As the holiday season approaches, many of us are eager to escape into the cinematic wish-fulfilment of classic winter films like The Holiday, but the star of that film might just have dashed all our Christmas wishes with a recent behind-the-scenes revelation.
Jude Law, who stars in both The Holiday and all of my romantic fantasies, discussed the holiday romcom during a recent interview on BBC Radio. The film was released in 2006 (the aughties, with Love Actually and Four Christmases, was huge for Christmas classics), and followed the romantic lives of two couples over the holiday period. While the starry cast of Law, Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet and Jack Black were the main focus, The Holiday found a scene-stealer in the form of the quaint cottage where Law and Diaz’s romance blooms.
![THE HOLIDAY [2006] - Official Trailer (HD)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wk9caHO3pW0/hqdefault.jpg)
Seemingly ripped straight from a Nancy Meyers fairytale (which makes sense, since she directed the movie… duh), the cottage is showstopping enough to warrant its own place on the movie’s credits list (truly, it deserves top billing), but Law has sucked all of the whimsy out of the beloved setting with a new detail about where The Holiday was filmed. “That cottage doesn’t exist,” Law said, adding the final nail in the coffin of my belief that romance is, in fact, dead.
At the risk of sullying our Christmas spirit even further, Law went on to divulge that, since Meyers “is a bit of a perfectionist,” she scoured the whole region to locate the perfect home, but “didn’t quite find the chocolate box cottage she’s looking for.” As a result, Law said Meyers simply “hired a field and drew [the cottage] and had someone build it.” The revelation that the cottage that features prominently in my dreams (alongside Law himself) is nothing but a Hollywood facade is a Grinch-like stain on the holiday season, but the revelations don’t stop there.
The actor also said that even the internal scenes supposedly shot inside the cottage are as fake as my Walmart Christmas tree. “We were shooting in the winter [in the UK],” Law recalled, “and every time I’d go in that door, we’d cut, and we shot the interiors of the house in L.A. about three months later.” Ok, so not only is the cottage not actually a pre-existing house (meaning your AirBnB dreams are now dashed), but it’s also not even what we see when Law and Diaz have multiple snow-topped rendezvous? Next, you’re going to tell me that Hugh Grant wasn’t actually the Prime Minister in Love Actually!
Acknowledging that he had just pulled back a curtain that many of us would’ve preferred to stay in place, Law admitted that he “just burst the bubble” with the behind-the-scenes detail and offered a heartfelt “sorry.” Somewhat diminishing his Grinch status, Law also took time to appreciate The Holiday’s very passionate and long-lasting fanbase (myself included, if you couldn’t tell already). “I find it just, honestly, glorious,” the actor said of the movie’s enduring popularity with audiences.
With that charming smile, it’s almost enough to recoup the goodwill Law just lost by bringing harsh reality to our Christmas romcom fantasies. So, if you embark upon your eleven hundredth rewatch of The Holiday this Christmas and find yourself less enthralled by the cottage, you know exactly who to blame. Let’s face it, though, with a character like Eli Wallach’s Arthur, The Holiday will never lose its place in the holiday romcom canon.