I’ve been home for the holidays for about a week, and in that time, my mom and I have managed to screen an impressive number of Christmas movies while she cooks meals and I scroll frantically through dating apps. Granted, we sometimes have to watch them in installments, but we’ve already taken down Love Actually and at least three different Hallmark holiday films featuring busy, tight-bunned female executives who move to small towns and are thrown off-course by the laid-back charms of burly local hunks.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my extreme holiday-movie enrichment time, however, it’s that there’s nothing all that fun about a pleasant, pretty, checks-all-the-boxes protagonist; the people I really want to watch onscreen at Christmastime are the messy, nightmarish, selfish, and/or generally maladjusted holiday-movie villains. So, without further ado, please find a roundup of my very favorite ones below:
Mark in Love Actually (2003)
There’s a lot of hatred out there for the devilishly hot assistant girlie who steals Alan Rickman away from Emma Thompson, but you know what? A) He’s the one who made marriage vows, not her, and B) At least she was chic!
To me, the true villain of this Christmas classic will always be Mark, the cucked bro of a newly married man who is super fucking mean to Keira Knightley in order to cover up his sad crush on her (are you four?) and then stages a really cringe and emotional-affair-vibes card presentation to prove his love while she’s at home with her husband on Christmas Eve. How have we possibly socialized that scene as romantic? “Enough now,” indeed!
Meredith Morton in The Family Stone (2005)
A compelling case was recently made by writer Rose Dommu that Rachel McAdams is the true villain of this movie, but for me, it will always be Sarah Jessica Parker’s Meredith—partly because McAdams’s home-for-the-holidays drip is so good, and partly because Meredith is so boring and weird and toxic for basically the entire movie… at least until she gets drunk and high and drops the strata and starts having some good, old-fashioned, dysfunctional-family Christmas fun. Like…why are your only topics of conversation your work trips to Hong Kong and your casual homophobia, queen?
Jasper Bloom in The Holiday (2006)
Hell is not hot enough for any ex-boyfriend (or even ex-situationship) who continues to extract emotional support from a woman after he’s no longer showing romantic interest in her—and that’s exactly Jasper’s vibe. Leave Kate Winslet the hell alone, you weirdly-permed nightmare! (Side note: Remember when she sort of tries to kill herself over this man, albeit very briefly, and it’s framed as a joke? Holiday rom-coms are weird.)
Harge Aird in Carol (2015)
God forbid two closeted lesbians have a little fun (okay, emotionally tortured and clandestine fun, but still) without some man coming along to ruin it! The titular Carol’s estranged husband, Harge Aird, using a private investigator to try to get custody of their daughter, Rindy, if Carol continues to lez out all over the country is so pathetic, I can’t even process it. I lowkey hate this man, even if he is played by Coach Taylor. (Also, why is your name Harge?)
Harper in Happiest Season (2020)
Okay, we obviously needed at least one villainous lesbian on this list, and thanks to Clea DuVall, we have one in the form of Harper, Mackenzie Davis’s dithering and wildly insensitive closeted, wannabe-perfect daughter, who basically tricks her girlfriend Abby (Kristen Stewart!) into coming home to spend Christmas with her family and then lets it slip that…they don’t know she’s gay. No, coming out isn’t an imperative, but maybe don’t be a huge asshole to your girlfriend and straight-up deny that you love her until the last possible second? Abby should have defected to the Aubrey Plaza camp early on, IMO.
