In 2006, director Nancy Meyers created everyone's favorite holiday romantic comedy, The Holiday. Starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jack Black, and Jude Law, the film focuses on two women who swap homes for the holidays to escape their own realities.
The movie was a standout and is still a classic that's replayed every holiday season. It went on to earn over $200 million at the box office and created a cult following with viewers wanting to exchange homes with strangers to experience a new life. And while it's been almost 15 years since The Holiday came out and viewers have watched it again and again, there are still things some fans didn't know about the movie.
10 Cameron Diaz Hasn't Seen It In Years
In November of this year, Diaz was a guest on Danny Pellegrino's podcast, Everything Iconic. During the interview, Pellegrino praised The Holiday and how much it means to millions of fans during the holiday season. And when he asked Diaz if she also watched it during the holidays, she said "I actually haven’t seen it in 15 years.”
She went on to say that she signed on to the project because she was a "big fan" of Nancy Meyers but she hasn't seen the movie since it came out.
9 HomeExchange.com Is A Real Website
Amanda (Diaz) and Iris (Winslet) are in two different parts of the world and suffering in their personal lives. Amanda just kicked her boyfriend out of her house and Iris just found out her long-time love is engaged to another woman at work.
Iris is close to giving up on life when Amanda messaged her via HomeExchange.com. Iris put her cozy English cottage in a home exchange program where she and Amanda would swap houses. Funny enough, HomeExchange.com was a real website that was created in the '90s. Nancy Meyers is the one who showcased the site and idea in the movie.
8 The Interior Of Amanda's Home Was All Done On A Sound Stage
Amanda's Los Angeles mansion in The Holiday is what dreams are made of. It's massive, it's gated, and it's created in a Mederterainan style. It's stunning. As soon as Iris saw where she was staying for the holiday season, she ran around the entire house dancing and screaming uncontrollably.
Shockingly, the inside of the mansion was a soundstage! The exterior shots were of a real home in San Marino but when it came to shots done inside the home, production recreated an iconic home on a soundstage.
7 Rose's Cottage Was Also Built By Producers
In contrast to Amanda's mega-mansion, Iris lived in a beautiful and warm English cottage in the countryside. It had pale blue windows and doors and the inside was perfectly suited for a cozy weekend indoors. The cottage is everything a person like Amanda would want for some quiet time during the holidays.
However, this home was also created by production! In two weeks time, production built this entire home in the English countryside. Nancy Meyers said, "We built that wall and we put in those trees. It really was just an empty field." She continued saying “But it’s gone now because it was just a shell, it was torn down after filming."
6 Life Becomes Art
After meeting Diaz's character Amanda, it's clear from the start that she suffers from anxiety. Between the lousy boyfriend and a stressful job, Amanda had a lot on her plate.
In the opening scene, Amanda is seen kicking her boyfriend out of her house for cheating on her. In the middle of her freakout, she claims she has an esophageal spasm and starts rubbing her chest. Throughout the movie, a jar of Tums (or the alike) is next to her to settle herself. As it turns out, Nancy Meyers suffers from esophageal spasms and added that trait to Amanda because she likes adding parts of her own life to her movies.
5 Dustin Hoffman's Cameo
When Iris and Miles decide to celebrate with a night-in, they go to the movie store to rent a few DVDs. While they're roaming the DVD racks, Miles picks up The Graduate and starts talking about the music the movie produced. Funny enough, as he's talking about the film, Dustin Hoffman is also in the aisle browsing movies. Hoffman played Ben Braddock in the film, so it was a humorous shoutout.
Funny enough, Hoffman was never supposed to make a cameo. According to BuzzFeed, Hoffman was driving by the video store when he saw production. He pulled over to see what was going on and ended up knowing Nancey Meyers and staying around for a scene!
4 The Mistaken "Graze" Happened IRL
When Iris and Miles go out to eat, he reaches for the soy sauce and accidentally grazes her chest. To make things less awkward he makes a joke of it and called it an "accidental boob graze." Iris laughed it off and the two continued eating. However, this moment happened in real life between Jack Black and Nancy Meyers.
According to Coming Soon, Meyers said that Black accidentally grazed her and he immediately apologized for the "boob graze." "I just laughed so hard because men bump into women all the time like that and act like they didn’t do it, but he immediately said sorry about the boob graze so I wrote it into the next scene he did," Meyers said.
3 The Small Shoutout To Lindsay Lohan
Amanda was very successful at what she did and owned a company that produced movie trailers. After she breaks up with her boyfriend, so goes into her office and helps complete a movie trailer that starred Lindsay Lohan and James Franco. Considering the actors were playing themselves, fans were wondering if that was a real movie that was coming out.
However, it was just another cameo. Nancy Meyers knew Lohan from when she directed The Parent Trap and said that Lohan owed her for essentially making her a star. Luckily, Lohan did it happily.
2 Jude Law's Favorite Part
Any time Graham (Jude Law) was on camera with his two daughters, fans' hearts melted. Graham never told Amanda that he was a single dad because he didn't think anything would come out of the relationship. But when they became more serious, she caught him in a lie when she showed up at his house unexpectedly. He was a widow and wasn't ready for his daughters to meet the women he dated.
In real life, Law said his favorite scenes to film were when he was filming with his on-screen daughters, Olivia and Sophie.
1 Kate Winslet & Jude Law Weren't Sure They Were Funny Enough For A Rom-Com
With an all-star cast and characters written specifically for them, Diaz, Winslet, Law, and Black had a lot on their plate. And while Diaz and Black were used to doing comedies, it was a new world for Jude Law and Kate Winslet. Reel Rundown noted that Winslet and Law were nervous about doing a romantic comedy.
Winslet said "Jude and I would speak on the telephone a lot before we started shooting, 'Oh my god, they're going to fire us, they're going to recast, what if we don't make them laugh?'" But as fans would say, they knocked it out of the park.
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