How Real Hitmakers and a Boy Band Bootcamp Made Nicholas Galitzine a Pop Star in ‘The Idea of You’
BOY BAND BOOTCAMP whipped Nicholas Galitzine into shape to become Hayes Campbell, frontman of the fictional band August Moon in The Idea of You. The group serves as a launching pad for his whirlwind romance with Anne Hathaway’s Solène in Michael Showalter’s film, now streaming on Prime Video. The group’s backstory isn’t too far off from the tried and true narratives of real-life boy bands — executives hosting trainee camps and talent show auditions that tell hopeful solo artists: “We’ll make your dreams come true, but only if you achieve them alongside the four strangers we’re going to put you in a group with.” And even if it isn’t exactly what they want, they learn to love it, at least for a little while.
When we first encounter August Moon in the film, they’re still in the honeymoon phase of being thrown together through a vague audition process. Their single “I Got You” is a certified radio hit, and the boys — Hayes, Oliver, Simon, Rory, and Adrian — are about to take the main stage at Coachella. It’s something no actual boy band had ever done as a leading act until this year when ATEEZ performed at the festival. Consider it a creative liberty, but it factored into the creators’ authenticity formula: establish a feeling of artistic legitimacy, create camaraderie among five guys sharing this bizarre experience, and build out their catalog with original songs from executive music producer Savan Kotecha. The Grammy and Academy Award-nominated producer and songwriter’s discography features hits with Ariana Grande, Britney Spears, and — most notably — One Direction.
“The challenge was to have songs that felt big,” Kotecha tells Rolling Stone over Zoom. “You have to believe that this band is a big band.” The shadow of a pretty massive band was already cast over The Idea of You from the start. Adapted from Robinne Lee’s novel of the same name, the film follows 24-year-old Hayes as he falls in love with Solène, a 40-year-old single mother attending Coachella with her teenage daughter. In 2020, Lee clarified in an interview with Vogue: “This was never supposed to be a book about Harry Styles.” And the film was never supposed to be about One Direction — and it’s not, but when taking their cultural ubiquity into account, Hayes’ patchwork tattoos and his musical progression with August Moon can’t help but seem familiar to those who know the lore.
Kotecha not only knew the lore but was innately part of it. He worked with One Direction as a vocal coach from their inception on The X Factor UK in 2010 and co-wrote songs across their first three studio albums — including “What Makes You Beautiful” — mostly alongside Carl Falk, Rami Yacoub, Albin Nedler, and Max Martin’s other pop pupils. “There was no thought of like, One Direction did this or that,” he explains of shaping August Moon musically, but adds that he mostly drew from the insight he gained from working with build-a-band acts “based on how they expressed their feelings about being in one of those bands.”
Kotecha worked closely with music supervisor Frankie Pine, who had recently completed Daisy Jones & the Six, another book-to-screen adaptation about a Fleetwood Mac-inspired band with Elvis’ granddaughter Riley Keough in the leading role. Neither project is a direct one-to-one parallel, but the creators were cognizant of their influences. “Were we thinking about a band like ‘NSYNC, or were we thinking of One Direction? I mean, I think for us it was like a conglomeration of everything that made them good and hopefully left out whatever connotation that had any kind of bad side of it,” Pine says.
The best of those worlds emerges on “Guard Down,” a guitar-heavy pop-rock cut on the soundtrack that signifies August Moon taking more creative control — à la One Direction on Midnight Memories or ‘NSYNC on No Strings Attached. “This is the third album song,” Kotecha explains. “It’s all about the pitfalls of fame. Letting your guard down is either substance abuse, or women, or whatever … partaking in things you know you shouldn’t and losing someone that’s known you before you were famous.” In order for the songs to work within the context of the film, they needed to chronologically follow Hayes’ development as a character and musician.
“I Got You” is a big pure pop radio hit, one of the only pre-existing songs on the soundtrack, and features production from Ilya and Babyface. “It goes into making it authentic, in the sense of — their first single should be like, well, we’ve got these hitmakers that have this one song, let’s record it with this band,” Kotecha says. Elsewhere, “Taste” lays the groundwork for a bit more maturity on what would be their second album. “Closer” plays a pivotal role in Hayes and Solène’s love story at Coachella, and “Dance Before We Walk” narratively sets the stage for his departure from the band. “Go Rogue” and “The Idea of You” are emotional and stripped back, showcasing Hayes’ growth as a solo artist.
“We wanted to show that there was a progression of him — that he was exploring this creative side of himself,” Pine says. “Dance Before We Walk” develops in bits and pieces over the course of the film — a piano melody here, a few guitar chords there, a couple of lyrics written sporadically throughout. “It’s the song that also is part of the development of their relationship. You get more of a connection not only to them as a couple but also to the song and what it represents,” Pine explains. As a unit, August Moon doesn’t have much of an essential narrative thread in the film outside of Galitzine’s character, which points to why the music is entwined so closely with his individual experience.
