘kidnapped by One Direction’ stories to the depths of our tween Wattpad library, thanks to Anne Hathaway, a new Harry Styles-inspired film, The Idea of You, is ready to hit our screens.
Is The Idea of You based on fanfiction?
While Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You may be best known as a best-selling novel, the story of 40-year-old Solène Marchand and boy band member Hayes Campbell got its start as a Harry Styles-inspired story.
As highlighted by The Guardian, Robinne’s novel has the phrase “one direction” scattered through it countless times and with a brooding tattooed British frontman as the love interest, it’s definitely not hard to see where she drew her inspiration.
Speaking to blogger Deborah Kalb in 2017, Robinne revealed the exact moment that Harry inspired her story, sharing, “I was up late surfing music videos on YouTube when I came across the face of a boy I’d never seen in a band I’d never paid attention to, and it was so aesthetically perfect it took me by surprise.”
“I spent a good hour or so Googling and trying to figure out who this kid was, and in doing so, I discovered that he often dated older women, and so the seed was planted.”
Despite the obvious Harry symbolism, since the announcement of the film, Robinne has downplayed Harry’s role in inspiring the story, claiming that the character of Hayes Campbell is an amalgamation of 23 different men.
“I’ve always been taken with all things British. I wanted to do a posh boy band, as if Prince Harry and his friends from Eton had formed one,” she told The Guardian, adding that Hayes had also been inspired by Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch, Duran Duran, and her husband.
The Idea of You star Nicholas Galitizine has also weighed in on the Harry Styles comparisons, telling Vanity Fair, “Hayes Campbell, the man I’m playing, is a very different character [from Harry] and we want him to exist in his own world.”
Who is Robinne Lee?
While her name may have made headlines for The Idea of You, Robinne Lee has also dipped her toe into the world of fanfiction-inspired films as an actress, starring as Ros Bailey in Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed.
Following her appearance in the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, Robinne revealed to The Guardian that the series’ author Erika Lee gave her some valuable tips for crafting her first erotic novel.
“She was really good at giving me advice. She was like, ‘Have you done this? Are you on Goodreads? Do you communicate with your fans?’ She was wonderful.”
Robinne also shared that her acting career inspired her to write The Idea of You as an expression of female sexuality over 40.
“Do they think women just shrivel up and become ogres at 40? I knew my husband and I were having a pretty active sex life… and I thought, ‘What is it about Hollywood and our culture that they shut off and discredit women after a certain age as not being valuable or desirable?'”
If you want to explore the romance of Solène Marchand and Hayes Campbell at home, you can pick up a copy of The Idea of You now at the following retailers:
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