Richard Curtis returns to Christmas movies with Genie

Christmas is the most magical time of year — so why not add a genie to the mix?

That’s the notion at the heart of Genie, a new movie headed to Peacock on Nov. 22, starring Melissa McCarthy as the titular wish-granting entity. Directed by Sam Boyd (Love Life), Genie is written and produced by Richard Curtis, the screenwriter behind other Christmas favorites such as Love Actually and Bridget Jones’ Diary, as well as the films About Time, Notting Hill, and Four Weddings and a Funeral.

EW has your exclusive first look at the film’s trailer, as well as exclusive images of McCarthy modeling some truly dazzling looks, including a gold-yellow tinsel tree. Curtis is no stranger to iconic holiday ensembles, be it a papier-mâché lobster or a hideous reindeer jumper. He hopes Genie has the same sartorial effect.

“I hope the purple one will be the bestselling coat next Christmas,” Curtis says of McCarthy’s plaid coat in another exclusive image. “When I was young and sad, I always used to dream of the coat that Martine McCutcheon wears in Love Actually. I gave it twice to a girlfriend who wasn’t quite a girlfriend. So, I’ve always thought that a big old Christmas coat was a gorgeous thing. I do love Christmas costumes. I’ve got my fair share of Christmas jumpers, all of which increasingly don’t fit me as the years go by.”

In addition to Christmas costumes, Genie has plenty of the season’s (and Curtis’) signature heartwarming themes and magical happenings. McCarthy’s Flora has been trapped for more than 2,000 years inside an antique jewelry box after a minor misunderstanding with a sorcerer in 77 B.C.

Bernard Bottle (Paapa Essiedu) accidentally summons Flora while in the midst of a crisis. He’s been so busy with work that he’s lost sight of his marriage to Julie (Denée Benton) and obligations to his family. When he misses his daughter Eve’s (Jordyn McIntosh) birthday only 12 days before Christmas, Julie asks for a trial separation — only to then have Bernard’s tyrannical boss (Alan Cumming) fire him.

Despondent and alone, Bernard dusts off a jewelry box and unintentionally releases Flora, setting in motion a series of adventures as he fights to get his family back and discovers the magic of unexpected friendship.

The film was shot on location in New York City, which director Sam Boyd calls “the ultimate Christmas city.” “To me, New York instantly heightens every movie or show that takes place there,” he adds. “Imbuing every story with all the dreams and fantasies we bring to it — whether we’ve been lucky enough to spend time there or not.”

As the trailer makes evident, Genie has plenty of McCarthy’s signature brand of wacky humor mixed with Curtis’ abundance of heart. “I love improvisation, but of course it has to work within the parameters of the story you’re telling, and its tone,” Boyd says of melding the two styles. “The whole thing was really this huge collaboration, where we were working within a few different traditions, running parallel — the tradition of the Christmas movie, of the Richard Curtis movie, of the Melissa McCarthy movie — and the hope is that the final product is a glorious mash-up of them all.”

Watch the trailer below and read on for more from Curtis.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Christmas is often a key setting in your films. What makes it such a rich space for you to work in?

RICHARD CURTIS: I’ve been thinking about it more and more. Christmas has always been very happy for me, and I like it as a deadline. It’s the clearest deadline in the year. It was a month into writing Love Actually that I decided it should be set at Christmas. I thought, “What can force people into thinking they’ve got to get stuff done?” In Genie, it’s like a ticking clock. And then there are all sorts of tropes that you can take advantage of. It’s the most famous week of the year with the most things connected to it. So, it’s to do with stuff you can play with, as well as generally a time for joy and a very useful deadline.

Speaking of tropes, Christmas spirits changing people’s lives are a popular notion. Where did you get the idea of a genie being this force that comes into this man’s life?

The film is based on a shorter, very different film that I made 20 years ago. It’s the most fun time of year for someone to be miserable. It’s the most fun time of year for someone to help someone stop being miserable. But the genie thing, I’ve just always been intrigued by magic, and there’s a limit to how many magical things Father Christmas can do. He only works that one night a year. If I wanted magic at Christmas, a genie was a fun, new way of doing it.

Was A Christmas Carol in the back of your mind at all when conceiving of it?

I don’t know about that. Strangely, my very first encounter with entertainment was playing Tiny Tim in a production in the Philippines. I only had my one line, “God bless us, every one,” or whatever he says at the end. There’s got to be a bit of Christmas Carol in everyone. But I didn’t specifically refer to it in my head as I was writing this.