Galitzine was also the only official member to record vocals for the soundtrack, Kotecha had to stand in for the rest. “My voice is the second member of the boy band. We didn’t have much time, so I had to fill in, and they cast me younger and better looking,” he says with a laugh. The actor had less than a week to record the complete soundtrack, a process that would normally allow at least two days on each song. Kotecha recruited Falk and Albin from the Sweden team to cut background vocals for the songs, noting: “We kind of did have our little boy band that Nick was the lead of.”
Kotecha spent around two or three months crafting the songs for The Idea of You, shaping them specifically around Galitzine’s voice. “I told them, look, I can’t really start until I know what voice I’m writing for,” he explains of the process, which began last June. “That way, it will feel authentic because, again, the audience has to believe this is the biggest boy band.” Once he got his hands on Galitzine’s audition tape, a whole world of possibility opened up. “There was him singing with a guitar, and you could tell he just had a beautiful soulful voice,” Kotecha remembers. “That was quite inspiring because you know you have this awesome tool to play with. That really helped.” The producer admits that he considered withholding certain songs to give to real artists but ultimately decided: “We have to give it to the movie. It’s an August Moon song.”
The four other actors that makeup August Moon primarily have backgrounds in dance, something that Galitzine initially shied away from. “He immediately was like, ‘I don’t dance,’” Pine recalls. “I was like, oh we’ll make it so.”
That’s where the boy band boot camp came in. It began in Los Angeles, where he was drilled on nailing the dance moves for the film’s live performance scenes. And once he landed in Atlanta, it was all about becoming a band beyond the music. “When you see behind the scenes of them practicing these dance moves, it’s the most ridiculous, funniest, raunchiest kind of stuff,” Pine says. “And what that did is it really created this camaraderie between all of the guys.” They all still share a text chain.
Seeing Galitzine convincingly slip into the role of pop star not just on screen but in the recording studio, too, felt prophetic to Pine. “Usually you’ve got a producer in there, and they’re like, ‘Sing it like this, or can you try this?’ Man, he was just doing all this stuff on his own,” she says, recalling when she told him: “This is your launch, man. Now, you’re going to be able to do your own music after this movie and become your own pop star on top of a movie star.”
The actor briefly tested the waters as a leading artist in 2022 with the one-off single “Comfort,” a mid-tempo pop track about navigating mental roadblocks. The song has amassed more than 7 million streams on Spotify. “I have some friends who are musicians and pop stars. And the lifestyle to me — it’s so crazy. I have such admiration for them because whether you’re going on tour or performing in front of 80,000 people, it’s just entirely different,” Galitzine told Rolling Stone in a recent interview. “Acting is quite insular in a way, whereas being a musician, you have to give all your energy outwards. I had such fun doing the music side of it. But whether I can be a pop star in real life, I think, is maybe a different thing altogether.”
As music supervisor, Pine found it essential for Hayes — both in August Moon and as a solo artist — to exist in the broader context of popular music within the film, “like what we hear on the radio or what we see at Coachella,” she says. In the film, Solène’s teenage daughter ends up at the festival because her out-of-touch father assumed she would want to see August Moon, failing to realize she had entered her Urban Outfitters-era and was more interested in catching St. Vincent’s set. To emphasize the central age gap at the core of the story, music from both Minnie Riperton and Mae Stephens are featured. In other scenes, Solène and Hayes bond over the Eighties new wave band Wang Chung and drive around to Fiona Apple.
“It lent its hand to this guy who basically auditioned to be in this boy band, but also auditioned to be in a play — and he just happened to get this,” Pine says, detailing Hayes’ backstory. “He had a stronger musical background that the boy band’s manager just didn’t give a shit about. I loved that showing the different genres just added more fuel to [giving] this character more depth.” This artistic authenticity was on Kotecha’s mind as he was writing the soundtrack, as well. “The way Nick played him and the way he was written, Hayes has a lot of integrity,” he explains. “He really wanted to be taken seriously, and he wanted to earn it. He didn’t want to just be there by accident or because he was a cute boy.”
Kotecha found it funny when “Dance Before We Walk” arrived as the first release from The Idea of You’s soundtrack, and the social media response overwhelmingly latched onto the One Direction connection, declaring the arrival of “New Direction.” But the songwriter doesn’t see writing for the fictional band any differently than he would for chart-topping artists. “It needs to be taken seriously, and I want the music to do well — especially in a movie like this one,” Kotecha says. “I feel the void of not having a boy band.”
He doesn’t view these songs or any other records he’s made with boy bands as “cheesy pop music” but rather a vehicle for connection. “It has its role in shaping memories at a very awkward, difficult age for a lot of people. Those kinds of bands make that time easier, and build lifelong bonds and friendship, and help a generation — or hopefully, two generations — of young women who are going to help shape the world get through those times,” he says, adding: “It’s a part of pop culture and it’s so fun for a generation to have one of those bands. We’re really working hard to make people feel this band, and hey, even though it’s in the movie, it’s real. It’s real music. It’s real songs written with real intention. And it’s okay to be an August Moon fan.”