Despite the fact that Emily Bader grew up just three hours from Hollywood, in a small town called Temecula, acting always felt like a distant dream. “I was truly desperate to do small plays,” she says, “but I couldn’t even get cast in my high school’s [productions].” Inspired by Emma Stone, whom she read made a PowerPoint when she was 15 convincing her parents to let her move to Los Angeles, Bader tried to do the same—with little effect. Her parents told her she’d have to wait until she was 18, which she reluctantly agreed to.
Now the 29-year-old actress is set to star in People We Meet on Vacation, Netflix’s highly anticipated adaptation of Emily Henry’s best-selling 2021 novel. It’s a When Harry Met Sally–type story about two best friends who take a vacation together every summer, until a falling-out forces them to confront their deeper feelings. Bader stars as the adventurous travel writer Poppy opposite Tom Blyth (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes), who plays a high-school English teacher named Alex.
The role is well suited for Bader, who’s no stranger to the travel bug herself. Calling from her hotel room in Chicago, the latest stop on the Netflix press tour, she remarks with glee that she can see Lake Michigan from her window—though she admits it doesn’t rival the streets of New Orleans, where part of the film was shot. “That’s the cool thing about this job,” she says. “l’m always going to places I’ve never been before…. A new city just makes me giddy.”
Her curiosity toward trying new things is part of the reason she wanted a career in acting in the first place. It was halfway through high school that Bader realized she had “no idea” what she wanted to do with her life. “I wasn’t the kid who said they wanted to be a veterinarian or a princess or an astronaut,” she says. “And I think that’s because, deep down, I always kind of wanted to do all the things. And acting is a way to do that—to play into all these worlds.”
Staying true to her agreement with her parents, after high school she moved to Los Angeles, to study theater at Loyola Marymount University. She graduated in 2016, and it took the better part of a decade of grinding through low-budget horror movies and network-television shows—with a handful of starring roles in projects like Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021) and the Mafia drama Fresh Kills (2023)—before she finally made it to the mainstream, as the titular character in the Amazon Prime series My Lady Jane (2024), a reimagining of the brief reign of the Tudor noblewoman dubbed “the Nine Day Queen,” with a fantasy twist. “The character description was Elizabeth Bennett meets Blondie,” Bader recalls. “As a huge fan of [both], I felt this immediate need to get it.” Learning she got the part a few months later was “a huge, huge dream come true.”
The series was canceled just months after the first season’s release, triggering an immediate uproar from fans. (There’s a Web site called Save My Lady Jane, dedicated to reviving the show, and George R. R. Martin himself promoted a viral fan petition to bring back the series in a September 2024 blog post.)
“We were all a little bit heartbroken, if I’m being completely candid about it,” says Bader. But the “fan support made it feel like what we had done at least will survive with them. It’s just a really great feeling.”
Even more so than My Lady Jane, which features a romantic plotline between the scholarly Jane and her playboy husband, Lord Guildford Dudley (Edward Bluemel), People We Meet on Vacation is a classic love story. Luckily, Bader is a romantic. “I feel like I’ve lived my life pretending like I was in these movies ever since I was a little kid,” she says with a laugh. “And maybe that’s why I wanted to be an actor. That’s the only way that I could figure out how to live, was to sort of romanticize moments.”
But, she clarifies, People We Meet on Vacation isn’t a glamorized version of love. Poppy and Alex have their issues. “They make mistakes,” she says. “They ask too much of each other sometimes. And also have to compromise at the end of the day. I don’t think it’s being overly fantastical in their love, but it is being hopeful.”
As for Bader’s next steps, she’s taking a cue from her characters and starting to write. This year, she wrote her first film, a short called “Crybaby,” which she’s currently submitting to festivals. “It’s very different from anything that I’m doing right now. It’s quite dark.”
People We Meet on Vacation will be released in theaters on January 9
Paulina Prosnitz is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