Do you ever write with actors in mind? Melissa McCarthy has this very specific energy as a comedian and a performer. Was that something that came after or with the script?

The answer is staggered because I wrote it and then we cast Melissa, and then I paid a lot of attention to it being Melissa and also worked with Melissa on the script. We went through every scene and said, “What might you do here? What could you say here?” Some of my favorite lines in the movie are now written by Mrs. Melissa McCarthy rather than by me, which means I like them even more. The truth is it was a written character and then in production and particularly pre-production, we bent it toward Melissa a lot.

Is that where the energy of this genie being a bit chaotic came from? Or was that always in the story?

There was an element of chaos because of the absolute fish out of water of it — washing your hair in a toilet because you don’t realize you are not meant to. So there was always a bit of chaos, but Melissa added to that element in it. The fun was always that she wasn’t a great big spiritual figure, but she was just a real person who’s been transported into a different world. She’s got these magical powers, but her brain is the brain of a woman from a different century rather than some spiritual figure with a moral purpose.

Most of your films are set in London or England more broadly. Why’d you choose New York this time?

The original was set in London, and since then, I spent a year in New York in 2015 and a year in L.A, in 2021. So I kind of feel I’ve got a tiny bit more experience of what it means to be in America. I do think New York is such a magical city and particularly magical around Christmas. For some reason or other, the Christmas moment I most remember is Michael Corleone going shopping with Diane Keaton when his dad gets shot [in The Godfather]. But I’ve watched lots of other films at Christmas there. It’s such a luxury to have Rockefeller Center and all the things that you connect with Christmas. And it’s fun for me to set something somewhere new.

Melissa has some really incredible outfits, including in some of these first-look photos we’re debuting. How much of that was something you pointed to in the script, or how much of that was totally on the designer?

I pointed to it in the script that we needed costumes, but it was absolutely between Melissa and the designer, what they came up with. Her big central purple coat is such a great extrapolation. She has this Scottish background — she’s meant to have come from 300 BC or something in Scotland. I love the fact that it’s kind of tartan, but then I also love the fact that she ends up wearing Zabar’s and Tom Cruise T-shirts and everything.

In another image where wearing a tinsel Christmas outfit with a star (above). What might be going on there?

Yes. There is a lovely sequence where they’re shopping in Bloomingdale’s and she basically doesn’t know what anything is. So, she has a hefty meal of sanitizer, which comes up in the trailer. She thinks it’s zesty; she eats as much of it as she can. She has no idea what a thong is but assumes that it’s some kind of Frisbee. In the decorations, we put a Christmas tree and she extrapolates that it could be a costume. It’s part of a joyful in-store montage. She only wears it for about 11 seconds.

The genie is, as you said, this fish out of water. She’s quite literally out of time having been locked away for centuries. What fascinates you so much about playing with time and space and memory?

Reality is stubborn. The older you get, the more you see that you are locked in certain paths and it’s hard to get out of them. In About Time, I love that time element to see whether or not we can rectify mistakes of the past. I’m fundamentally a pretty realistic writer in a way. But I do love it when there can be a trick. And I do love the idea of people discovering things anew and looking at something in a completely different way. I hope it’s not tactless to say that Elf is my favorite Christmas film, and that’s the perfect demonstration of that. It’s really fun for someone like me who’s done a lot of quite realistic love stories to be able to bounce out of that. The first thing I wrote was a sitcom in the U.K. called Blackadder, and that was set in four different historical periods. I love the magic of being able to make up a whole comedy world. It’s somewhere in my bones.

Since you love Elf so much, was that an inspiration for any of these New York at Christmas locations?

I tried not to think about it or watch it. The official answer is, definitely no. But who knows how much it’s wormed its way into my brain.

Do you see your films as existing in the same world? Might we hear “Christmas Is All Around” in Genie?

My daughter was reading Holly by Stephen King, and in the book they talk about Carrie as though Stephen King’s work even exists in Stephen King’s fictional world. I’ve often thought about that, and once I nearly did put a character from one film into another film, but the director I was working with said, “We’re not having that. I don’t want somebody else’s sloppy seconds.” I certainly don’t think of this film as existing in the same world, but I think of the English films as vaguely existing in the same universe.

Genie debuts Nov. 22 on Peacock.

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