The holidays came early with the release of Clea DuVall's queer-themed rom-com Happiest Season on Hulu over the Thanksgiving weekend. And the movie that stars Kristen Stewart as Abby and Mackenzie Davis as Harper, a couple who hit some snags when they go home to Harper's perfectionist family for the holidays, broke records on the streaming site in its first weekend.
It was "the most-watched film across all acquired and Hulu Original films during its opening weekend and generated the highest engagement with Hulu subscribers. Happiest Season secured the most hours amongst all Hulu Original films through its first weekend on the service," according to a release.
Now Hulu has released a featurette with DuVall and cast members Stewart, Davis, Dan Levy, Mary Holland (who cowrote the script with DuVall), Alison Brie, Mary Steenburgen, and Victor Garber sharing their experiences making the movie.
"This movie is made with a tremendous amount of love and heart," DuVall says of the film.
In the featurette, Stewart, who is one of The Advocate's current cover stars along with DuVall and Davis, addresses the coming-out storyline in a movie at this juncture.
"Happiest Season is a really heartwarming Christmas story about two women who are very much in love," Stewart says. "I think any gay woman over the age of 20 years old right now has probably dealt with not being able to be honest about who you are or being with someone who's not quite ready to be honest about who they are."
In her cover interview with The Advocate, Stewart, who's been in the public eye since she was a child, spoke candidly about how a lack of queer visibility in pop culture and media affected her coming into herself and how she was impacted by stigma.
"I was really comfortably functioning conventionally. Only in retrospect [do I] see that if I had just had my eyes opened to more ambiguity in a way that wasn't weird, I probably would've had more crushes on girls when I was little. I just genuinely didn't.
"I know now that [I was affected by] the world opening up for me a little bit more as I got older. The more artists that I met, people that I met, friends that I had, and different examples of things and ways to love and know each other presented themselves, I was like, 'I can do that.'
"I didn't want to be called a lesbo. And I didn't want to be that weird, gross, 'dykey' girl. And that sucks. It's terrible. But I was always really attracted to, sort of, weirdness and otherness. I would've loved to have had more examples of that not being ridiculed and a point of scrutiny. Yeah, that would've been awesome," Stewart said.
Read the full Advocate interview here. And watch the Happiest Season featurette below.
