The 'exciting and terrifying' task of adapting 'People We Meet on Vacation'

Adapting a beloved best-seller for the screen is no day at the beach.

“I was kind of terrified, definitely,” Emily Bader confesses alongside Tom Blyth, who swaps his English accent to play the actress’ perfect (American) complement in “People We Meet on Vacation.” Netflix’s adaptation of Emily Henry's 2021 romance novel centers on the years-long, thus-far platonic friendship between Type B travel writer Poppy (Bader) and tightly wound teacher Alex (Blyth), who vacation together each summer. He grounds her and she pushes him outside his comfort zone. The film arrives Jan. 9, much to the delight of TikTok's bibliophile subsect BookTok.

“emily henry thank you for saving the romcom genre,” one TikTok user commented on a trailer shared in September. “THEY ARE EXACTLY HOW I PICTURED MY POPPY AND ALEX,” another declared with a crying emoji.

Bader, 29, says she strived to do "justice" to the source material. “I'm such a fangirl with so many things, so I know how important it can be to see the thing that you love so much brought to life in this way. And you just want to make them happy − also, show them new things, get to explore the world in a different way.”

Blyth, 30, also navigated treacherous adaptation waters to play Coriolanus Snow in 2023’s high-profile “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.”

“It's only terrifying when you fixate too much on trying to live up to expectations,” he says. “But when you let that go and you just stay with your scene partner − and Emily gives so much. So the minute I got on set, any fears I had of living up to expectations went out the window because I was like, ‘Oh, this is just another great scene partner that I can look at and they'll give me everything I need. And if I stay with them, I'm in safe hands.’”

Blyth also valued author Henry as a resource when she visited the set.

“Anytime we felt a little bit lost, we just looked at Emily (Henry) and (said), ‘Is this right?’” Blyth says. “She was so supportive of us, from the get-go.”

Bader agrees. “The best advice she really could have given us for this whole project was: ‘Be free. I have faith in both of you and what we're doing here. And just have fun with it.’ That blessing from her, if you will, gave us that freedom to just have fun with the entire project.”

But there were two scenes from the book that the actors hoped to successfully replicate on-screen. First, a meet-cute inspired by the Oscar-nominated classic “When Harry Met Sally…”, in which Alex and Poppy first meet and bond while road-tripping from college to their shared hometown of Linfield, Ohio.

“To me, it was the trickiest one, but also one of the most important ones,” Blyth says, “because it was very much written specifically as an homage to kind of all the best rom-coms in a way, and so there was this double-pressure there of honoring the book and also honoring the films that it’s referencing.

“That was a lot of pressure. But actually it ended up being such a cool thing to be inside those scenes and go, ‘Oh wow, we're doing the ‘When Harry Met Sally...’ thing.’ But we’re doing it fresh, with two different characters.”

The pair were especially determined to nail what's arguably the most crucial and iconic moment in Poppy and Alex's story.

“There's this scene between Poppy and Alex in the rain,” Bader says vaguely, careful to avoid any spoilers, “and you can't skimp on that in a movie like this. So we really wanted to make sure that that was as satisfying, hopefully, in this way as it is when you read it on the page.”