Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint: Game of Thrones star John Bradley and director Jack Spring on York-set festive film

It fits the mould of director Jack Spring’s work, however, who has made movies about big moments in the lives of regular people: middle-aged men on a road trip to see their dying school friend in Destination Dewsbury and struggling trawlermen from Grimsby planning a heist in Three Day Millionaire.

His third feature, Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint, is out next week.

London-born Spring, who is based in Leeds, says: “I was living in America in 2018, 2019, and I would watch these little BBC clips, they were like my link to back home. There was this one video about these two drama teachers that would go into old folks' homes and put on Christmas plays, and it was just really sweet.

"You saw these elderly residents come alive and their families would see them in this new, almost childlike way. They'd be reinvigorated and that was the kernel of the idea.”

Aubrey, played by John Bradley, is forced into community service at a struggling retirement home, Willow Lodge. To save the home from the nasty developer, Aubrey, whose sad family background means he hates the festive period, is forced into a production of A Christmas Carol, helping him to discover the power of community and human connection.

The way in which elderly people are treated in society is a theme of the film.

Spring says: “When we were developing that, my granddad was in a care home. Not only the residents, but the carers as well, I have so much admiration and respect for. Elderly people on screen are usually just presented as one sort of homogenous old people, grey, stale group. I wanted them to be all very much individuals, as all the old people that I had in my life certainly were.”

It was the more grown up elements of the script which stood out to Bradley, 38, of Manchester, who is known to audiences around the world as Samwell Tarly from Game of Thrones.

“The thing that hooked me in was, it was about very mature and quite delicate themes,” he says. “It's a story about grief and about trauma and about how if you don't process your pain properly, the effect it can have on you all the way through your life and what a mountainous task it is to overcome that if you leave it too long.”

Moreover, it is about the “quiet pain and sadness amongst a group of people you don't get films made about very often, let alone Christmas films,” he says. “So I thought it was a unique project in that way.”

Chris Boyle-McQuarry signed up as the writer in 2021 and the comedy drama stars a bumper British cast: alongside Bradley is Celia Imrie (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Thursday Murder Club), Richard E. Grant (Gosford Park, Withnail & I), Adjoa Andoh (Bridgerton), Kiell Smith-Bynoe (Ghosts, Stath Lets Flats), Sophia Di Martino (Flowers, Loki), Karl Pilkington (Ludwig) and Jim Broadbent (Moulin Rouge!).

“It's a testament to the writing that all of these parts were attractive prospects for these actors to come in and play,” says Bradley.

"Just from a selfish point of view, my tastes have always been British comedy, really. I've met a lot of people over the course of my career but it's always the people that you meet who were in stuff that you liked when you were a kid... I was a huge fan of the Spice Girls when I was a kid, so to get Richard in from the Spice Girls movie, to get Celia in from Dinnerladies and all the Victoria Wood stuff. Nigel from the Young Ones, Karl from all the stuff with Ricky (Gervais) and Steve (Merchant). It was just my dream cast, really, and over the course of the first 10 minutes of the film, it's like you're introduced to a new legend every 30 seconds.”

For Spring, too, his third feature film – produced by his own Shush Films – includes more household names than any of his previous works. He says: “Not only are they all great at their jobs, they're all lovely humans as well. I think it all added to that overall feeling of a film that's made with love and heart.”

It was filmed in York, where it is set (and where Spring once lived and worked as a hot tub salesman), as well as London.

Spring, 30, says: “It seemed so obvious as a place to make a Christmas movie. Creatively, the aesthetic of it. Commercially, even when you're making a British indie movie, you're thinking: will America get this? And when you're asking yourself that question of a British movie, really it needs to be Royal Britain or Harry Potter Britain or East End gangster Britain. These three kind of Britains that they recognise, if you like. York was obviously the Harry Potter and I guess to a degree the Royal Britain as well. I'd made my first two movies up north and had a cracking experience.”

Bradley was born in Wythenshawe but his mother’s maternal side of the family are from Thorne, near Doncaster in South Yorkshire, and he was in The Railway Children Return (2022), which set in the region.

“York in particular, there's just something about it that feels timeless,” he says. “This isn't a period piece at all, it's set very much in the modern world with a lot of modern themes and social comment on it, but in terms of the the exterior stuff in York, you want a Christmas movie to have a sort of timeless, nostalgic appeal to it, and I think that York absolutely has that. You do get a sense of the history of the place when you walk on the cobbles and you see the timber in the buildings. You get a sense of some of that stuff, it's been there hundreds of years and will be there for hundreds of years to come. So there's something re cognisably British, but also comfortingly timeless about it that I think really adds to the feel of any film, but especially a Christmas film.

"The people of York are very proud of their city, as they very much should be, so I hope that they’ll come and see the movie and they’ll feel that we’ve done it justice because around every corner, there's something worth shooting. We really drained it of all of its aesthetic resources and we show a really lovely side of it, I think.”

Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint is in cinemas from November 6.