Richard Curtis has made a career out of weaponizing sentiment. Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually, About Time—his films turn emotion into currency and then have the decency to make you laugh while you’re paying. So it’s almost surprising that it took him this long to make an actual Christmas movie for kids.
“That Christmas,” now streaming on Netflix, began as three small children’s books Curtis wrote for his own kids. “A producer came to me and said, ‘Can we make one of them into a half-hour thing?’” he recalls. “Then Locksmith Animation said, ‘Go on—let’s make Love Actually for kids.’ Which, I think, is not quite right, but here we are.”
The film threads together several stories in a snow-blanketed seaside town where Christmas might be canceled. There’s family, friendship, loneliness, and one very confused Santa (voiced by Succession’s Brian Cox) who makes a colossal mistake. “He’s a realistic Santa,” Curtis says. “He doesn’t solve everything. He helps, and then it’s up to us humans to sort it all out again for the next 364 days.”
The idea of imperfection runs through the movie—especially in “The Empty Stocking,” Curtis’s favorite segment. “It’s about twins, one who’s meant to be naughty and one who’s meant to be nice,” he explains. “My brother had just had twins, and I’d watch them and think, ‘I hope it goes well for both of you.’” That small, almost invisible empathy—loving people for who they are, not who they’re supposed to be—has always been his secret superpower.
Curtis admits the move to animation was a “real journey of discovery.” He’s a writer who thinks in words, not visuals. “A lot of people imagine the scene when they’re writing,” he says. “I imagine the page.” Once the animators started sketching, though, the characters came alive in ways he couldn’t predict. “They do all the drawings first, and then we start talking about the voices—‘What about this one? That one?’—and suddenly it just clicks.”
The casting of Brian Cox as Santa, he says, was one of those magical fits. “You see the face, hear the voice, and it’s perfect.” He grins. “Santa with a Scottish snarl—that’s realism.”
Curtis even sneaks in a sly nod to his own canon: a moment where kids mock “the boring old Christmas movie” playing on TV. “I came into the edit expecting some black-and-white American film,” he says. “They’d inserted a clip of Love Actually. I thought, ‘Fair enough. Kids probably do think it’s the boring one now.’ It’s a good modern joke.”
And then there’s Ed Sheeran, who wrote a new song for the movie in three days. “The film’s set near where Ed lives,” Curtis says. “He’s got kids, I told him about it, showed him the scene, and he said, ‘I’ll do it.’ He delivered the song almost immediately.”
For a man whose career is synonymous with warm fuzzies, Curtis still talks about joy like it’s a practical skill. “Santa helps,” he says, “but he doesn’t fix everything. We still have to do the work.”
In the end, Richard Curtis gives us a Christmas movie about love, mistakes, and doing better next year.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
