# Twenty Five Years of Mia Thermopolis, and a Third Film Finally Moving > Adele Lim is writing and directing, Anne Hathaway is producing, and the original cast and crew remember a set where Garry Marshall made everybody tap dance. - Source: Star Life - Canonical URL: https://starlife.channel/article/princess-diaries-25th-anniversary-third-film-interviews-2026 - Author: Devon Ruiz - Section: Film & TV - Published: 2026-08-06T11:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-06T11:00:00.000Z - Tags: The Princess Diaries, Anne Hathaway, Adele Lim, Disney --- The Princess Diaries came out in 2001 and has never really left. Part Pygmalion, part Cinderella and sentimental without apologising for it, the film took a generation with it and keeps turning up in the origin stories of people now making films of their own. ## The premise, for anyone who needs it It comes from Meg Cabot's diary novels, a series now past twenty books, and follows Amelia Thermopolis, played by Anne Hathaway, an awkward teenager who is informed that she is a princess. Her grandmother, Queen Clarisse, played by Julie Andrews, sets about shaping her into a plausible ruler for the invented country of Genovia. Her best friends, the siblings Lilly and Michael, played by Heather Matarazzo and Robert Schwartzman, have mixed feelings about the promotion, and her mother Helen, played by Caroline Goodall, is not convinced Mia should take it. Gina Wendkos wrote it, Garry Marshall directed it, and between them they produced lines that people are still quoting a quarter of a century later. ## The third film The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement reached cinemas in 2004, and the wait since has been long and heavily rumoured. One attempt at a third film was shelved after Marshall died in 2016. Eight years after that, Disney confirmed Adele Lim as writer and director of The Princess Diaries 3. Lim describes herself as a devoted fan of the first film and credits the series with holding on to female power, joy and mentorship. Scripts have come and gone over the years. In July 2026, Hathaway, who both stars and produces, told SiriusXM's Radio Andy that the story had broken open and that things are pointing the right way. ## What Lim will say about the plot Very little, although one thing is settled. The film belongs to the part of the franchise built around Olivia Harrison, Mia's secret half sister, whose parents are the late Prince Philippe Renaldo and a charter pilot named Elizabeth Harrison. In Cabot's spinoff series, From the Notebooks of a Middle School Princess, Olivia works out what she is when Queen Mia pulls up outside her New Jersey middle school in a limousine. Lim is careful to add that the screen version will not follow the books precisely and will be its own reading of the material. Moving on to the next generation of Renaldos struck her as where the series naturally goes next. Hathaway produces alongside Debra Martin Chase, who produced the original and has stewarded the franchise since. She is the only original cast member publicly confirmed so far, although Cabot has hinted that Chris Pine will return as Nicolas Devereux from the second film, a character Lim calls iconic. ## Why it still lands Speaking to Entertainment Tonight during the anniversary year, Hathaway said she was 17 when she made it, that it remains one of the best experiences she has had, and that what the film became had almost nothing to do with her. She puts it down to the girls who took it to heart, held on to it into adulthood, and now put it on for their own children. Lim was one of those girls. She pitched for the job using a photograph of herself at that age. She grew up in Malaysia, she is Chinese, and on paper she has nothing whatsoever in common with Mia Thermopolis, which she says is the entire point once you look at the picture. Her reading is that every girl passes through a stretch of being that character and needing an oversized fairy godmother to draw something out of her, and that Cabot understood that. ## How it got made at all Chase had executive produced a Cinderella with Whitney Houston, and an agent at William Morris passed her the script on the strength of it. Several publishers had already turned it down for being too soft. She liked it for the reason they did not, as a Cinderella story that could plausibly happen, and from the start she and Wendkos wanted Andrews for Clarisse and Marshall in the chair. Marshall took some convincing. Mario Iscovich, his longtime producer, says Disney offered a green light if the two of them would take the job, and Marshall's first response was that it was a children's film. Iscovich suggested he make it for his granddaughters instead. The line went quiet for a moment, and then he agreed. ## Casting Mia Marcia Ross, who ran casting for the studio, says virtually every actress of the right age read. Scarlett Johansson was on a list and her availability was checked. Emmy Rossum auditioned and tested. Leighton Meester came in before she had representation. Mandy Moore read for Mia and impressed her. Hathaway arrived by a different route. Ross had met her at about 15 or 16, and around the time the script came in she watched Get Real, the short lived family drama in which Hathaway was a regular. What stood out was the double demand of the role, which needed somebody believable as an ordinary girl and then believable as a princess. Hathaway was passing through Los Angeles for other work, they got her into a room with Marshall, and a screen test finished the argument. Iscovich remembers making the case on charm, since she had little experience behind her, and Marshall cutting him off to say he thought she could be a star. Mayne Berke, the production designer, has the better version of the story. Marshall came into the Monday production meeting and announced to the room that he had looked at 400 girls, that he had found her, and that she would end up the size of Julia Roberts. Patrick Richwood, who played the neighbour Mr Robotussin, says Marshall compared her to Audrey Hepburn and liked that the gawkiness was genuine, on the grounds that she really was a teenager. ## Filling the rest of the room Sandra Oh came in for the vice principal. Michael was the hard part, until Marshall heard about a kid from someone and asked the team to track him down. Robert Schwartzman was in San Francisco and had barely acted, being busy with music, though Ross knew his brother Jason from Rushmore. Schwartzman says the job came from nowhere, off the back of The Virgin Suicides, while he was running his band Rooney. He was in his final year of school and walked out of it to make the film, which he found thrilling and also entirely disorienting. He spent the production with impostor syndrome: Moore was a serious singer, Matarazzo was experienced, and he was quietly asking himself whether he could keep pace. He had grown up around sets as part of the Coppola family without ever being in front of a camera at that scale. Matarazzo was cast out of Welcome to the Dollhouse, which the casting director Donna Morong had seen at Sundance, and hired for a comic timing that suited Lilly exactly. It was her first lead in a studio film, and at 16 or 17 she found the size of it hard going, having worked until then on budgets in the low millions. She remembers a chemistry read with Hathaway during which Marshall had the pair of them tap dance, and credits him with making the set safe enough to try things in. Richwood's account explains where that came from. He first read for Marshall at 23, for a part that was cut from a film that later became Overboard, and was inside the circle from then on regardless. By the time of The Princess Diaries he felt like family, and he says every Marshall set worked the same way. --- Originally published by Star Life. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://starlife.channel/article/princess-diaries-25th-anniversary-third-film-interviews-2026.