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Julie Andrews has explained why she won’t be reprising her role as Queen Clarrisse Renaldi in the forthcoming Princess Diaries 3.
“I think the story is slightly different, and I’m not quite sure how they’re dealing with that. But it’s too late for me to do it. I think the story has to continue in Princess Mia [played by Anne Hathaway]. It’s her story. It’s not really mine,” the Sound of Music star, 90, told Today.com in an article published on Tuesday, August 11.
Andrews’ comments come after Hathaway, 43, recently shared an update on the film’s production two years after the instalment was officially greenlit. “I can say I think we had a story breakthrough,” Hathaway said during a July appearance on SiriusXM’s Radio Andy. “I think we are moving in the right direction. The script that we were working on — we kind of had to start over with this new direction, which is not the update I think anybody wants, but we all feel really good that this is going to be the one.”
The Princess Diaries, released in August 2001, followed teenager Mia Thermopolis as she adapted to the life of a princess with help from her estranged grandmother, Queen Clarrisse, after learning of her royal blood. The subsequent Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, released in 2004, saw Mia as a then 21-year-old preparing to take over the throne from her grandmother.
Andrews said in an interview with InStyle magazine, published on Monday, August 10, that she turned down the offer to pick up where the story left off. “I think I probably passed … I think I’m retired, really, would be about the best description for that,” Andrews told the outlet. “[The crew] asked me all last year if I would be keen to do it. It was very, very hard to say ‘no’ but I did because I thought I had a wonderful ride, and this one, I felt, would flourish very well and wouldn’t need Granny going in there at my age.”
Hathaway has publicly shared her fondness for Andrews in the past. In a 2022 interview with Entertainment Tonight, she said she was extremely keen to have Andrews be part of a third Princess Diaries chapter. “I would more than entertain it, I’m pulling for it,” the Odyssey star told the outlet at the time. “If there’s any way to get Julie Andrews involved, I think we would make it work. We would go to where she was and put a green screen behind her and just make it happen.”
Meg Cabot, who wrote the original Princess Diaries book series of which the film adaptations are based upon, teased in June that she had read the script for Princess Diaries 3 and liked it.
“I read a script, and it was amazing. I told them not to send anymore, because I love it so much,” Cabot, 59, said during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “They don’t like it when you tell people what’s gonna happen yet. So I was like, ‘Better not send me any more scripts!’”
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