Nicholas Galitzine went to “boy band boot camp” to prepare to play a pop star in The Idea of You.

In the upcoming romantic comedy, the British actor plays Hayes Campbell, a famous singer who falls in love with Anne Hathaway’s character Soléne, a single mother almost 20 years his senior, after a chance encounter at the Coachella festival.

Galitzine and his on-screen bandmates went to “boy band boot camp” to learn “how to dance” and “feel comfortable with (their) stage presence” before shooting concert scenes as the fictional band August Moon.

“We didn’t perform in front of 80,000 people, but 500 supporting artists (were) there watching us so it was kind of like doing a mini-concert in a way,” he told People. “It’s like embodying the confidence of a pop star.”

Hayes has drawn comparisons to former One Direction star Harry Styles because he is part of a five-piece band, has a British accent and similar tattoos. In addition, the source novel by Robinne Lee has been widely described as Styles fan fiction, although the author told Vogue in 2020 that Hayes was a mix of the pop star and Prince Harry.

Galitzine recently told BuzzFeed that his character is not “a shoddy impersonation” of the As It Was singer.

“We tried to create a character that felt maybe akin to Harry in the sense that’s he a younger man dating older women,” he said. “It was important to create someone who felt new and original and not a sort of shoddy impersonation of this person that we know really well.”

The Idea of You premiered at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas over the weekend. It will be released on Prime Video on 2 May.

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