Cameron Diaz has revealed she ran seven miles every day for a week while filming an infamous scene in The Holiday.
The 2006 romantic comedy starred Diaz and Kate Winslet as two strangers who swap houses for Christmas. Diaz, playing a Los Angeles movie trailer editor named Amanda, ends up spending the festive season in a tiny cottage in Surrey, where she falls in love with Winslet’s brother Graham (Jude Law), a handsome widower.
In one of the film’s climactic scenes, Amanda is in a taxi headed to the airport, but changes her mind about returning to LA and decides to spend New Year’s in Surrey with Graham. Upon making her choice, she leaps out of the taxi and runs across several snow-covered fields to reunite with him faster.
“I was running, like, seven miles a day in heels,” Diaz has now revealed in a new interview with Vulture. “That whole scene took a week to shoot. That wasn’t even in the script.”
Diaz explained that director Nancy Meyers seemed to only realise while about to film the scene that Amanda was already “halfway to the freaking airport” when she has her romantic epiphany. It meant that the shots of her running back to Graham’s cottage had to be particularly extensive.
“We shot like 10 shots of me running across 10 different fields,” Diaz remembered. “And I’m wearing that Valentino cashmere wool trench coat, a turtleneck cashmere sweater … and jeans, and my high-heeled boots. And we covered all the hillside with this fake snow, which was totally biodegradable.”
She continued: “It’s all these long shots, like really far away. I’m just this tiny little thing running in the distance … Literally, I was so fit by the end of that week. I ran probably seven miles a day in those heels. Through mud and hills. It was so hilarious.
“I was literally like, I’m not even complaining right now because my job is to run, and I’m okay with that … I think we shot it in over a week. And I just said to Nancy, ‘How did this go from four lines of description into a two-week scene of shooting?’ She was like, ‘I don’t know’.”
In 2019, Jack Black, who plays Winslet’s love interest in the film, briefly forgot he appeared in The Holiday when asked about the film on a red carpet.
The Independent has also ranked the film sixth in our list of the greatest Christmas films of all time.
