John C. Reilly, the Oscar-nominated actor whose film credits seem to include at least one movie on any person’s list of all-time favorites, is in a good mood when we connect by phone two days before Thanksgiving, and says he’s about to buy his turkey.
“I’m the rotisserie king of Thanksgiving,” he explains. “If you rotisserie a turkey, it goes well every time. It sort of self-bastes — it’s a very good cooking method for big turkeys.”
It’s not hard, after a few minutes of talking about the holiday spirit, to imagine Reilly with his own version of Martha Stewart Living magazine, full of tips like these. But for the time being, you can get your dose of his Christmas cheer with An Almost Christmas Story, a beautiful short film now streaming on Disney+, which features Reilly as a narrator and troubadour, performing two original songs as well as two traditional tunes. The tale, brought to life with charming stop-motion animation, follows a little owl named Moon as he is accidentally whisked to New York in the forest pine that will serve as the Christmas tree for Rockefeller Plaza. There, he meets a lost girl named Luna — and the pair must work together to make it back to their respective homes.
“As soon as I saw that it was going to be stop-motion animation and that it was around Christmas, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is my moment to be Burl Ives!’” Reilly says, referring to the actor and musician who voiced Sam the Snowman, narrator of the classic 1964 TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Directed by David Lowery from a story by Jack Thorne and Alfonso Cuarón, An Almost Christmas Story is less about the religious significance of the holiday — which, after all, the owl Moon has never heard of — than offering brightness and warmth in winter.
“To me, it’s really almost like a pagan holiday or a secular holiday, because people have so many different faiths and so many different backgrounds, and people who are not religious, all celebrate Christmas,” Reilly says. “Well, what is it about this time of year? You realize it’s just an eternal human thing to want to have hope in the darkness. What is the little candle that you light that gets you through? These rituals, and these holidays, and giving gifts to people, and showing love and appreciation to the people in your life.” The music from the film, which Reilly helped curate, matches this cozy and inclusive approach to the season — particularly when he sings the unexpected tune “Ar Fol Lol La Lo,” a mostly nonsense song with Scots Gaelic origins that Reilly learned from the Irish folk band the Clancy Brothers.
In helping to craft An Almost Christmas Story, Reilly of course considered his own favorite holiday films and why they remain such comforts. They’re united by a certain soulfulness, and, more often than not, a musical element that brings it out. “I used to go caroling and stuff when I was a kid,” recalls Reilly, who this year staged Los Angeles performances of his vaudeville stage act called Mister Romantic, which he plans to take on the road, eventually releasing it as a film and an album. Here, he takes us through six films he loves to revisit during the most wonderful time of the year.
Naturally, this is Reilly’s first nod. “It’s funny, because I think it almost seems like they may have made it as kind of disposable TV content,” he says, “and it’s turned into this canon [film] for Christmas. I learned so much music from Burl Ives that I was like, ‘Wow, this is my moment to pass along some folk music to someone else.’”
“This is an animated film that I really love,” Reilly says. The short 1982 film features “almost no dialogue,” he explains. “It’s about this flying snowman who travels with this kid, takes him up to the North Pole and shows him what happens at Christmas when all the snowmen get together. It’s got this really beautiful vocal classical piece of music that goes through it. That’s a really beautiful one.”
Reilly doesn’t limit his holiday viewing to strictly on-topic films. “I’m sort of dating myself here, but when I was a kid, you couldn’t see The Wizard of Oz but once a year,” he says. “It would come on TV around Thanksgiving or around Christmas. So it just had this feeling of this ritual, and something so timeless about that movie. And there’s something about the holidays — you want the good stuff, you know? You want stuff that’s that seems like it’s been around forever, too.” Reilly says he always tries to see The Wizard of Oz around Christmastime, and that while he hasn’t had a chance to catch Wicked yet, he’s looking forward to it.
Another non-traditional holiday pick? The Harry Potter movies, specifically this third installment, which just so happens to be directed by Cuarón. “For some reason I just get sucked right back into those,” Reilly says of the Potter series. It makes a certain amount of sense: colorful scarves, magic in the air, snow-covered castles and warm butterbeer. We’ll allow it!
Reilly can’t resist naming one all-time Christmas classic. “It’s hard to get away from that one, because it’s just so right on the money, and it is such a brilliant movie,” he says. His experience with the film, however, is an unusual one: He originally saw It Happened One Christmas, a gender-swapped 1977 TV-movie adaptation starring actress Marlo Thomas, who plays a Mary Bailey as opposed to the George Bailey of the original. “I was like, ‘Wow, what a great story this is,’” Reilly says. “I thought It’s a Wonderful Life was a Marlo Thomas TV-movie when it first came out. Later on, I discovered the Jimmy Stewart [version], because when I was a little kid, It’s a Wonderful Life wasn’t as popular as it is now. I think it kind of grew into this Christmas favorite.”
For a last nostalgic selection, Reilly names something far more obscure. “There’s one other thing that, when I was growing up in Chicago, we would all really look forward to seeing,” he says. “It’s just a little black-and-white short film called Hardrock, Coco and Joe. It’s about these three elves and their efforts to help Santa get ready. Gem of a film that we just loved when I was a kid. ‘I’m Hardrock, I’m Coco, I’m Joe,’” he sings, adding, “Joe would always be, like, the butt of the joke.”
With its musical flair and genuine heart, An Almost Christmas Story lives up to the influences that Reilly brought to it. The short and his vaudeville act Mister Romantic have the similar goals of “generating empathy in people and having people think about love,” the actor explains. “I could not have predicted what kind of world we’d be going into with this film, but it turns out that it’s a real good moment to talk about taking care of the vulnerable and giving people a little bit of hope for the future.”
And if you’re looking for the true meaning of Christmas, you can hardly do better than that.
From Rolling Stone US
