Jenna Bush Hager Refused To Help Katie Holmes Prepare For ‘First Daughter’: “I Was At The Library” 

Jenna Bush Hager just revealed Katie Holmes reached out to her when she was in college for some inspiration for her 2004 rom-com First Daughter – but she declined the chance to speak with her!

“I was at the library and living a normal life as a college freshman,” she recently told People. “I felt she would be disappointed with whatever she saw.” 

Bush Hager and her twin sister Barbara were just 18 years old when their father George W. Bush was elected president of the United States. Despite having to attend college at the University of Texas at Austin with her own security detail, Bush Hager says she had a relatively “normal life.”

“We were 18, and he knew how badly we wanted just to go to college and live normal lives,” she recalled. “That was his promise to us: ‘Don’t worry. You can live normal lives.’ Which ended up not being exactly true. We were maybe all slightly naive, to be honest.” 

The Today With Hoda & Jenna host claimed she was able to live a “normal life” when her grandfather, George H.W. Bush, served as president from 1989-1993. But “everything changed” when her father became president.

In First Daughter, Holmes played Samantha Mackenzie, the U.S. president’s daughter who enrolls in college in California to get out from under her father’s thumb. Despite her committed security detail following her everywhere she goes, Samantha finds herself falling in love with a graduate student (Marc Blucas) who’s harboring his own secret.

The film released in 2004 after being stuck in development hell for almost five years. But an extremely similar film came out just a few months earlier – Chasing Liberty, the international romcom starring Mandy Moore and Matthew Goode, which landed in theaters that January and similarly flopped in the box office.

Unlike First Daughter, however, Chasing Liberty was reportedly inspired by a picture of Chelsea Clinton trying to blend in at a Stanford basketball game.

Bush Hager was similarly plagued by paparazzi and unwanted attention when she was in college.

In her interview with People, she added that “the absolute best blessing” her parents gave her and her sister was “the freedom just to be ourselves and to make mistakes.”

“The world was expecting us to be perfect,” she said.