The Verity adaptation will preserve one of Colleen Hoover’s most memorable details: the bitten headboard. Anne Hathaway, who plays bestselling novelist Verity Crawford and also serves as a producer, said changing the character’s appearance was one thing. Losing that particular piece of bedroom furniture was apparently unthinkable.
“There’re certain things, like, Verity can be a brunette, but we can’t mess up the headboard bit,” Hathaway said in a joint interview with co-stars Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett. “We have to get that right, because it’s too specific and unusual.”
Her conclusion was simple: “If we’re gonna make this movie, we have to get a detail like that right.”
Why does the headboard matter in Verity?
The psychological romantic thriller follows Lowen Ashleigh, played by Johnson, after she is hired to complete a highly anticipated novel by Verity. A car crash has left the author comatose, so Lowen moves into the Crawford home and begins working through the unfinished manuscript.
While there, she uncovers disturbing secrets and becomes involved with Verity’s husband, Jeremy Crawford, played by Hartnett. That relationship leads to the scene in question.
As in Hoover’s novel, Jeremy performs oral sex on Lowen, who bites the headboard to suppress the sound of her orgasm. She wants to leave deeper marks in the wood than Verity’s older bites, which remain clearly visible. Subtle symbolism has left the building.
Hathaway also had to film her character’s contribution to the damaged furniture. “I never thought I’d bite a headboard on camera in my life, but that was just a Tuesday,” she joked.
Hartnett did not have to test his teeth against the props, but he saw the evidence. He recalled finding several headboard pieces on a prop table, each carrying different bite marks. He teased Hathaway and Johnson that they “must have sat there for a while” working through them.
Which scenes from the book were cut?
Not every detail survived the move from page to screen. Johnson, who is also an executive producer, said the film reduced Lowen’s sleepwalking storyline to a brief glimpse, despite the character having struggled with it since childhood.
“It’s just not necessarily that interesting to watch someone sleepwalk,” Johnson said. “There were some really, really cool moments where she ends up outside and it’s very spooky.”
Those moments did not make the final cut, proving that even atmospheric midnight wandering can lose a fight with running time. The headboard, meanwhile, remained gainfully employed.
The filmmakers also made visual choices that may not match every reader’s imagined version of the story. Hathaway acknowledged that the Crawford house could look different from what audiences pictured, while many readers imagined Verity as blonde rather than brunette.
“Right off the bat, we’re making choices that people are either gonna go with it or not,” she said. “So, you just kind of hope that people will go with your version of it and let it be its own thing.”
Did early audiences approve of the changes?
The cast filmed Verity from January through March 2025. Hathaway said the first audience reactions offered some reassurance that the adaptation had retained the novel’s essential mood, even where specific details changed.
“We shot this January of 2025 through March of 2025 and it was so wonderful to have the first wave of audiences see it and have them tell us that they loved what we did,” she said. “They thought that we got the spirit of the book correct and that’s been a real relief.”
Hathaway was expecting her third child with husband Adam Schulman at the time of the interview. The film is scheduled to premiere in theaters on Oct. 2.
