2006’s The Holiday is one of the best Christmas movies as well as one of the best romm-coms, so naturally I find time to watch the movie starring Jude Law, Cameron Diaz, Jack Black and Kate Winslet. But Law just spoiled one dream that always springs out of my yearly rewatches of the modern classic in four words when he was recently asked about the adorable cottage Winslet’s character owns in the movie.
When Jude Law guested on The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show in promotion for the Star Wars: Skeleton Crew premiere on Disney+ next week, he was asked about the famed English cottage where Cameron Diaz’s Amanda stays before falling in love with Jude Law’s character, Graham, the brother of its owner (Kate Winslet’s Iris). Here’s the swift sentence that dashed my dreams of ever seeing it in person, and perhaps staying there, too:
That cottage doesn’t exist.
Excuse me? Much like myself, the hosts of the BBC Radio show (via Instagram) were nearly traumatized by the revelation. So many famous homes from movies often belong to real people, and if they are famous enough become destinations for movie fans. Jude Law explained how the cottage doesn’t exist with these words:
So the director, she’s a bit of a perfectionist. [She] toured that 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… So we were shooting in the winter here and every time I’d go in that door we cut and shot the interiors in L.A. about three months later.
Writer/director Nancy Meyers, who also famously made The Parent Trap with Lindsay Lohan, Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, had a specific vision for the cottage in The Holiday. And when she couldn’t find the house she wanted for the movie via location scouting, she decided to have it built for the movie. As the movie business goes, the whole house wasn’t likely built and only used for exterior shots. As Law shared, whenever the characters would move into the cottage, they would not be in the cottage at all, but on a set in Los Angeles, California. Hollywood sure is wild sometimes.
When Jude Law previously spoke about The Holiday to Vanity Fair, Law shared that because they filmed the exteriors in London and then the interiors in Los Angeles a few months later, fans can look closely and perhaps notice Graham is rather tan in all his indoor scenes. While this revelation certainly spoils some of the fantasy of the movie, it’s not going to stop me from rewatching every year, and Graham being one of those fictional men who set my standards high.
A couple years ago there was talk of a sequel, before Nancy Meyers said it was not true. Jack Black shared his own hope to get back with the cast last year, but considering this revelation, I guess they’d have to build the cottage all over again if they did make a second movie. You can watch The Holiday now with an Amazon Prime subscription.
