‘People We Meet on Vacation’: Poppy and Alex Catch Flights & Feelings in New Trailer (VIDEO)
What To Know
- People We Meet on Vacation is a Netflix film based on Emily Henry’s bestselling romance novel of the same name.
- Emily Bader and Tom Blyth play Poppy and Alex.
- The official trailer was released on December 2.
It’s Poppy and Alex’s world, and we’re just living in it. A month before the film adaptation of Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation is set to hit our screens, Netflix dropped the official trailer. EmHen readers, it does not disappoint. The new year can’t come soon enough. Alex Nilsen is about to be the new king of yearning.
If you’re not already, you’re about to become obsessed with Poppy and Alex, played by Emily Bader and Tom Blyth. “I think just seeing Tom and Emily be these characters changed them forever for me in the best way,” Henry said in a new Netflix promo video. “I knew that this was a book about growing up, but getting to watch Tom and Emily be Alex and Poppy through all of these different stages and phases really brought that home to me in a much larger way that this truly is a coming-of-age story.”
Swooon has the latest updates about the highly anticipated film adaptation, from the release date to the cast. Keep scrolling for more!
Michele K. Short / Netflix
When is People We Meet on Vacation coming out?
People We Meet on Vacation’s premiere date is January 9, 2026. The movie will be released globally, so you can watch it anywhere in the world — just like Poppy and Alex intended!
View this post on Instagram
Who is playing Poppy and Alex in People We Meet on Vacation?
My Lady Jane breakout Emily Bader is playing Poppy Wright. She’ll be joined by The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes star Tom Blyth, who plays Alex Nilsen.
Director Brett Haley broke the news to Bader via Zoom. “Oh, I’m gonna cry,” an emotional Bader responded. Blyth joined the call and congratulated Bader.
Michele K. Short / Netflix
Henry surprised the leads and showed her support for the film. “I have been, like, kind of an anxious wreck about who would play these characters,” she began. “I just truly could not feel any more 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 with Poppy and Alex, with you guys playing them.” (Watch the full video below.)
Watch Emily Bader find out she’s starring opposite Tom Blyth in People We Meet on Vacation — the feature adaptation of Emily Henry’s best-selling novel directed by Brett Haley. pic.twitter.com/XY90QJI36B
— Netflix (@netflix) August 2, 2024
In a November 2025 promo video, Henry explained that the actors “were so them, even from the very first time that they read this dialogue together, that it all just was so natural.”
More casting news was revealed in September 2024, with Emily in Paris‘s Lucien Laviscount attaching himself to the project, as well as The Good Place‘s Jameela Jamil and You‘s Lukas Gage. Sarah Catherine Hook is also a part of the People We Meet on Vacation ensemble. She shared a story on Instagram to celebrate her upcoming role in the movie and declared, “Bringing back romcoms one vacation at a time.”
Daniel Escale / Netflix
When Gage spoke to Swooon, he praised the film’s leads. “[Bader] is unbelievable,” he said. “Tom is amazing, too. They’re both [amazing], but the world, I don’t think, knows about Emily Bader quite yet, and it’s gonna love her.”
He added, “I think I will be 100% transparent, there’s a lot of book-to-film adaptations that I’ve seen that I don’t feel like… I see it so clearly in my head. I’m like, they’ve missed the mark. With People We Meet on Vacation, I see exactly what Emily Henry wrote brought to life.”
Henry published People We Meet on Vacation in 2021, and it debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list. The film adaptation was confirmed in 2022. Yulin Kuang, author of How to End a Love Story, wrote the screenplay with Amos Vernon and Nunzio Randazzo. In March 2024, Henry told Variety that the People We Meet on Vacation screenplay had “gone through a lot of different drafts.”
What is People We Meet on Vacation about?
The rom-com novel follows best friends Poppy and Alex, who take an annual summer vacation together. People We Meet on Vacation features dual timelines: the current summer and previous ones. A trip to Croatia fractured their friendship, so Poppy plans one last trip to Palm Springs to get their relationship back on track. Over the course of their week together, life-altering truths come to light.
The official logline reads: “Free-spirited Poppy and routine-loving Alex have been unlikely best friends for a decade, living in different cities but spending every summer vacation together. The careful balance of their friendship is put to the test when they begin to question what has been obvious to everyone else — could they actually be the perfect romantic match?”
The movie, however, moves most of the story from Palm Springs to Barcelona. “We get new dialogue between Poppy and Alex, new moments, new jokes, new moments of affection, and it’s kind of just like we get extra pieces of them,” Henry explained.
Emily Henry tells how moving the story from Palm Springs to Barcelona changed People We Meet on Vacation
“We get new dialogue between Poppy and Alex, new moments, new jokes, new moments of affection and it’s kind of just like we get extra pieces of them.” pic.twitter.com/iQQJ8sOnL4
— written by emily henry (@emilyhenryverse) November 25, 2025
Kuang revealed that she’s incorporated Easter eggs for People We Meet on Vacation book lovers. “In the very first draft of People We Meet on Vacation, I knew what I would want as a reader was a recreation of the cover, and so I wrote something that was like a recreation of the cover that I think book lovers will identify,” she said on the Bookmarked podcast.
Recently, Henry also teased that Alex and Poppy’s romantic climax in the movie is “so similar” to what she pictured when she was writing the book. “The actual choreography of it, the rain, the way that they look at each other, the things that they’re saying just felt so in tune with my initial vision,” she said.
Basically, Poppy and Alex are about to prove love is the greatest adventure of all.
People We Meet on Vacation, Movie Premiere, January 9, 2026, Netflix
