The Holiday: 21 Behind-The-Scenes Secrets You Probably Never Knew About The Festive Rom-Com
Cameron Diaz and Jude Law in The Holiday
The Holiday may have received mixed reviews upon its release in 2006, but over the subsequent years it has firmly cemented itself as a modern Christmas classic.
A mainstay on late-night ITV2 and one of Netflix’s big hitters during the festive season, it’s hard to avoid the Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Jack Black-led Christmas rom-com each year – not that we’d want to, of course.
Sure, it’s packed with clichés and schmaltz, but there’s something about it that is always guaranteed to give us a festive glow (and no, it’s absolutely got nothing to do with Jude Law’s eyes, ok?).
No matter how many times you’ve seen The Holiday though, we’ll bet you didn’t know all these behind-the-scenes facts...
First of all, no, The Holiday’s Rose Cottage is not real
Rose Cottage in The Holiday
It might have looked like it had stood there for a hundred years, but in fact Iris’ Surrey cottage was purpose built for the film (but that seemingly hasn’t stopped people looking for it all the same...).
According to The Telegraph, the production team scoured the Surrey countryside to find the perfect cottage, but ended up building their own on a hill overlooking the town of Shere.
It only took the crew of The Holiday four days to build the house
However, set dressers spent two weeks making it look old and authentic.
Director Nancy Meyers told ComingSoon: “It was really an amazing process to build a cottage because the people that lived there couldn’t believe that people from Hollywood were coming and building this cottage, but they did a magnificent job. We built the road, the wall around it, put in the trees.”
The Rose Cottage interior scenes were actually shot on a soundstage in LA
The inside of the cottage was built on a sound stage
According to IMDB, the scenes inside the specially-built cottage were actually filmed thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, where sets were built on a soundstage.
Exterior scenes were shot in Godalming and Shere in Surrey
According to Surrey Live, Jude Law and Cameron Diaz filmed scenes on Church Street in Godalming, which was dressed with Christmas decorations and fake shops for the movie.
The pub in which Graham and Amanda meet again is also a real pub called The White Horse.
There was real snow in Surrey during the week of filming
Cameron Diaz said the snow was fully degradable
It reportedly snowed three times in Surrey during filming, but the crew had already hired a snow machine because they hadn’t counted on any of the white stuff falling.
According to Cameron Diaz in an interview with © HuffPost





















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