STAR-CROSSED
Asa Butterfield spends Christmas in the wrong house in this festive romcom.
What’s the opposite of a meet-cute? Whatever it is sees new couple James (Asa Butterfield) and Hayley (Cora Kirk) spending their first Christmas apart – each hoping to surprise the other with a spontaneous visit and both ending up stranded at their in-laws’ house alone.
“It’s sort of a backwards romcom,” laughs director Jim O’Hanlon, making his feature debut after honing his comedy chops on the likes of TV’s Catastrophe and Trying. “Tone is the hardest thing to nail on a Christmas film. You want it to be warm and you want it to be emotional and you want it to be funny, but it also needs to feel real. I wanted it to pretty much be the opposite of whatever they run on those 24/7 Christmas movie channels…”
As much a social farce as a festive family comedy, Your Christmas Or Mine? does everything it can to widen the gaps that threaten most new relationships. For upper-crust southerner James, that means spending the holidays on a Macclesfield estate with in-laws Daniel Mays and Angela Griffin (and being mugged by Hayley’s baby twin brothers, “Ant and
Dec”). For working-class northerner Hayley, it means dodging shotgun shells on a country estate run by Alex Jennings’ pompous lord of the manor.
“It was challenging, trying to make a romcom where the two lead characters are in completely different places most of the time,” says O’Hanlon. “But not as much as shooting a film in the middle of summer that’s set during a snowstorm!” Piping in tons of fake snow to make August look chilly, the cast sweated through woolly jumpers while the crew dealt with lens glare, microphone issues and constant annoying footprints.
“It was a huge problem,” laughs O’Hanlon. “But it really was worth it in the end, I think. I hope my great-grandchildren are watching this film in 100 years at Christmas. This is about people from different sides of the tracks in almost every way you could imagine, so I do genuinely think there’s something here for everyone.”
YOUR CHRISTMAS OR MINE? STREAMS ON PRIME VIDEO FROM 2 DECEMBER.