The first look of Paul Feig’s latest reveals a serious note to the holiday rom-com and Emma Thompson doing an accent.
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER – Christmas came early on Tuesday night when the Last Christmas trailer dropped online, revealing some new plot details to Paul Feig’s holiday-themed romantic comedy starring Emilia Clarke and Henry Golding.
The Paul Feig-directed project sees Clarke star as Kate, a disillusioned retail worker and self-described “mess” working as an elf at a year-round Christmas shop under the management of an exacting boss played by Michelle Yeoh. “I have nicknamed her ‘Lazy the Elf’ because she appears never to work,” Yeoh says loudly to a group of visitors to the shop in the trailer. When Clarke begins to bump into Tom (Henry Golding), she starts to confide in him — but starts to wonder about who he is when he disappears for short bouts.
The screenplay, penned by Emma Thompson, who also stars in the film as Clarke’s heavily Eastern-accented mother, sees Clarke play a somewhat meta role as a woman who nearly died due to a condition that isn’t revealed in the trailer. Clarke revealed that she suffered two life-threatening brain aneurysms over the course of her time starring in Game of Thrones in a story for the New Yorker in March. “I was really sick and I nearly died. I don’t tell people because they get weird, but I don’t think you’ll get weird,” Clarke says in the trailer. “I’m just scared all the time.”
Serenading viewers will be Clarke, who at one point in the trailer begins spreading Christmas cheer by singing “Deck the Halls” in front of a homeless shelter, and the late George Michael, whose music will accompany the film, named after his 1984 Wham! hit.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year, Feig said that he was attracted to Thompson’s Last Christmas screenplay because “it’s not necessarily about, ‘I’ve gotta find a husband, I’ve gotta find someone to complete my life,'” he says. “I much more like movies about people who have to straighten their own lives out, and then once they do, then the real prize at the end of the film is that you’ve actually fixed your life and put yourself in a better place.”
Last Christmas will release on Nov. 8.
