Copyright Los Angeles Times
Oliver Hudson had the biggest crush on Cher Horowitz. When he was 19 years old, Hudson swooned for her after watching “Clueless,” the 1995 teen comedy that transformed Alicia Silverstone into an overnight sensation. The film was perfectly cast. Every actor oozed Main Character Energy, but the plot fully revolved around Silverstone’s Cher, the effervescent queen bee of Beverly Hills. Young women wanted to dress like Cher. Hudson wanted to date her. “Cher was my No. 1,” the actor, now 49, said in a recent interview. “I tried to find Cher in Los Angeles. Didn’t work out. But I just thought [Silverstone] was so adorable in that. And she’s an amazing actor even beyond that.” Hudson welcomed the opportunity to work with Silverstone in “A Merry Little Ex-Mas,” Netflix’s holiday movie premiering Wednesday. Before reading the script, however, he worried that the project would involve partial nudity. Dustin Milligan went shirtless for “Hot Frosty.” So did Chad Michael Murray in “The Merry Gentlemen.” The latter was “dancing with his shirt off and he’s all shredded,” Hudson mused. “I’m like, my gosh, I hope when I read this, this almost 50-year-old man doesn’t have to do anything of this sort. Because I do not want to dye my gray chest hair at this point in my life.” “A Merry Little Ex-Mas” spares Hudson the embarrassment. He and Silverstone play a divorcing couple who spend one last Christmas together as a family in the fictional small town of Winterlight, Vt. Hudson is Everett, a workaholic doctor, and Silverstone is Kate, a people-pleasing, eco-conscious handywoman who can fix anything except their marriage. The exes grew apart while raising their kids, Sienna (Emily Hall) and Gabe (Hudson’s real-life son, Wilder), with Kate expressing deep, justifiable resentment despite her cheery disposition. She regrets deciding years earlier to give up a promising career in Boston, where she was a green architect, to follow Everett to the countryside. There, he started a successful medical practice. Kate feels like she missed her chance to make a positive impact on the planet. The road not taken is gnawing at her soul. In many ways, this movie checks off all the boxes for a seasonal, feel-good flick. There are plenty of hijinks. There are twinkle-lights galore. There is real snow. But there is also real drama. The conflict between Kate and Everett? That’s neither cute nor gimmicky. That’s grown-up stuff. “I don’t know anyone who gets divorced lightly,” said Silverstone, who produced the dramedy alongside Melissa Joan Hart and her mother, Paula Hart. “I just don’t know anyone who goes, ‘I’m out. I’m bored. Let’s leave,’” especially if both parties “still love each other.” The narrative had to deliver a happy ending, but Silverstone wanted to make the pair “struggle and fight” for it. Otherwise, she said, “It seemed too silly that two people would just decide to break up and then realize they want to be together” within a tidy, 90-minute time span. Enter Jameela Jamil and Pierson Fodé, each a formidable, fleeting obstacle on the path toward marital reconciliation. With cheekbones as sharp as her tongue, Jamil exudes playful, feline glamour as Tess, a New Yorker who runs a global nonprofit and breezes into Everett’s life after falling on the ice and needing medical attention. He invites her to spend the holidays with him … and Kate. (Awkward.) For Jamil, who grew up “worshipping” Silverstone and Hart in the ’90s, deciding to do the role was a no-brainer. “They could have been making a porno and I would’ve said yes, to be perfectly honest,” gushed Jamil, an irreverent alum of NBC’s “The Good Place.” “And then I got to read the script [by Holly Hester] and thought it was so sweet and such a lovely, realistic take on Christmas.” She appreciated that Tess managed to escape a lazy cliché: “the classic big-city bitch” who rolls into town with a major attitude. “We’ve seen that character a thousand times,” Jamil said. “I wanted a genuinely likable character who was difficult for Kate to hate because she’s on her own journey. I refer to it as ‘Perimenopause: The Christmas Movie,’ because all of us are going through it, and she’s just an innocent woman looking for love, clearly having her own manic episode. Because why on Earth is she spending Christmas with this man she’s just met and barely knows? And I thought it was nice to see a character that had a bit more nuance than just being rude and snobby and superior.” Meanwhile, Kate attracts the attention of a 28-year-old hunk named Chet (Fodé), whom she meets at a Christmas tree farm. He is 6 feet 4, with a big heart and dazzling smile. He hands her a business card that reads “I wear a lot of hats.” Among his side hustles: Santa-for-hire, “manny” and “exotic dancer.” At one point, Chet — mimicking Murray’s “Merry Gentlemen” striptease — tears off his tuxedo, and while baring his