Emma Thompson sent Paul Feig Last Christmas script out of the blue

Emma Thompson surprised director Paul Feig by emailing him the script to their new movie Last Christmas completely out of the blue.

The Love Actually actress had been working on a script loosely inspired by Wham!’s hit song Last Christmas for about eight years, with the help of Bryony Kimmings, and once it was ready to be made, she fired a copy off to the Bridesmaids filmmaker without any prior warning with the hope he’d direct it.

“One day out of the blue, this email showed up in my inbox with the subject line 'The Script What I Wrote.’ She said, 'Hey, I just finished this script, and I think you might like it and we'd have a lot of fun doing it,’” he recalled to Empire. “I had no idea it existed. I had no idea she was working on it. I knew nothing about it. And suddenly this thing shows up.”

Thompson and Feig “hit it off” and became friends when he was attached to direct Late Night, which the British actress starred in earlier this year, but he had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts.

When he received her script a year and a half ago, the Ghostbusters filmmaker had a sinking feeling when he saw the title, because he’d already made an unsuccessful Christmas movie called Unaccompanied Minors back in 2006, but he was sold once he read it all the way through.

“By the time I was finished with it I was like, this isn't a Christmas movie – it's a story of one woman's journey to heal herself and her family. It's fun and funny, but it's also very emotional. It's got everything,” the 56-year-old gushed. “By the minute I closed the last page I was like, ‘I have to do this movie.’”

Last Christmas, starring Emilia Clarke and Henry Golding, hits cinemas in November.