Oliver Hudson had the largest crush on Cher Horowitz.
When he was 19 years previous, Hudson swooned for her after watching “Clueless,” the 1995 teen comedy that remodeled Alicia Silverstone into an in a single day sensation. The movie was completely solid. Each actor oozed Fundamental Character Vitality, however the plot totally revolved round Silverstone’s Cher, the bubbling queen bee of Beverly Hills.
Younger girls needed to decorate like Cher. Hudson needed so far her.
“Cher was my No. 1,” the actor, now 49, stated in a current interview. “I tried to find Cher in Los Angeles. Didn’t work out. But I just thought [Silverstone] was so adorable in that. And she’s an amazing actor even beyond that.”
Hudson welcomed the chance to work with Silverstone in “A Merry Little Ex-Mas,” Netflix’s vacation film premiering Wednesday. Earlier than studying the script, nevertheless, he fearful that the venture would contain partial nudity. Dustin Milligan went shirtless for “Hot Frosty.” So did Chad Michael Murray in “The Merry Gentlemen.” The latter was “dancing with his shirt off and he’s all shredded,” Hudson mused. “I’m like, my gosh, I hope when I read this, this almost 50-year-old man doesn’t have to do anything of this sort. Because I do not want to dye my gray chest hair at this point in my life.”
“A Merry Little Ex-Mas” spares Hudson the embarrassment. He and Silverstone play a divorcing couple who spend one final Christmas collectively as a household within the fictional small city of Winterlight, Vt. Hudson is Everett, a workaholic physician, and Silverstone is Kate, a people-pleasing, eco-conscious handywoman who can repair something besides their marriage. The exes grew aside whereas elevating their children, Sienna (Emily Corridor) and Gabe (Hudson’s real-life son, Wilder), with Kate expressing deep, justifiable resentment regardless of her cheery disposition. She regrets deciding years earlier to surrender a promising profession in Boston, the place she was a inexperienced architect, to observe Everett to the countryside. There, he began a profitable medical apply. Kate seems like she missed her probability to make a optimistic affect on the planet. The street not taken is gnawing at her soul.
Wilder Hudson, left, is Oliver Hudson’s son on-screen and in actual life, and Emily Corridor performs Sienna, Kate and Everett’s daughter.
(Marni Grossman / Netflix)
In some ways, this film checks off all of the packing containers for a seasonal, feel-good flick. There are many hijinks. There are twinkle-lights galore. There’s actual snow. However there’s additionally actual drama. The battle between Kate and Everett? That’s neither cute nor gimmicky. That’s grown-up stuff.
“I don’t know anyone who gets divorced lightly,” stated Silverstone, who produced the dramedy alongside Melissa Joan Hart and her mom, Paula Hart. “I just don’t know anyone who goes, ‘I’m out. I’m bored. Let’s leave,’” particularly if each events “still love each other.”
The narrative needed to ship a cheerful ending, however Silverstone needed to make the pair “struggle and fight” for it. In any other case, she stated, “It seemed too silly that two people would just decide to break up and then realize they want to be together” inside a tidy, 90-minute time span.
Enter Jameela Jamil and Pierson Fodé, every a formidable, fleeting impediment on the trail towards marital reconciliation. With cheekbones as sharp as her tongue, Jamil exudes playful, feline glamour as Tess, a New Yorker who runs a world nonprofit and breezes into Everett’s life after falling on the ice and needing medical consideration. He invitations her to spend the vacations with him … and Kate. (Awkward.) For Jamil, who grew up “worshipping” Silverstone and Hart within the ’90s, deciding to do the position was a no brainer.
“They could have been making a porno and I would’ve said yes, to be perfectly honest,” gushed Jamil, an irreverent alum of NBC’s “The Good Place.” “And then I got to read the script [by Holly Hester] and thought it was so sweet and such a lovely, realistic take on Christmas.”
She appreciated that Tess managed to flee a lazy cliché: “the classic big-city bitch” who rolls into city with a serious perspective.
“We’ve seen that character a thousand times,” Jamil stated. “I wanted a genuinely likable character who was difficult for Kate to hate because she’s on her own journey. I refer to it as ‘Perimenopause: The Christmas Movie,’ because all of us are going through it, and she’s just an innocent woman looking for love, clearly having her own manic episode. Because why on Earth is she spending Christmas with this man she’s just met and barely knows? And I thought it was nice to see a character that had a bit more nuance than just being rude and snobby and superior.”
Chet (Pierson Fodé) catches the eye of Kate (Alicia Silverstone) at a tree farm. (Marni Grossman / Netflix)
Everett (Oliver Hudson) meets Tess (Jameela Jamil) after she falls on the ice. (Marni Grossman / Netflix)
In the meantime, Kate attracts the eye of a 28-year-old hunk named Chet (Fodé), whom she meets at a Christmas tree farm. He’s 6 toes 4, with an enormous coronary heart and dazzling smile. He fingers her a enterprise card that reads “I wear a lot of hats.” Amongst his aspect hustles: Santa-for-hire, “manny” and “exotic dancer.” At one level, Chet — mimicking Murray’s “Merry Gentlemen” striptease — tears off his tuxedo, and whereas baring his washboard abs, tries to save lots of the day when Kate’s Christmas tree catches fireplace in homage to “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.”
