25 fun facts you didn’t know about your favorite teen movies

The Princess Diaries – No one better for Clumsy Mia than Clumsy Anne

Sometimes the star of a movie truly embodies the character they’re playing. In The Princess Diaries, that could be said about Anne Hathaway as Mia Thermopolis.

In The Princess Diaries, Mia Thermopolis is just a nerdy, seemingly invisible teenage girl who lives an ordinary life with her artist mother in San Francisco. When her European grandmother (Julie Andrews) comes for a visit, she finds out she’s actually the heir to the throne in Genovia. To make matters even more stressful, Mia is being urged to accept her role as a princess or the country could be doomed.

While it seems like any teenage girl would want to be a princess, the clumsy, frizzy-haired, bushy-browed Mia is not like those girls. When it came to casting Anne Hathaway, it was a no-brainer.

Despite not having a mane of bushy hair or wild eyebrows, Hathaway immediately caught the eye of casting agents. At her audition for the film, she fell out of her chair and was immediately given the role of the clumsy princess.

It doesn’t end there! Hathaway’s clumsiness came into play more than just during the casting. In one scene, when Mia and Lily are walking along the bleachers in the rain, Mia slips and falls, while laughing hysterically.

As it turns out, that slip was not scripted, Hathaway actually fell but stayed in character. Director Garry Marshall thought it was so funny that he kept rolling and used that scene in the final cut.

In another scene, Princess Mia accidentally sets a man’s arm on fire and shoves his arm in an ice bucket. The flames were supposed to go out, but they didn’t, so Hathaway panicked and threw a glass of water on it, which also wasn’t scripted.