Anna Kendrick is set to play a female Santa Claus in Disney’s new movie written and directed by Marc Lawrence, according to Variety.
Currently titled Nicole, the story involves Father Christmas chucking in the towel on presents delivery and his son getting cold feet at the prospect of taking over. This leaves Kendrick to don the big red suit and get the reindeer in reins.
Lawrence, who wrote Sandra Bullock vehicle Miss Congeniality, last directed Hugh Grant comedy The Rewrite. Kendrick is about to shoot Pitch Perfect 3.
Claus’s daughter is less of a folkloric figure than his spouse, but she has been present in Christmas literature for more than 100 years.
In an 1892 play, she is called Kitty and asks her father to give her the gift of another man, while in a revisionist 2000 novel, she is called Noel. On the big screen, she appears fleetingly in The Legend of Holly Claus, in which the heart of the infant daughter is frozen on account of a curse, shortly after birth.
On TV, the narrative has usually involved Claus’s daughter – variously christened Kristen, Mary and Annie, seeking to escape the North Pole. In Slavic literature, such a figure, called Snegurochka, is often seen accompanying her father.
