We've in a bit of a soundtrack renaissance as of the last year, between the resurgence of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" from Stranger Things, Sophie Ellis-Bextor's "Murder on the Dancefloor" from Saltburn (complete with that infamous Barry Keoghan naked dance scene) and most recently Natasha Bedingfield’s "Unwritten," which played a prominent role in Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell’s rom-com, Anyone but You.
That mid-2000s bop, which was pulled off Bedingfield's 2004 debut album of the same name, has been utilized in numerous TV shows and films like Because I Said So and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but it was most notably the theme song for the MTV reality series The Hills. That is, before the Anyone but You folks jokingly assigned the hit track as the "serenity song" of Glen Powell's character Ben, and the uplifting tune is sung several times throughout the 2023 romantic comedy.
It's not the first time one of Bedingfield's songs have been used for comedic effect onscreen—remember Emma Stone's epic greeting-card rendition of "Pocketful of Sunshine" in Easy A? That 2010 comedy which was also helmed by Anyone but You director Will Gluck and the singer recently shared with People what she thought of Gluck using "Unwritten" in his latest movie:
It really feels like Anyone But You is about 'Unwritten,' like 'Unwritten' is almost a character in the movie. My publisher and Will Gluck, the director, they were like, 'Look, it's a big moment in the movie.' So, I believed them. But when I watched the movie, I was like, 'Wow.'
Director Will Gluck told The Hollywood Reporter that it was between "Unwritten" and another song for Anyone but You but that, ultimately, Bedingfield's number one out
The song had to fulfill the requirement of what you just said. It had to have baggage, and maybe people don’t like it, but really, people do love it. I just needed to give them permission to love it, which is what I did in another movie [Easy A] with another [Bedingfield] song [“Pocketful of Sunshine”]. But when I started playing [“Unwritten”] and the other [potential] song for people, I very quickly realized that everyone knows [“Unwritten”]. No matter how snarky or how much of a curmudgeon someone might be, you can’t not love that song.
The 42-year-old British singer-songwriter also noted to People that it's been "incredible" seeing the way the song—which has gone viral over on TikTok in the wake of the rom-com—is "lifting everyone up." She revealed to the outlet that she originally wrote "Unwritten" as a birthday present to her then-14-year-old brother Joshua, and how she uses music as a way to connect "to everything that's good":
I use music to get to the light at the end of the tunnel. Music connects me to everything that's good and to my higher power and my higher self and to others. And so my music is very optimistic because it's chasing the light.
Bedingfield clearly is a good sport about her music and about the fact that "Unwritten" is now one of those songs that will automatically make you think of a specific movie. She recently joined Powell and Sweeney onstage at the People's Choice Awards on Sunday, February 18 to surprise the crowd with a live rendition of "Unwritten," with everyone in the audience—including the two actors—enthusiastically singing along.
You can have your own at-home karaoke session to Natasha Bedingfield’s "Unwritten" by watching Glen Powell, Sydney Sweeney and the rest of the cast of Anyone but You sing along to it in their new rom-com, which you can rent or buy through Prime Video and Apple TV.