“I was completely naked,” stated Fodé, who beforehand starred within the hit Netflix rom-com “The Wrong Paris.” “I mean, I had sock garters on and a pair of candy-cane underwear, so you really can’t get much more naked than that without changing the movie title. I had an absolute blast.”
Filming the over-the-top scene, “I went in on that first take so hard and heavy that everybody screamed,” he recalled. “Literally, Alicia jumped and screamed and Melissa, Jameela started laughing immediately.”
Fodé and Jamil turned quick buddies on the snowy Toronto set, the place the previous stored a chilly plunge tub. “Everybody’s welcome to come train at the gym with me,” he stated. “This is my way of bonding with people.”
Jamil, calling herself a “very nonathletic person,” took him up on his provide, and “he personally trained me and he went so hard that I got a literal hernia. If you’ve never exercised before, don’t exercise with actual He-Man.”
Luckily, she was capable of proceed filming. “It was so awful but hilarious,” she stated of the incident. “Almost worth it for how funny it was. But he’s the best.”
“I went in on that first take so hard and heavy that everybody screamed,” Pierson Fodé recalled of his ab-baring scene. “Literally, Alicia jumped and screamed and Melissa, Jameela started laughing immediately.”
(Courtesy of Netflix)
Director Steve Carr, whose credit embody the comedies “Next Friday” and “Daddy Day Care,” inspired improvisation as he strived to recreate the magic of the season — simpler stated than completed. A variety of effort goes into designing the look of a movie like this. The unstated purpose is that the decor meets Mariah Carey’s requirements. To that finish, Paula Hart’s directions have been “very ‘Christmas in every shot,’” Carr recalled.
He grew pissed off at instances, like when a location scout discovered an “absolutely gorgeous” home that was proper subsequent door to an airport. One other time he suggested a prop man to consider a bacchanal whereas setting Kate’s breakfast desk. “I get there on the day [of the shoot],” Carr recalled, “and there’s eggs and sausage … Then I realized the guy didn’t know what ‘bacchanal’ meant.”
In hindsight, Carr loved “the chaos” of the job. He championed the concept of casting 18-year-old Wilder, who makes his movie debut reverse his dad regardless of some inner opposition.
“He’s not your typical teenage actor,” stated Hudson, who shares Wilder, 15-year-old son Bodhi and 12-year-old daughter Rio with spouse Erinn Bartlett. “This kid is real. He’s not jaded or tainted by anything yet. And to Netflix’s credit, they took a chance on him.”
Hudson received emotional watching Wilder recite a heartfelt speech within the movie’s finale.
“I just started to cry because I’m just looking at my son and I’ve been doing this for 25-plus years,” he stated. “I’m like, he’s in my world now and he’s doing this and he’s doing well, and he’s got this whole future ahead of him if he wants it.”
Silverstone handled Wilder as if he was her personal.
“It was sweet because he was 17 at the time, and my son [Bear] is 14, and I can’t bear the idea of a 17-year-old boy not wanting to be close to their mom,” she stated, recalling that Wilder “let me kiss him a lot and just dote on him as if he was still a baby.”
She and Kate share a typical ardour for environmental activism. (At one level, Kate explains her five-minute bathe rule to Tess, quipping, “No one takes showers for more than five minutes unless you’re a dick.”)
Jameela Jamil says she grew up “worshipping” Alicia Silverstone and Melissa Joan Hart within the ’90s, and deciding to affix “A Merry Little Ex-Mas” was a no brainer.
(Marni Grossman / Netflix)
“When you think about an environmentalist and an actor who embodies that, [Silverstone] is that through-and-through,” stated Melissa Joan Hart, who performs Kate’s sassy finest buddy April within the movie. “And then on top of that, I feel like the ‘nostalgia people’ sort of miss her and miss her face and feel comfortable with her.”
As for Hudson, the son of Goldie Hawn and brother to Kate Hudson, “a brick wall could fall in love with Oliver. Just dreamy eyes [on] that guy,” she noticed. “I mean, I had some incidents when I was twentysomething years old in a few nightclubs. Ran into Oliver and just kind of [started] blubbering and not making any sense. And you’re like, ‘Whoa, what is this charm this guy has?’”
Silverstone, for her half, stated she didn’t know Hudson earlier than his title got here up as her potential co-star. The 2 related on the cellphone for a chemistry learn when she was in Eire taking pictures the Acorn TV collection “Irish Blood.”
“It was clear that he was solid, that he had all the things I needed,” she stated.
Then, once they met in particular person, “we immediately became a family,” Hudson stated.
The actors crossed paths within the airport lounge and realized they have been on the identical flight to Toronto for the six-week shoot.
“We got to Canada and I took her passport with my son’s passport and went through customs, went through the immigration, went through the work-permit stuff, and I was handling it as if I was the husband,” he stated. “And we were laughing together, like, ‘Wow, we got off on the right foot, I guess, right here.’ So it was kind of immediate. We assumed the roles in real life.”
