'Happiest Season': Clea DuVall on Making an LGBTQ Christmas Rom-Com

Christmas movies — and holiday-centered rom-coms in particular — have become synonymous with the season. It’s a genre that’s an indelible part of the pop culture canon, and one that, until very recently, has been straight as the business end of a candy cane. But all that’s changing — and you can partially thank Clea DuVall. The actor-director’s Happiest Season is the first yuletide rom-com ever released by a major studio to center an LGBTQ love story, following Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis as a lesbian couple who get caught in the machinations of a high-pressure family Christmas. (It begins streaming on Hulu November 25th.)  “I’ve always been a huge fan of Christmas movies and rom-coms,” says DuVall, speaking via phone from Los Angeles. “But never seeing my experience represented always left me feeling like there was something missing, and I always hoped there would be a story that I could really connect with in a real way. And then as I got older and I started transitioning into writing and directing, I realized that I could make the movie that I always wanted to see.”   'The First Time' With Mary Steenburgen Phoebe Bridgers Covers Merle Haggard's 'If We Make It Thru December' And in the End The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time  As an actor, DuVall has been a big- and small-screen mainstay since the mid-Nineties, when she appeared in movies like The Faculty and Girl, Interrupted. She cemented herself as a queer cinematic icon when she starred opposite Natasha Lyonne in Jamie Babbit’s 1999 cult classic But I’m a Cheerleader. Since then, she’s been a regular television presence on shows like Veep, The Handmaid’s Tale, and American Horror Story. DuVall has moved into writing and directing in recent years, starting with 2016’s The Intervention.  Happiest Season centers on Abby (Stewart), a woman who’s on the verge of proposing to her girlfriend, Harper (Davis), when the latter invites her to spend Christmas with her family. It’s a big step: She’ll finally get to meet Harper’s mayoral candidate father (Victor Garber), her perfectionist mother (Mary Steenburgen), and her sisters Jane (Mary Holland, who also co-wrote the movie) and Sloane (Alison Brie). There is, however, a catch: It turns out that Harper has never come out to her relatives. All of which means Abby has to pretend to be tagging along as Harper’s roommate, with all the sleeping in the basement and getting iced out of family photos that the ruse entails. (At one point in the movie, she ends up hiding in a literal closet.)  When she was first conceiving the movie, DuVall used her own experiences as a jumping-off point to explore Abby’s side of the story. “I don’t have a traditional family, so I’ve spent the majority of my Christmases with other people’s families,” she explains. “And what it feels like to always be on the outside of a family is so specific. That’s what I think of a lot when I think about the holidays, and I think it’s a very relatable thing for queer peo