Tom Bateman Is Feeling the Love

by · WWD
Tom BatemanLexie Moreland/WWD

Tom Bateman might not be a rock star, but he’s getting a taste of the experience thanks to the romance novel fandom.

“I tell you, going to Brazil, those guys let you know how they feel. They’re excited,” the actor says of his recent press stop. “I had a headache from the screams. I felt like Harry Styles for a second.”

Bateman stars alongside Lili Reinhart in the new movie “The Love Hypothesis,” a screen adaptation of the bestselling novel by Ali Hazelwood. The story follows Olive (Reinhart), a grad student who enters into a fake-dating scheme with Adam (Bateman), Stanford’s notoriously cold biology professor, to convince Olive’s best friend to date her crush and Stanford’s advisers to award Adam a grant.

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Bateman has been “burning the candle at every end that I can,” promoting “The Love Hypothesis” everywhere from Brazil to New York, all while flying back and forth from a shoot in Manchester.

Despite the chaos, spirits remain high.

“My agent said to me a long time ago when I think I was having to do some crazy thing of flying somewhere to a last-minute thing, I was going, ‘Oh, it’s a bit much and I’m a bit overwhelmed.’ And he just went, ‘Darling, it’s all rock ’n’ roll,’” Bateman says, ahead of a promotional event for the movie at the New York Public Library. “And I thought, ‘Do you know what? You’re so right.’”

Tom BatemanLexie Moreland/WWD

The 37-year-old English actor first heard about the project when his agency called to see if he’d ever be interested in doing a rom-com. Soon the script was sent over, and immediately he was interested in Adam’s journey.

“When I read it, I sort of thought, ‘Oh, OK. I see who this guy is.’ But then who he ends up as at the end, I realized on the second time I read it, I thought that’s who he is inside. It’s not that he changes, it’s just that he has been on a journey where he can feel secure enough to be himself a bit more,” he says. Shooting chronologically allowed him to channel his own experience on-set into the character’s growth.

“I myself, Tom the actor, at the beginning, you feel nervous, you feel tense, you don’t really know anyone. Also, I found it fascinating being an English actor working with predominantly Americans. We speak the same language, we don’t speak the same language and that was really useful for the role,” he says. “But then as the filming developed, I was obviously more comfortable and people got to know me a bit more and that’s when Adam had started to relax a little bit more until we find him.”

Tom BatemanLexie Moreland/WWD

Bateman got a first taste of just how excited people were for the movie adaptation when Reinhart started promoting the shoot online.

“My agent called up when Lili did the first of her TikToks, and she said, ‘People are going nuts.’ I said, ‘Who?’” He says, “It got millions of views.”

The movie is the latest in a string of shows and films from Prime Video in the romance genre, following the likes of “Off Campus,” “Your Fault London” and “The Last Sunrise.” While “The Love Hypothesis” is Bateman’s first foray into the world, it’s easy for him to understand why the genre is hitting so hard at the moment.

“My feeling towards it really is I think we are all so separate in our lives that for me, I don’t feel a sense of community in the world as much anymore. Even in my 37 years of being on this planet, I felt a huge shift,” he says. “It felt like there used to be this community and I do think it’s because of the internet and social media and mobile phones where every single person just sees the world through our phones, and it makes us all live such secular lives detached from each other. I think that that’s why people are craving it because a rom-com at its core, you boil it down, you take away all the bells and whistles, at its core is two people connecting. I think that’s what people are yearning for. There’s various different ways, and that’s what really drew me to this.”

Tom BatemanLexie Moreland/WWD