With Christmas officially upon us, it is The Holiday season, with the 2006 Nancy Meyers romantic comedy regarded as a yuletide classic.
Starring Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz, the star-studded film follows Surrey-based Iris Simpkins and LA’s Amanda Woods, as the pair swap homes over the Christmas period. And featuring Jude Law, Jack Black and Rufus Sewell, it’s no surprise that the film is still popular, seeing a resurgence each Christmas.
However, according to director Nancy Meyers, this was never part of the plan, with the filmmaker not intending for The Holiday to be a Christmas film.
Meyers’ surprising revelation came about during her recent appearance on the Hollywood Gold podcast, where she explained: “I didn’t think of it that way.”
“I just really wanted to tell the story about these people,” she reflected. “I set it at Christmas because that can be lonely. The holidays seem like a good time to deal with those issues. So it was that, not, ‘Hey, I think I’ll make a festive holiday movie.’ Not at all.”
She continued: “I know it’s called ‘The Holiday’ because they’re taking a holiday, but it could have been called that if it was in the summer… Everybody sees it as a Christmas movie, and when I watched it last night to prepare, I was a little shocked at how much Christmas was in it.”
This surprising revelation from Meyers comes just weeks after another made by The Holiday actor Jude Law.
The 51-year-old accidentally found himself going viral last month, after revealing on BBC Radio 2 that the famous cottage from the romantic comedy does not actually exist.
“I mean, I find it just, honestly glorious,” Law explained when asked how he feels about the film’s resurgence each year. But when hosts Zoe Ball and Kerry Godliman mentioned the theory that the famed cottage was on Air BnB, Law replied: “That cottage doesn’t exist.”
“So the director – she’s a bit of a perfectionist,” Law explained of Meyers. “She toured the whole area and didn’t quite find the chocolate box cottage she was looking for. So she just hired a field and drew it, and had someone build it.
“But here’s the funny thing, if you watch it,” he continued. “So, we were shooting it in the winter here and every time I’d go in that door we cut and we shot the interior in LA about three months later.”
The Holiday is available to watch now on Netflix.