‘EXmas’: Robbie Amell & Leighton Meester Talk Baking Cookies, Messy Holidays & Sequel (VIDEO)
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What do you get when you pit one of TV’s top Queen B’s against a hunk known for being as funny as he is foine over the course of one wild Christmas? Well, we get a whole lot of merry and Santa’s naughty list gets two new entries!
In Freevee‘s fantastically offbeat comedy EXmas, Gossip Girl icon Leighton Meester and Upload‘s Robbie Amell bring their A-games as a quarrelsome former couple that is forced to spend the holidays. “It’s a great lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers situation,” producer Richard Alan Reid told TV Insider last month.
Paulina Stevens/Exmas Film Inc.
In the Yuletide tale, Los Angeles game designer Graham (Amell) receives the worst present ever when he surprises his family in Minnesota at Christmas: Thinking he’d choose work over them as usual, they’ve invited his ex-fiancée, Ali (Meester), to join their gathering. Worse yet, his parents and sister have been keeping in touch with Ali ever since they’re break-up. In fact, they may even be closer to her than to him anymore. So before the first batch of cookies is baked, the oven mitts are off and the coldest war is on. “We’ve packed the movie with all of those warm, cozy Christmassy things, and [then] a battle ensues amongst it all,” Reid says.
“We’re not nasty,” Amell laughingly denied when we spoke to him and his costar earlier this week. “It’s just competitive.” Case in point: Those aforementioned Christmas cookies, which ignite a contentious cook-off that not only ends poorly for several batches but also Meester’s shot at actually learning how to bake. “I got my chance on this set,” she recalls. “When it came time to try and decorate them, it looked so, so bad…like some sort of disaster.” Watch the full video interview above.
As Graham and Ali’s tit-for-tat war to win over the family escalates, so, too, do their emotions. Soon, they begin realize why their romance failed in the first place and maybe see the possibility of giving each other a second chance under the mistletoe — if they can survive the season, that is. “There’s a playfulness underneath all of it,” Reid notes, “even though they’re out to knock each other down.”
Exmas, Streaming Now, Freevee
