Shubhabrata Dutta
Two acting powerhouses will be joining forces in South Carolina very soon. Academy Award-winner Octavia Spencer and Academy Award-winner Jessica Chastain, who are very good friends, will head to the scenic city of Charleston, South Carolina, to film a Holiday rom-com feature titled ‘Deck The Y’alls,’ with principal photography beginning in mid-June 2026. Joining Spencer and Chastain is Primetime Emmy-winning stand-up comic/actress Wanda Sykes. Tracy Oliver and Stefanie Williams wrote the story. The director has yet to be publicly revealed.
The story follows Rachel Stein (Chastain), a savvy New York baker who can roll with anything, until she falls for Beau, a younger Southern gentleman, and heads to Charleston to spend Christmas with his family. But over-protective matriarch Gladys Gibbes (Spencer) is a true steel magnolia whose massive celebrity chef persona will take all of Rachel’s bless-her-heart best to survive.
Octavia Spencer won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Minerva “Minny” Jackson, a maid, in Tate Taylor’s period movie ‘The Help.’ It also won her the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress. Besides these, she has a string of awards and nominations to her credit. We last saw her play Barb, the manager of a homeless shelter in Stephanie Laing’s ‘Tow.’ The movie features Rose Byrne as homeless Amanda Ogle, who tries to reclaim her towed car, which provided her shelter. Spencer’s upcoming projects include the ‘Ma 2,’ the highly anticipated sequel to the thriller ‘Ma,’ the Prime Video action-adventure series ‘Ride or Die,’ co-starring Hannah Waddingham, Bill Nighy, Ed Skrein, and Sylvia Hoeks, and Chinonye Chukwu’s ‘Death of a Salesman,’ a feature adaption of Arthur Miller’s eponymous play, co-starring Jeffrey Wright.
Jessica Chastain won an Academy Award for Best Actress for the biopic ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye,’ wherein she plays evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. She and Spencer worked together in ‘The Help,’ and, like Spencer, she has several accolades to her name, including Oscar and BAFTA nominations. Next for Chastain are the Apple TV+ crime drama series ‘The Savant,’ about a top-secret investigator who infiltrates internet hate organizations to bring down the nation’s most violent men; Rob Savage’s horror movie ‘Other Mommy,’ also starring Dichen Lachman and Karen Allen; Bernard Rose’s King Lear feature adaptation ‘Lear Rex,’ co-starring Al Pacino, Ariana DeBose, and Rachel Brosnahan; and ‘This is Pleasure,’ directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, based on Mary Gaitskill’s eponymous #MeToo novella.
Wanda Sykes is famous for playing Lucretia Turner in Netflix’s sitcom ‘The Upshaws,’ also starring Mike Epps and Kim Fields; Barbara “Barb” Baran in CBS’s ‘The New Adventures of Old Christine,’ and a fictional version of herself in HBO’s ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm.’ Movies she has been a part of include ‘Monster-in-Law,’ ‘Bad Moms,’ ‘Friendsgiving,’ ‘Bad Moms,’ and most recently the sports drama ‘Undercard.’
Read More: Kate Hudson and Javier Bardem’s ‘Hello & Paris’ Starts Filming in London in Q2 2026
You must be logged in to post a comment.