washboard abs, tries to save the day when Kate’s Christmas tree catches fire in homage to “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” “I was completely naked,” said Fodé, who previously starred in the hit Netflix rom-com “The Wrong Paris.” “I mean, I had sock garters on and a pair of candy-cane underwear, so you really can’t get much more naked than that without changing the movie title. I had an absolute blast.” Filming the over-the-top scene, “I went in on that first take so hard and heavy that everybody screamed,” he recalled. “Literally, Alicia jumped and screamed and Melissa, Jameela started laughing immediately.” Fodé and Jamil became fast friends on the snowy Toronto set, where the former kept a cold plunge tub. “Everybody’s welcome to come train at the gym with me,” he said. “This is my way of bonding with people.” Jamil, calling herself a “very nonathletic person,” took him up on his offer, and “he personally trained me and he went so hard that I got a literal hernia. If you’ve never exercised before, don’t exercise with actual He-Man.” Fortunately, she was able to continue filming. “It was so awful but hilarious,” she said of the incident. “Almost worth it for how funny it was. But he’s the best.” Director Steve Carr, whose credits include the comedies “Next Friday” and “Daddy Day Care,” encouraged improvisation as he strived to recreate the magic of the season — easier said than done. A lot of effort goes into designing the look of a film like this. The unspoken goal is that the decor meets Mariah Carey’s standards. To that end, Paula Hart’s instructions were “very ‘Christmas in every shot,’” Carr recalled. He grew frustrated at times, like when a location scout found an “absolutely gorgeous” house that was right next door to an airport. Another time he advised a prop guy to think of a bacchanal while setting Kate’s breakfast table. “I get there on the day [of the shoot],” Carr recalled, “and there’s eggs and sausage … Then I realized the guy didn’t know what ‘bacchanal’ meant.” In hindsight, Carr enjoyed “the chaos” of the job. He championed the idea of casting 18-year-old Wilder, who makes his film debut opposite his dad despite some internal opposition. “He’s not your typical teenage actor,” said Hudson, who shares Wilder, 15-year-old son Bodhi and 12-year-old daughter Rio with wife Erinn Bartlett. “This kid is real. He’s not jaded or tainted by anything yet. And to Netflix’s credit, they took a chance on him.” Hudson got emotional watching Wilder recite a heartfelt speech in the film’s finale. “I just started to cry because I’m just looking at my son and I’ve been doing this for 25-plus years,” he said. “I’m like, he’s in my world now and he’s doing this and he’s doing well, and he’s got this whole future ahead of him if he wants it.” Silverstone treated Wilder as if he was her own. “It was sweet because he was 17 at the time, and my son [Bear] is 14, and I can’t bear the idea of a 17-year-old boy not wanting to be close to their mom,” she said, recalling that Wilder “let me kiss him a lot and just dote on him as if he was still a baby.” She and Kate share a common passion for environmental activism. (At one point, Kate explains her five-minute shower rule to Tess, quipping, “No one takes showers for more than five minutes unless you’re a dick.”) “When you think about an environmentalist and an actor who embodies that, [Silverstone] is that through-and-through,” said Melissa Joan Hart, who plays Kate’s sassy best friend April in the film. “And then on top of that, I feel like the ‘nostalgia people’ sort of miss her and miss her face and feel comfortable with her.” As for Hudson, the son of Goldie Hawn and brother to Kate Hudson, “a brick wall could fall in love with Oliver. Just dreamy eyes [on] that guy,” she observed. “I mean, I had some incidents when I was twentysomething years old in a few nightclubs. Ran into Oliver and just kind of [started] blubbering and not making any sense. And you’re like, ‘Whoa, what is this charm this guy has?’” Silverstone, for her part, said she didn’t know Hudson before his name came up as her potential co-star. The two connected on the phone for a chemistry read when she was in Ireland shooting the Acorn TV series “Irish Blood.” “It was clear that he was solid, that he had all the things I needed,” she said. Then, when they met in person, “we immediately became a family,” Hudson said. The actors crossed paths in the airport lounge and learned they were on the same flight to Toronto for the six-week shoot. “We got to Canada and I took her passport with my son’s passport and went through customs, went through the immigration, went through the work-permit stuff, and I was handling it as if I was the husband,” he said. “And we were laughing together, like, ‘Wow, we got off on the right foot, I guess, right here.’ So it was kind of immediate. We assumed the roles in real life.”
