Champagne Problems is, in many ways, a classic contemporary Christmas movie: It’s twinkly; it’s sprightly; it’s packed with macarons, sparkling wine, and too much cheese. But it revs into high gear and really becomes memorable about 15 minutes in, when the film’s leading man, played by French actor Tom Wozniczka, bites his lip.
A clip of this fleeting, pivotal moment from the Netflix film isn’t currently available on YouTube, but the moment that precedes it provides a strong hint of what’s to come—and we can thank Wozniczka, the new reigning hunk of holiday movies for that.
Sydney, played by Minka Kelly, is in France to close her venture capital company’s acquisition of a storied champagne vineyard. Wozniczka’s character, Henri, is the son of the vineyard’s owner, but longs to slip the yoke of familial expectations to open a combination bookstore and wine bar. In this economy? Never mind that; boring concerns like the economy are never an issue in Christmas rom-coms!
And anyway, look at how Henri looks at Sydney: his dazzled longing! Their zippy banter! Seconds later, after inviting himself to be Sydney’s tour guide to Paris at Christmastime, the lip bite. The lip bite.
Champagne Problems was the most-watched movie on Netflix in its first week of release, and has remained a fixture in the streamer’s Top 10 as the holiday season waltzes on. Only the 2024 Lindsay Lohan holiday rom-com Our Little Secret had more viewers in its debut. That’s certainly a reason to pop a bottle or two for Wozniczka, who, thanks to his charismatic performance—and that viral lip bite—is breaking out with American audiences in a major way and is poised to be an exciting new leading man.
That lip bite, funnily enough, wasn’t even on purpose. In fact, Wozniczka chalks it up to good luck and great chemistry between himself and Kelly. They shot the scenes, which are Henri and Sydney’s meet-cute, on the first day of filming. Wozniczka had no idea that he’d bitten his lip until he saw it on-screen during an ADR session to re-record some dialogue. “I turned to Mark and said, ‘Is this OK? I don’t remember that I did this,’” Woznicka tells the Daily Beast’s Obsessed. Johnson was unconcerned, and correctly assured his leading man that “it’s cute!”
Lest audiences get a bit blinded by the stars in Wozniczka’s eyes and his swoon-inducing romanticism, consider this about the French actor: He gleefully tells us that his most vivid behind-the-scenes memory is how he, Kelly, and castmate Sean Amsing cooked up the film’s rather surprising flatulence scene.
Sydney is lactose intolerant. Rather than just mention it in a scene where everyone is about to go to town on a cheese board, and let the audience draw their own conclusions about Sydney’s digestive consequences, the trio of actors decided to add a moment heavily featuring, well, farts.
The final version in the movie is very funny, relatable, and humane. Still, in Wozniczka’s retelling of the experience on set, the crew was able to capture Henri’s own gas passing without much incident, “because [writer-director Mark Steven Johnson] did the fart [sound] for me, and I was focused enough to not laugh,” while Sydney’s required “so, so many takes” because Kelly’s face would freeze in an expression that sent everyone into helpless giggles.
This bodily function-based silliness, which viewers might not expect from a Christmas rom-com, somehow sits neatly within a story that’s as much about the fraught relationship between Henri and his father Hugo (Thibault de Montalembert, from the workplace dramedy Call My Agent!) as it is about Henri and Sydney finding their way back to each other. Hugo is angry and hurt at having to sell the storied vineyard he considers his son’s birthright, while Henri resents the pressure he feels to take on a business he doesn’t want to be a part of.
Wozniczka found all of it very relatable. It’s heartbreaking for Henri and Hugo to be so mired in stilted formality that they hold back from “saying out loud what they have in their hearts” when they clearly love each other. As the father and son heal their rift (with help from insights from Sydney, of course), so, too, do Sydney and Henri, leading to a blissfully happy ending.
Wozniczka might not have taken on the role of a sweet bookworm were it not for his 2024 turn in the fourth season of Slow Horses, as Patrice, a wily, relentless assassin. Having spent his early career as a theater actor playing “very dumb guys,” a character type he says he’d love to return to, he had passed on several opportunities to play “kind of boring,” one-dimensional love interests. When an offer came through to play Patrice on Slow Horses, after submitting audition tapes “with absolutely zero hopes—I was sure they wouldn’t call me back”, it all felt “almost too beautiful to be true” when he was cast.
Preparing for Slow Horses included intensive training in mixed martial arts, karate, and judo with a trainer who “kicked my a-- every day for one week” to get ready for all of the stunt work for the popular series. Patrice’s feats include a steady stream of brutal murders, a deadly one-man invasion of Slough House, and most spectacularly, a massive set piece that took four consecutive nights to shoot.
In the season’s penultimate episode, Patrice drives a garbage truck into an armored MI5 SUV, then kills all but one of the elite agents inside in order to kidnap his own half-brother, River (Jack Lowden). The men in that family have zero chill. Exhausting? A little intimidating? Sure, but Wozniczka says his first-ever large-scale action sequence was also “one of the most incredible things I’ve ever [seen]” and ultimately left him both “very happy [and] so sore.”
Maybe that soreness is what made Wozniczka more open to playing a love interest. Still, that change of heart isn’t so surprising because, ultimately, he really likes rom-coms. He bristles a little at the clichéd complaint that viewers “already know the end after five minutes. Of course you know the end, it is a rom-com for Christmas!”
His list of seasonal favorites includes modern classics like Love Actually and The Holiday, but his number one pick is About Time. He watches the film annually and waxes rhapsodic talking about it, reflecting that in life “you have one chance, and you just have to take it and enjoy the journey, and try to be the [happiest] guy you can.”
Wozniczka’s own prescription for happiness at Christmas includes traditional events like a big family Christmas Eve dinner with “champagne, wine, and good food,” accompanied by holiday movies. As an actor, he’ll be happy as long as he can stay out of a standard workplace, because so many years in, “I don’t think I could have a normal job anymore,” and “I couldn’t live without art [...] I would need to create something.”
After watching him in projects as diverse as Slow Horses and Champagne Problems, we can all toast to that.
