“Stripping isn’t typically the first thing we think of when we think of Christmas,” says Chad Michael Murray. Netflix, Murray, and his abs are hoping there’s some wiggle room in your Christmas expectations with the new movie “The Merry Gentlemen,” out Nov. 20 — and yes, it’s a bit of a stripper Christmas movie. The movie follows a dancer (Britt Robertson) who gets cut from her company in the big city and returns home to her small town, only to find that her parents’ local performing arts venue is at risk of being closed. Thus begins her plan to save the business with the help of the hunky town carpenter and an amateur all-male holiday dance show.
When Netflix reached out to Murray about “The Merry Gentlemen,” one of their first questions was about his dance background.
“It’s not that I don’t dance — I do dance, at home and at weddings,” Murray says from a press suite inside The Plaza Hotel. But the dancing was exactly what drew him to do the movie — mostly, the fact that he wasn’t very experienced with it.
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“I hadn’t been terrified of shooting something in a very long time. I mean, there’s always nerves, but this was completely out of my comfort zone,” he says. “It wasn’t just an accent, a walk, a talk, something that I could live in. This was complete and utter body movement, a new skill that you’re going to learn in a very short period of time. And there’s multiple different styles that we are going through, from country western to stomp and hip hop and jazz.”
He promptly signed himself up for dance training six hours a day, plus regular workout training “because [I’m] shirtless half the movie.” As it turned out, he rather liked all the classes — hip-hop emerging as a favorite.
“The one thing I never expected, the one byproduct of this was how much I’d fall in love with dance,” he says. “This was some of the most fun I’ve ever had making a movie.”
Aside from the appeal of a challenge, Murray, who is 43, liked the idea of working on an escapist movie that made people feel good.
“Where I am in my life right now with three young kids and in the state of the world, I just feel like these films are good for people. They want the departure. I became an actor because I wanted to give people that. I wanted to entertain. I wanted to bring joy and have that opportunity. And I’ve been blessed to be able to do it now for 25 years. Can you believe it?” Murray says. “And where I am currently, I just feel like the content needs to be of a certain…don’t go too far. Your kids are going through school and the pressure’s already going to be immense with kids saying things because your dad’s an actor. I don’t want to make it too difficult on them.”
“So for right now, this is the perfect content for where I am. We’ll cross the bridge when it comes to it in five, 10 years from now when they’re a little bit older. But for me, this is the sweet spot, being able to do this where I got to test myself and push myself with the dance and with getting something out there that I felt scared me,” he continues. “And I believe this is going to bring a lot of joy.”
Next August, Murray joins Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis in “Freakier Friday,” the sequel to their 2003 hit “Freaky Friday.” Murray has already wrapped work on the new film, an experience he calls a “surreal and full-circle moment.”
“I really started to sharpen my teeth on [the original] film, and take chances. I was terrified. When you’re out there in the middle of a neighborhood and people are watching and you’re just singing ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ as God awfully as you can in front of everybody, it’s a moment,” he says. “So it was weird. You walk on set and to a certain degree it felt like no time had passed. And yet we all had lives in between there. Kids, grandbabies, Academy Awards, and you walk into these places and our producers and everybody’s all there. And it just filled my heart with such joy. And you’re hugging it out with Jamie Lee and Lindsay and it blew my mind.”
In the meantime, he’ll be spending his first winter back in Buffalo since he was a teenager, producing the documentary “Just One Before I Die,” about the Buffalo Bills Mafia. He and his wife, Sarah, have just bought a house nine minutes from his brother and dad, and plan to be bicoastal now.
While he worries his “blood has thinned” a bit from his many years in California, the excitement about the Bills will likely propel him through.
“When you’re born and raised in that city, it’s just, it’s a right. You walk out of the womb, you’re a Bills fan,” Murray says of the project, which is centered around the fans’ hope for a Super Bowl win.
“That would be epic for the city. We hope to just continue to bring light to a community that truly loves and gives everything for this team and digs them out in snowstorms to make sure that they can make it to the game and would give the shirt off their back if it would help in any way,” Murray says. “It’s a brotherly love community. I love that about this city. So we just want to shine light on that.”
It also doesn’t hurt that getting to spend the winter in Buffalo is much more attuned to the Netflix Christmas spirit.
“I remember the magic as a kid. I mean, there’s nothing like snow on Christmas,” he says. “Do me a favor: Everybody put out great vibes for a white Christmas.”
