Juliette Lewis Just Learned A Surprising Detail About A Christmas Vacation Scene

December 24, 2025

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National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation star Juliette Lewis only learned a sad detail about one of the holiday classic’s craziest scenes this year, as the others involved with filming didn’t tell the then-teenage star. The 1989 comedy follows the Griswolds as the father, Clark (Chevy Chase), relentlessly tries to host the perfect Christmas for their extended family, with disastrous results.

Directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik and written by John Hughes, Christmas Vacation also stars Beverly D’Angelo as Clark’s wife Ellen, Lewis as their daughter Audrey, Johnny Galecki as their son Rusty, as well as John Randolph, Diane Ladd, E.G. Marshall, Doris Roberts, Randy Quaid, Miriam Flynn, and Mae Questel, with an appearance by Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Seinfeld had premiered just months earlier).

Among the many other things that go wrong because of Clark’s commitment to spreading holiday cheer, his endeavor to get a real Christmas tree himself brings more problems, turning out to house a hyperactive squirrel. The sequence where the squirrel is revealed and runs berserk in the house took three days to film, and at times relied on a fake squirrel attached to Chase’s shoulder.

At Fan Expo Chicago this year, where Lewis reunited with D’Angelo, the former reflected on the “whole squirrel in the tree gag,” noting: “I think we shot that for three days” (via Entertainment Weekly). But Lewis didn’t know everything about Christmas Vacation, as D’Angelo then added: “Cause the first squirrel died. Did you know that? Because you were young.”

D’Angelo further explained that the squirrel used for the scene was not very well-trained; the more professional squirrel had died of a heart attack just before filming. “So the squirrel that we ended up using was not the original squirrel,” said D’Angelo. “It was not trained. And Chevy ended up wearing a stuffed squirrel on his shoulder for everything but the leap at the camera. I’ve destroyed the magic.“

“That was sad,” added Lewis in agreement. Christmas Vacation is luckily a more lighthearted affair than this behind-the-scenes story (though not without heartrending moments). In 1989, the movie debuted at No. 2 at the box office and moved up to No. 1 the following week, and though it received mixed reviews then, it has come to be seen as an essential holiday movie.

Juliette Lewis gave her Oscar-nominated performance in Cape Fear just a couple of years later, and also went on to star in Natural Born Killers and From Dusk Till Dawn, while her on-screen brother from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Johnny Galecki, is now famous for playing Leonard Hofstadter in The Big Bang Theory. But both will certainly always be linked to this chaotic classic.