Reel News: Fans Finally Get A Peek At Poppy and Alex In Netflix’s People We Meet On Vacation Adaptation
Emily Henry lovers rise! Fans are finally getting the romantic comedy writer’s beloved universe’s first screen adaptation: People We Meet on Vacation. The story follows Poppy, an optimistic travel writer who takes her best friend Alex on trips every summer, until one summer goes horribly wrong. She and Alex’s friendship blows up, but Poppy convinces her long-lost friend to go on one last summer trip to try to rebuild what they lost. With one week to fix everything, can Poppy get her best friend back?
The story is a classic friendship-to-lovers trope, with a splash of right person, wrong time. The book takes readers through more than a decade of summers, learning how rich and meaningful Alex and Poppy’s friendship is, and leaves you wanting to shake them and tell them to get together already! Henry’s romantic comedy world has become a staple in the romance genre, with People We Meet on Vacation having sold over a million copies since its publication in 2021. When Netflix announced the beloved book would be made into a film, fans were itching to know who would play Poppy and Alex.
Emily Bader stole hearts when she portrayed Lady Jean Grey in the short-lived (will never forgive the television gods for this cancellation) My Lady Jane series on Prime Video. The actress learned she’d play the infectiously happy Poppy in an adorable video Netflix posted in 2024, where her joyous energy shone through the video call. She was joined by director Brett Haley, Emily Henry, and Tom Blyth, who will play the pessimistic, yet secretly goofy, Alex.
Blyth rose to heartthrob status when he portrayed a young Coriolanus Snow in the Hunger Games prequel film, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. In promotional clips, and the photos fans have gotten, it’s clear Bader and Blyth will have swoon-worthy chemistry.
With nearly all of Henry’s books set to get film and television adaptations, the pressure to make the first one as magical as the books is definitely looming over the film. However, Henry places complete trust in Blyth and Bader. In the 2024 casting post, she told the actors “I have been kind of an anxious wreck about who would play these characters, and I just truly could not feel anymore confident that my readers and then so many more people who don’t even know about the book are going to completely, completely fall in love with Poppy and Alex, with you guys playing them.”
People We Meet on Vacation is coming to Netflix on January 26.
