HOLIDAY HIJINKS

Ryan Reynolds, Will Ferrell and Octavia Spencer sing and dance in a spirited new spin on A Christmas Carol and share their Christmases past and present with Parade.

What happens when you cast three actors—with nearly 350 acting credits and one Oscar among them but little singing and dancing experience—in a musical? When it’s Will Ferrell, Octavia Spencer and Ryan Reynolds, you get the magic of Spirited, a Christmas comedy musical (debuting Nov. 18 on Apple TV+). The reimagining of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol is “from the ghosts’ perspective,” says Ferrell. He plays the ghost Present, who has his eye on Reynolds’ “unredeemable” character, a charismatic New York media consultant that Present calls “the perfect combination of Mussolini and [Ryan] Seacrest,” who will go to any lengths to manipulate the public. “[My character] doesn’t have the requisite scruples to understand that what he’s doing is wrong,” says Reynolds. And he has succeeded in part due to his righthand woman, Kimberly, played by Spencer, who is struggling with her boss’s ethics.

When director Sean Anders called Ferrell with the idea four years ago, the actor was intrigued. “Then [Sean] said, ‘Oh, and by the way, it’s a musical.’” Ferrell, 55, agreed, “but I got scared later when I saw the level of detail and all the stuff we would be doing.” Spencer, 52, says she found it “kind of stress-inducing, but extremely flattering” to hear the creators had written the part for her without even knowing if she could sing. “I can carry a tune from, like, here to the computer screen,” she tells Parade with a laugh. Reynolds, 46, remembers thinking that the chance “to work with Will was a pretty spectacular opportunity.”

And about that singing and dancing: Ferrell and Spencer won’t soon forget their first time singing together on camera. “There were lots of crew and people watching the scene, so it was a little intimidating,” says Ferrell. And when the director checked in and asked if there was anything his stars were worried about before the cameras rolled, Spencer said, “I’m worried about the singing! The singing!” But her stress dissipated after the first take. As for Ferrell, “All I had to do,” he says, “was to look into Octavia’s eyes, and we felt connected. It was very sweet and emotional.”

He had a different kind of experience with Reynolds in rehearsals for their dance segments. “We were both behind on the steps, just a little bit off, and Ryan commented that we looked like we were taking a dance class at a retirement community,” he recalls. Yeah, adds Reynolds, “like one of those exercise programs. Both Will and I got ‘the gigs,’ as we call it—the giggles—and it just never stopped. I mean, I don’t think we were able to catch our breath again for about an hour.”

Offscreen, Reynolds was relieved that “Will is not one of those people who’s terminally on,” he says. “He can kick into high gear,

but when you speak with him, he’s incredibly low-key.” They bonded over their shared experience as dads and both co-owning soccer teams. (Ferrell has a stake in Major League Soccer’s LAFC, while Reynolds co-owns the Welsh club Wrexham.) “It wasn’t just dueling comedy bits all day. We would do some of that,” he adds. But mostly, it was “just a couple of guys talking about what it’s like having a bunch of kids and raising them.”

GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST

Reynolds was raised in what he calls “a lower-middleclass-ish” family in Vancouver. He had three older brothers and a paper route, and every Christmas his family would bring up their “hideous” artificial tree from the basement, and the brothers would wait for their mom to make an amazing meal. But with a house full of boys, he says, “It always ended up as some kind of brawl on the front lawn.” In fact, one year Reynolds’ father called off everything. “My dad had a bit of a short fuse, and one year he canceled Christmas, which my brothers and I still fall over laughing about,” Reynolds tells Parade. “We thought, OK, are you canceling Christmas just in our house, or are you going to go around and let everybody know in the neighborhood? It was a very classic Jimbo—we called my dad Jimbo— move.” His father soon changed his mind, ending the Christmas crisis.

Now, Reynolds lives in a house full of females— with his wife of 10 years, actress Blake Lively, 35, and their three daughters, James, 7, Inez, 6, and

Betty, 3. And his brood is about to grow, as Lively is pregnant again. So far, “having a house full of girls is a huge upgrade,” he says. For Christmas, they put up a real tree, then go all-out with lights and decorations, most of them kept from his and Lively’s childhoods. “We’re both pretty sentimental with that stuff.”The gifts are personal too, like the painting Lively had done for Reynolds featuring him as a boy outside of his childhood home, which was bulldozed when he was 16. “That really put a hitch in my throat,” he says. “Got me right in the feels.”

Ferrell spent his Christmases growing up with one younger brother in the burbs of Irvine, Calif., and is also now a father of three. He lives with his wife of 22 years, Viveca Paulin, and their three sons, Magnus, 18, Mattias, 15, and Axel, 12. For Christmas, they’ve enjoyed celebrating the holiday in the spirit of his wife’s home country, Sweden, which includes traditions like giving a gift to each child that comes from

the Swedish Santa, Tomten.

Spencer was raised in Montgomery, Ala., the sixth of seven children. She remembers trying to stay awake to see Santa, the mayhem of wrapping paper ripping and her mother cooking a feast that filled their home with “the smells of cakes and cookies and cloves—you know, the pot with oranges and cloves and cinnamon.” She also recalls “one particular Christmas [when] Santa didn’t bring me what I asked for. I wanted an EasyBake Oven, and to this day, maybe that’s why I don’t cook!” she says with a laugh. But her biggest memory of the season is a heartbreaking one: After losing her father when she was 13, her mother passed away weeks before Christmas when Spencer was 18. It forced her “to become my own best advocate and confidently navigate the world.”

She and her siblings now gather in Alabama over the holidays with their children and grandchildren to cook and fill the house with those same traditional scents—and the memories of her mother. “Christmas was, and is, very magical for me.”

A NEW YEAR AHEAD

Next up for Spencer is the third season of her Apple TV+ drama series Truth Be Told, and “the role that I feel like I am destined to play at the highest level—that of producer,” she says. She’s also fine-tuning her work-life balance by doing what she loves: following true crime, reading law books, solving puzzles (“I’m a detective at heart,” she says) and enjoying the outdoors at her homes in Los Angeles, Alabama

and Mississippi, where she’s planted “trees and flowers and plants that will attract hummingbirds and butterflies. I just like to commune with nature.”

On Reynolds’ roster is the latest film in his Marvel franchise, Deadpool 3. But most of all, as he looks forward to life as a family of six, he’s squeezing out all the moments he can with his kids. “I try to take them to school, and pick them up as much as humanly possible,” he says. “I really love just spending time with my family.”