The 00s may have been problematic for many reasons, but one thing no one can deny is that it was an absolute golden era for chick flicks and rom coms.
Sure, viewing them through the lens of 2023 feminism might throw up a few stumbling blocks if you were looking for them, but for the most part we’ve managed to hold a special place in our hearts for the wildly fantastical and gender stereotypical love stories of our fictional 00s counterparts.
One film that was truly definitive of the time was How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, and to celebrate it turning twenty (yes, sorry, twenty) its romantic leads Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey have reunited with the power of social media to reminisce on their time filming the iconic movie together.
Speaking of their connection in front of the camera, Matthew said, ‘What tickles me doesn’t bruise you. What tickles you doesn’t bruise me. We were never afraid to push it to what might be considered too far.’
Kate agreed, ‘When you went one direction, I went with you. But then I would be like, “I’m gonna throw him off a little bit. Let’s see what happens if I do a sharp right.”’
‘Underneath, probably for things that were happening in character and out of character and off-set, we’d gotten under each other’s skin a little bit. We were legitimately kind of pissed off at each other in a really cool way,’ said Matthew of their many fraught argument scenes. ‘Like okay, that worked. But can we inject a little more of the charm and the love and the desire and the lust in there?’
It wasn’t the only time the pair worked together, joining forces again five years later on Fool’s Gold, a kind of rom com/action adventure cross over, where they played a married couple – but the tantalising chemistry between Benjamin Barry and Andie Anderson on HTLAGITD was surely what made it into a runaway smash hit of the genre, which ended up grossing $177.5m, more than tripling its $50m budget.
Kate said, ‘When you're kissing anyone in a movie, it's professional; we're actually trying to create something that evokes something in a certain way that might not exactly be the way you would necessarily do it in real life.’