The screening room lights come up slowly, the way sunrise creeps across a snow-covered lake, and for a long moment neither of them moves. Justin Hartley sits perfectly still, one arm wrapped around Sofia Pernas, the other pressed hard against his mouth as if he’s physically holding the emotion inside. Sofia’s cheek rests against his chest, tears sliding silently into the fabric of his hoodie. The credits have finished rolling, the Netflix logo has vanished, and the only sound is the soft, uneven rhythm of two people trying to remember how to breathe after watching something that feels less like a movie and more like an open wound gently stitched with Christmas lights.

When Justin finally speaks, his voice is barely above a whisper, cracked and wondering and utterly unguarded. “Keri and I watched The Noel Diary tonight,” he says, using the private nickname he gave the story years ago when it was still just a fragile stack of pages on his desk. “And I swear to God, I couldn’t believe this came from my writing. It felt like someone had reached inside my life, pulled out every memory I’ve ever tried to bury, every Christmas I spent pretending I was fine, every letter I never sent my dad, and turned it into something so beautiful it hurts.”

Sofia turns her face up to him, eyes shining. “You okay, babe?” He laughs, but it catches in his throat. “No. Not even a little.”

This is the night Justin Hartley watched his own heart beat on screen for the first time, and it undid him completely.

The journey to this moment began quietly, almost secretly, in the winter of 2020 when the world was locked down and Justin, like so many of us, found himself alone with memories he had spent decades outrunning. While the rest of Hollywood was baking sourdough and doing TikTok dances, he was in his home office at three in the morning, Christmas carols playing low, typing words that felt too raw to ever show another human being.

The spark was real: a leather-bound diary his mother had discovered in her attic, written by his father in the months before he left the family when Justin was nine. The entries were simple, aching things: apologies never delivered, fears never spoken, love that didn’t know how to stay. Justin read it once, closed it, and carried the weight of it for a year. Then one December night, unableed to sleep, he opened a blank document and started writing a fictional version of what might have happened if a grown man, successful but hollow, came home to face the ghosts he’d left behind.

He called the protagonist Jake Turner, a bestselling author who returns to his childhood home to settle his estranged mother’s estate and finds, instead, a diary written by the father who abandoned him. He called the love interest Rachel, a woman searching for the daughter she gave up for adoption, carrying her own diary of regrets. And somewhere between those two broken people looking for closure, Justin found pieces of himself he didn’t even know were missing.

“I never set out to write something autobiographical,” he says now, curled on the leather sofa in the screening room, Sofia’s hand still tangled in his. “But every time I tried to make it less personal, the story fought me. It wanted the truth. It wanted the messy Christmas mornings when I pretended I wasned sad that Dad wasn’t there. It wanted the way I used to check the mailbox every December hoping for a card that never came. It wanted the moment I realized forgiveness isn’t a single decision; it’s a thousand tiny ones you make when no one’s watching.”

What emerged was The Noel Diary, a script so tender and specific that when it landed on producer Margaret French’s desk at Netflix, she cried in her office and immediately called director Charles Shyer. When Justin was offered the chance to star as Jake opposite Barrett Doss as Rachel, he almost turned it down. “I was terrified,” he admits. “Playing a version of myself who’s forced to say all the things I never got to say to my dad? That felt like standing naked in Times Square.”

But Sofia, who had read every draft, who had held him on the nights when the memories got too loud, wouldn’t let him run. “She looked at me,” he remembers, voice softening, “and said, ‘This story healed something in you while you were writing it. Now let it heal other people.’ So I said yes.”

Filming in March 2022 across snow-dusted Connecticut towns that looked exactly like the ones in his childhood photographs was its own kind of exquisite torture. There were days, he confesses, when he had to walk off set because a line hit too close, when the prop master handed him a diary that looked eerily like his father’s real one and he couldn’t open it without shaking. There were nights when Sofia, visiting from Los Angeles, would find him sitting on the porch of their rental house long after wrap, staring at Christmas lights the way Jake stares at them in the film, trying to remember what hope felt like.

And then came tonight: the first time he watched the finished movie from beginning to end, with the woman he loves beside him and the knowledge that, in less than a week, the entire world would see the most vulnerable parts of his soul wrapped in tinsel and snowfall.

“I couldn’t breathe for the first ten minutes,” he says, laughing at himself. “The opening shot, that slow push in on the house covered in snow, it’s literally the house I grew up in, recreated down to the crooked mailbox. And when Barrett’s character finds the diary and reads the first entry, I heard my dad’s voice in my head. I had to cover my face.”

Sofia wipes her eyes and smiles. “You kept whispering, ‘That’s real, that actually happened,’ every five minutes. I’ve never seen you like that.”

There’s a scene halfway through the film where Jake and Rachel sit on the floor of his childhood bedroom, surrounded by boxes of Christmas decorations his mother never threw away, reading entries aloud and laughing through tears. It’s a scene Justin wrote at 4 a.m. after finding his own box of childhood ornaments in storage. When Barrett delivered the line “Some people leave, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how to live without the space they used to fill,” Justin lost it on set, and they kept the take.

Another moment that destroyed him tonight: the quiet, almost wordless sequence near the end where Jake finally reads the last page of the diary aloud to Rachel on that snow-covered porch. The words are almost exactly what his father wrote decades ago: an apology, a wish for happiness, a promise that love doesn’t always know how to stay but it never stops existing. Watching himself say those words on screen, Justin says, felt like receiving the letter he waited thirty-five years for.

By the time the credits rolled and the dedication appeared, simple white text on black: “For every child who ever waited by a window on Christmas Eve,” both he and Sofia were sobbing. Not delicate movie tears. Full-body, can’t-speak, soul-cleansing sobs.

“I didn’t expect catharsis,” he says quietly. “I thought I had processed all of this years ago. But watching it with her, seeing it made whole, it was like the nine-year-old in me finally got to exhale.”

Sofia kisses his temple. “You gave him that,” she whispers. “You gave all of us that.”

In the weeks since this private screening, The Noel Diary has become Netflix’s most-watched film of the holiday season, topping charts in 89 countries and spawning countless viral moments of people live-texting their parents, mailing long-overdue letters, pulling out childhood diaries they thought they’d burned. Critics have called it “the rare holiday movie that earns every tear” and “a masterclass in restraint and truth.” But for Justin Hartley, the reviews barely register.

What matters is the text he got from his mother the morning after the premiere: a photo of her sitting on her couch, clutching the real diary, crying happy tears. What matters are the thousands of messages from strangers saying they finally called the parent they hadn’t spoken to in years. What matters is the way Sofia looked at him when the lights came up and said, simply, “You did it. You turned pain into light.”

As we leave the screening room, Justin pauses at the door, looking back at the blank screen one last time. “I thought writing it was the hardest part,” he says. “Turns out watching it, watching my own life unfold with the woman I love beside me, was harder. And better. And everything.”

Then he smiles, the same quiet, wondering smile Jake wears in the final frame, and adds the line that has already become the film’s most quoted:

“Some stories don’t end. They just wait for the right Christmas to come back to life.”

For Justin Hartley, that Christmas is finally here.