If the Mr Napkin Head scene in The Holiday brings up happy, festive memories for you, you've in part got Miffy Englefield to thank for that. Now 21, she played Sophie, one of Graham aka Jude Law's delighted daughters in the scene, when she was just six.
"[Reenacting that moment] is one of the things my friends love to do to embarrass me now," Miffy told Cosmopolitan UK. "My friends are always teasing me about being in the film as a little girl, even all these years later."
Miffy started acting lessons, paid for by her grandparents when she was five. "We hoped I’d get some adverts or something." Instead, she landed a role in a then-unnamed Christmas film and found herself on a plane to LA ready to start filming – even through her character, Sophie, lived in a picture-perfect snowy village in Surrey.
"It was strange filming a Christmas film in the middle of a blazing hot summer in LA," she laughs. "My dad and I never went travelling, so to suddenly find myself on a plane to LA was surreal."
The first scene she filmed was actually the very last one, where all the characters are together for the first time at the New Year’s Eve party. Everyone was there: Jude Law, Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet. At six, Miffy didn’t know who any of them – apart from Jack Black because of School of Rock – were. “I remember walking onto set that first day and Jude Law was in one corner, Kate [Winslet] was learning her lines in the other."
It sounds like the most intimidating first day of work ever but, luckily, everyone was lovely. She says filming the Mr Napkin Head scene, which was only part scripted, was one of the funniest moments. "Every time we filmed it, it was a bit different – we were genuinely laughing, we found it really, really funny. We laughed a lot on set," she recalls.
"I remember one time we were filming the scene in the tent when Amanda first meets Sophie and Olivia. We were all lying down and going through some of the dialogue and then it came to Jude’s turn, we all looked at him and realised he’d gone to sleep! They’d been up really late the night before filming and he just dozed off."
Finishing filming was sad, but on their last day, Jude and Cameron bought her and Emma Pritchard [who played on screen sister Olivia] jackets with their names on and ‘The Holiday’ on the back.
That is one excellent Christmas present!
You can watch The Holiday on Netflix now
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