Christmas movie magic shattered: Jude Law reveals the secret fans didn’t want to hear - “Just burst the bubble, sorry”

While Nancy Meyers had long dreamed of making a Christmas-themed romantic comedy, that wasn’t her intention with ’The Holiday’ which hits theaters just a couple of weeks before Christmas 2006.

Featuring a star-studded cast, with Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Jack Black, ’The Holiday’ focuses on the love lives of two professional women, whose relationships have both recently ended. Disenchanted, their worlds collide when Amanda (Cameron Diaz) discovers Iris’ cottage listed on a home swap website.

From Los Angeles to Surrey

Both in need of some escapism and forget about their heartbreak, the two women agree to switch homes for a couple of weeks - despite living on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Amanda moves into Iris’ cottage in Surrey and Iris’ large pad in LA.

However, life in a quiet English village, far away from the fast pace of LA wasn’t quite what Amanda expected so she decides to return home early. She changes her mind after Iris’ brother Graham, (played by Jude Law) who knew nothing of the exchange, popped by expecting to crash out at his sister’s after a night on the tiles...

In search of the perfect English country cottage

Director Nancy Meyers had stumbled across a home exchange website by chance. She had no idea that such initiatives existed and became more intrigued after seeing a chocolate-box cottage in the listing. That was the basis for the storyline for ’The Holiday’. “I had no idea such a site even existed, and I was dazzled by the beauty of the homes people were swapping. I thought it was a great way to tell the story of two women determined to leave the past behind”, she explains in her production notes.

Meyers drew up a storyboard, secured a film deal, then began the search for shooting locations. A quaint cottage she had seen in Vogue magazine was perfect. Her production team tracked it down only to find it was unavailable.

Iris’ country cottage is perhaps the most iconic setting in ’The Holiday’ and many fans of the movie have tried to locate it. Jude Law has some bad news for them - as he explained to the BBC’s Zoe Ball.

“That cottage doesn’t exist,” he told Zoe and fellow guest Kerry Godliman. “So the director, she’s a bit of a perfectionist. Toured that whole area, and didn’t quite find the chocolate-box cottage she was looking for so she just hired a field, drew it and had someone build it. But here’s the funny thing - if you watch it, we were shooting in the winter here, and every time I’d go in that door, we’d cut and we shot the interiors in LA... Just burst the bubble, sorry!"

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