Anne Hathaway chides ‘Tonight Show’ audience after awkward ‘The Idea of You’ question
Anne Hathaway is now taking credit for “The Idea of You” book making the best-seller list — well, sort of.
The Oscar winner joked about her new film, which is based off the Robinne Lee romance book, in an Instagram Story Sunday.
“Audience said ‘hold my book!!!’ ” she captioned a screenshot of the novel hitting the milestone. She circled “No. 1” and tagged Jimmy Fallon and his late-night talk show.
Last week, Hathaway went viral when she asked the “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” audience if they had read the book — and the response was absolute silence in the NBC studio.
“Has anybody here read the book?” she asked at the time.
When no one responded she buried her face with her hands.
Fallon, meanwhile, tried to help her out during the awkward moment.
“No, we don’t read. This is ‘The Tonight Show.’ You want to go to Stephen Colbert if you want to get people to read books. Lame!” he said. “We do Audible here.”
Appearing embarrassed, she noted: “What’s a book?”
The “Bride Wars” actress stars in the Michael Showalter-directed film as an exhausted single mom who has a fling with a famous 24-year-old British boy-bander, played by Nicholas Galitzine.
Lee opened up about the movie’s ending in a new interview, but admitted: “It’s not the story I wanted to tell.”
“I wanted to make a point about how, as women, we put others’ happiness before our own,” she told Entertainment Weekly.
“The book is a book, and the movie is a movie,” she went on. “You have to step away and let the filmmakers do what they’re going to do and not get too concerned with what it is you’ve created and when it stops because it’s a completely different medium.
“It’s America — Hollywood’s going to do what they’re going to do, and they’re going to throw a happy ending on everything. I don’t know why. You hope they’ll keep to what you’ve written because it meant something to you, but you also have to think about the box office and viewers and what their audience is going to want to see.”
As for a possible sequel? She admitted she needs to “recover” from crying over the two characters before thinking of a second book.
She quipped: “When the book came out and people said, ‘Sequel!’ I was like, ‘Do you understand what I have been through?’ “