The Idea of You made a pop star out of Nicholas Galitzine

Nicholas Galitzine lived out his boyhood dreams in 2022 when he performed on the “Coachella’s” main stage with his “bandmates” Jaiden Anthony, Raymond Cham Jr., Vik White and Dakota Adan, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

To complete the dream, there were 5,000 screaming “fans,” chanting the band’s name, “August Moon! August Moon!” For the rest of the guys, this was familiar territory to them as they were professional dancers who had done this in front of much bigger audiences with artists like Beyoncé and Britney Spears. For the lone Brit Galitzine, it was totally new.

Nicholas Galitzine is Hayes Campbell

Also, it wasn’t a real band. He was filming scenes as Hayes Campbell, one-fifth of the fictional boy band August Moon. The crowd was real, though. While not exactly in the thousands (there were 500 extras), it was on an actual stage, but not at Coachella in the summer. They were in Atlanta, Georgia in December shooting the hit Prime Video movie, The Idea of You.

The film is based on Robinne Lee’s 2017 novel of the same name. It follows the story of Hayes and Soléne Marchand (Anne Hathaway), a divorced single mother who meets August Moon’s lead singer while taking her teenage daughter to the music festival.

It’s easy enough to transform the Atlanta Motor Speedway parking lot into a festival stage, but without real music — one believable enough for a worldwide sensation — the whole thing would just fall apart.

Music supervisor Frankie Pine said, “We pulled from a lot of different bands for inspiration. The obvious one was One Direction, but we also talked about Maroon 5, the classic boy bands, but also just the major artists of today.”

Pine definitely had the experience to pull it off. Pine has worked on the ABC and CMT series Nashville and another one for Prime Video, the miniseries adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & The Six. For August Moon, she wanted the kind of music that would have audience believe they were worthy of the film’s world tour montage.

The music of The Idea of You

But first, the production had to find the perfect Hayes Campbell. Lee said he was the coalescence of different men such as Prince Harry, Harry Styles, some of her exes. Director Michael Showalter and producer Cathy Schulman didn’t just want the kind of leading man who would have scorching chemistry with Hathaway (which Galitzine had in spades), they wanted someone who could actually sing the movie’s original songs.

Enter Galitzine. He’s not a stranger to singing in films. He sang on another movie in 2021’s Cinderella (also available on Prime Video) as well as covers he’s posted on YouTube. He also has a single out on Spotify, Comfort. When he auditioned for this role, lead songwriter and producer Savan Kotecha knew they’d found Hayes.

“As soon as we heard his voice, it was like, ‘Oh, wow, we’ve really got something here,” he said.

Kotecha was on sabbatical in Sweden when he read the script for The Idea of You. He has been nominated for an Academy Award in 2021 for the song Husavik for the movie Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. However, to Showalter and Schulman it was his credits as a former X Factor vocal coach and writing songs for One Direction, Arian Grande, Justin Bieber, Britney Spears and The Weeknd.

According to Kotecha, he drew on his experiences working with the world’s biggest pop stars to write the songs for the movie.

“I was treating it like Hayes was a real person. Based on my own experiences, and conversations that I’d had with artists, I know who he would be, and what he would be feeling,” he said.

For August Moon’s first single, he wrote Dance Before We Walk. From their second album came the sexier Taste. And to show the band’s evolution to songwriters with more input in their songs, Guard Down and Closer.

Since the rest of August Moon were actual professional dancers, Galitzine had to go to boy band bootcamp with the rest of the band, which meant weeks of intensive choreography training with Dani Vitale. This also gave the boys time to bond. The actor had to learn to move with the seemingly effortless swagger of pop stars, while the dancers needed to learn how to tone down their skills.

“I just had to learn how not to stick out like a sore thumb. For me, it was more about creating those little moments with each other on stage. I think that’s what really sells it,” Galitzine said.

And sell it he did. In the first part of the film, when the band performs on stage, the actor definitely doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb performing with the rest of the band. He does an admirable job nailing the choreography since as the lead singer he’s mostly in the center.

While Galitzine has said in previous interviews that he’s taken inspiration from the Korean superband BTS, most Western boy bands aren’t known for complicated dance moves. Even One Direction weren’t known for their dancing skills.

Now the actor just had to do one more thing to live out his pop star dreams: go to Sweden to record the lead vocal for the soundtrack with Kotecha.

“We did what we would usually do in three weeks in three days. Nick was such a trooper,” the songwriter said of Galitzine.

While the task of writing and recording the band’s songs came easily enough, the one thing that was musically challenging was the film’s title track.

“That was the hardest one to crack. I think I built up in my head, but it was just really important to make it feel different than August Moon,” Kotecha said.

It had to be different. The last song, which Hayes performs on The Graham Norton Show five years after he and Soléne had broken up, needed to show his growth as an artist. It also had to accomplish one thing that’s almost always present in all rom-coms: the grand gesture.

It was serendipitous that Galitzine’s Mary & George co-star, Julianne Moore, also happened to be filming a spot on the show. All he needed to do was swoop in and nail the performance.

“We scurried on and filmed it in a few minutes,” he said.