Rachel Marsh came to The Love Hypothesis knowing almost nothing about the novel behind it, and it was the friendship at the story’s centre, not the romance, that made her say yes. The Rachel Marsh Love Hypothesis pairing has since become one of the more talked-about casting announcements ahead of the film’s arrival on Prime Video this September, and listening to Marsh speak about the project in a new interview with Stylist, it is easy to understand why the role found her.
Marsh plays Ahn Pham, a PhD student at Stanford University and best friend to protagonist Olive, played by Lili Reinhart. Before auditioning, Marsh was unfamiliar with author Ali Hazelwood‘s work, despite, as she puts it, an ever-growing list of romance titles she intends to read. She downloaded the novel promptly, and what she found there was not quite what she had expected.
The friendship, not the romance, is what drew Marsh in
‘I remember thinking, “Oh my god, this is so cute,”‘ she recalls. ‘It’s about a friendship, which is really what got me excited about potentially even being in the movie, and how great of a story it was.’ In an era when the romantic plot quite reasonably commands most of the marketing oxygen, there is something refreshing about a lead performer insisting the female friendship is the point. Marsh is clear that this is not a secondary detail: it is the engine of the whole thing.
The plot, as Hazelwood’s readers will know, is neatly constructed. When Ahn falls for Jeremy (Nicholas Duvernay), who happens to be Olive’s former crush, Olive devises a solution: a fake relationship with Adam Carlsen (Tom Bateman), the kind of intimidating professor who clears a room on arrival. The logic is simple enough, convince Ahn she has moved on, and the awkwardness dissolves. The execution, predictably, is less straightforward. What begins as a mutually convenient arrangement develops into something Olive had not budgeted for, and she is left testing what Marsh describes as her most daunting hypothesis yet: that love might actually be worth the risk.
Authentic Filipino representation and the Rachel Marsh Love Hypothesis casting
Ahn Pham is a Filipino character, and bringing that representation to the screen with honesty is something Marsh has spoken about directly. BookTok, the corner of the internet that made Hazelwood’s novel a phenomenon in the first place, has its own relationship with the source material, and the expectations that come with an adaptation of a beloved text are never negligible. Marsh appears to have absorbed this. Her investment in Ahn goes beyond the technical work of the role: she is as attentive to what the character represents to readers who saw themselves in the novel as she is to what the character does within the plot.
Hazelwood’s readership has expanded steadily since the book’s publication, and the novel’s world, built around the particular pressures of academic life, STEM research, and the strange social ecosystem of a doctoral programme, has attracted a loyal following. Marsh, for her part, has cheerfully claimed membership. ‘I wasn’t familiar with her work,’ she says, ‘but now I’m such a huge Ali fan.’ She describes herself as an ‘honorary woman in STEM’, a label that captures something of the book’s specific charm, its warmth toward the women who occupy these environments and find each other there.
Lili Reinhart leads the film as Olive, with Tom Bateman as Carlsen and Nicholas Duvernay as Jeremy. The Love Hypothesis arrives on Prime Video this September. For anyone who has been quietly hoping the adaptation would honour the friendship as carefully as the romance, Marsh’s enthusiasm for exactly that dimension of the story is, at minimum, a good sign.
