25 things you didn’t know about your favorite rom-coms

The Holiday: A fair swap after all

Much like Love Actually, The Holiday is a heartwarming holiday romantic comedy about two women who swap houses (and lives) for Christmas. Iris (Kate Winslet) is a wedding columnist at a local newspaper in England with serious love problems. Amanda (Cameron Diaz) is a movie trailer maker in Los Angeles, and she’s just dumped her cheating boyfriend.

When Amanda decides to escape for the holidays, she finds Iris’ house on a house swap website and decides to take a leap. Iris heads to Los Angeles to stay in Amanda’s mansion, and Amanda heads to a cozy cottage in the English countryside.

One of the gags of the movie is that Iris wins big when she gets to go to LA and stay in some lavish house, while Amanda is stuck in some dumpy little snowy shack. Amanda’s house is massive, with a pool and and insane movie collection and viewing room. Iris’ is a small cottage with a bad kitchen and no closet space.

However, in real life, that’s far from the truth.

Even though the cottage seems basic, an old-fashioned cottage in a good area in the UK could probably go for three quarters of a million pounds or more. Amanda isn’t quite slumming it in England!

Speaking of Amanda’s mansion, it wasn’t really what it seemed. All of the interior shots of her home were built on a sound stage, not inside the actual house. These sets cost approximately $1 million, without a roof, plumbing, heating or electricity.

Wow, we’d rather have Iris’s cottage for that price!