While not everyone is lucky enough to be born with royal blood, celebs can at least play dress up in tiaras and gowns while portraying fictional royals.
When The Princess Diaries was released in July 2001, fans went crazy for the made-up kingdom of Genovia. First introduced in Meg Cabot‘s novel of the same name, the small country — nestled right between Spain and France — was famous for its pears … and its spunky rulers.
In the film, Mia Thermopolis (played by an adorable young Anne Hathaway) has her life turned upside down when her grandmother Queen Clarisse Renaldi (Julie Andrews) appears in San Francisco to reveal that the high schooler is the heir to the Genovian crown. Before she can claim the throne, however, Mia must endure some “princess lessons.”
Three years later, the Ocean’s 8 actress reprised her beloved character in The Princess Diaries 2. While she told Glamour in December 2012 that she felt she was “labeled a good girl” because of the role — causing her to have to fight for more serious parts she wanted — Hathaway and her costars would return to Genovia in an instant.
“There is a script for the third movie,” the Devil Wears Prada star said during a January 2019 episode of Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen. “I want to do it. Julie wants to do it. Debra Martin Chase, our producer, wants to do it. We all really want it to happen. It’s just we don’t want to unless it’s perfect, because we love it just as much as you guys love it. It’s as important to us as it is to you, and we don’t want to deliver anything until it’s ready.”
Luckily, while the world waits to catch up with Princess Mia, there are plenty of other fictional kingdoms to dive into. Netflix struck gold in November 2018 when they cast Vanessa Hudgens in The Princess Switch, in which the High School Musical actress plays both a royal and a normal woman who (unsurprisingly) look remarkably similar and decide to switch places. No princess movie is complete without a romance, and the two beauties end up falling in love with men from each other’s worlds — a happy ending that was tested in the 2020 sequel The Princess Switch: Switched Again.
“The story moving forward is that relationships aren’t always easy — that even if you’re a prince and a princess, there are pressures and the spotlight and there’s relationship struggles,” Sam Palladio, who plays Prince Edward in the films, told Us Weekly exclusively in November 2020.
While a new little prince or princess may be in the cards for an upcoming film, the Nashville alum shared that he’s ultimately happy with the direction potential scripts are headed in — babies or not.
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“I think these movies are about family, love and friendship, and I think a clear [next] step would be something like that,” he told Us. “I think there’s definitely elements of that that could be really fun, but having read some early drafts and things, there’s also some very unexpected twists and turns.”
Scroll to discover more of our favorite movies about fictional royals:
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