2019’S MUST-SEE HOLIDAY MOVIES
We could publish an encyclopedia of holiday viewing pleasures, but we don’t have the space. Instead, we’ve collected a selection of our favorites. Go to Parade.com/holidaymovies for all of 2019’s new releases!
A nna Kendrick recently crossed an item off her bucket list. “I’ve always wanted to be in a Christmas movie,” she says. “I love Christmas movies. I love the Christmas season. I love Christmas decorations. I know everybody complains that the season starts earlier and earlier, but I’m secretly in a corner thinking it’s awesome.” The actress, 34, spreads that joy big-time in the comedy movie
Noelle, which premieres Nov. 12 on the new Disney+ streaming service. (Go to disneyplus.com to sign up.) She plays the “halfbossy, half-sweetheart” title character, who happens to be the daughter of newly retired Santa Claus. Her brother Nick (Bill Hader of Barry fame) is next in line to take the job in the North Pole but goes missing. It’s up to Noelle to find him and save the holiday. “Lessons are learned and feelings are felt, and it’s warm and fuzzy with laughter along the way,” she says. “It’s all so darling, I could just scream.”
But not sing—at least not this time. “There’s no bursting into song,” says Kendrick, who was nominated for a Tony at age 12 for the musical High Society and showed off her vocals in all three Pitch Perfect films. “It still feels like a musical because it’s so bright and happy.”
THE MAINE THING
For Kendrick, Christmas has always been the most wonderful time of the year. Growing up in Portland, Maine, she felt like she was living in a winter postcard. “It was like a Thomas Kinkade painting!” she says. Her dad, William, a history teacher, moonlighted as the resident Santa Claus at the local Christmas fair every year. Yes, his white beard was real.
The Kendrick family—which also includes her mom, Janice, an accountant, and her older brother, Michael—attended midnight mass every year. As a member of her high-school choir, “We would go downtown in the Old Port and dress in Victorian garb and carol,” she says. Her favorite song: the standard “Good King Wenceslas,” because “it can be really sweet and sad and cheery and upbeat.”
She remains fiercely proud of her hometown roots more than a decade after moving cross-country to Los Angeles. She still can’t believe her Hollywood aspirations became a reality. (Indeed, she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar at age 24 for her role alongside George Clooney in the movie Up in the
Air.) “It does blow my mind that I’m doing well,” she says. “All I really wanted to do was become a working actor.” Now she’s so busy, she jokes, that her Christmas wish is to squeeze in more sleep in 2020.