'A Boy Called Christmas': Why Kristen Wiig Joined Netflix's Imaginative Holiday Movie (Exclusive)

By John Connor Coulston

Netflix's Christmas movie A Boy Called Christmas has quite the cast, and Saturday Night Live alum Kristen Wiig is among the best performers of the bunch. Wiig gets to play a loud and scene-stealing character in Aunt Carlotta, the mean temporary guardian for lead character Nikolas (Henry Lawfull). We recently chatted with director and co-writer Gil Kenan about the picture and the decision to have the fabulous American actress join the primarily European ensemble. It started with Wiig's SNL work, which he loved.

"I'm a huge Kristen Wiig fan. I'm a massive SNL fan. SNL is basically how I learned comedy growing up," Kenan told PopCulture. "And I became so committed to getting Kristen to do this because I would watch her week after week on SNL conjure up complete characters without seams, characters that felt totally immersive, where they had stories that extended for miles beyond the sketch that they were in." 

When it came to A Boy Called Christmas (co-written by Ol Parker and based on Matt Haig's book of the same title), Kenan just knew he wanted to bring in the Wonder Woman 1984 star to play the minor antagonist. It turns out, Wiig herself was looking to portray a British character, so it was the perfect combination of desires.

"When it came time to bring Aunt Carlotta to life, I reached out to Kristen, sent her this script, and I was so lucky to realize, after talking to her that she is a huge fan of storytelling and of fairytale films and actually had been really looking to play a British character in a film that could conjure up this sort of fantastical world," Kenan revealed. "So it was a really good bit of timing and good luck for me, that she was open to making the leap to Aunt Carlotta, which is a character unlike anything she's ever played before."

If you wish to see Wiig in action, A Boy Called Christmas is streaming now on Netflix. To watch our full interview with Gil Kenan, head to the top of this article. To read it in text form, click here.

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