The grown-ups in Nativity! (2009) were Martin Freeman, Marc Wootton, Jason Watkins, Ashley Jensen, Pam Ferris and Alan Carr, and most of them have barely stopped working since. Freeman went on to lead BBC One's The Responder and turned up in Netflix's Agatha Christie's Seven Dials in January 2026. Wootton was on stage at the Royal Court this summer. Watkins has two Channel 4 dramas to his name this year. Jensen is a detective inspector in BBC One's Shetland. Ferris joined the second series of Amandaland, and Carr won The Celebrity Traitors. The children were Coventry primary school kids, and they are adults now. We've kept them out of the spotlight, and there's a note on why further down. The full cast list is on the film page.
Nativity! · Film guide →What the American listicles tend to miss is how British this film is. Debbie Isitt, a Birmingham-born director who made the film from her home city of Coventry, shot it on the city's streets with local children who were never given lines. The adults improvised around them. That method, three sequels and a stage musical later, is why the first film still feels like a real school hall in December and not a set.
Where the grown-ups went next
Martin Freeman, the teacher
Freeman had already worked with Isitt on her earlier improvised comedy, Confetti. At the time he told the Coventry Telegraph he liked that she was brave enough to make a film without a script, and called her "a visionary lunatic", which he meant kindly.
He was already known for The Office. Since then he has spent two series as a night-shift response officer in Liverpool in BBC One's The Responder (2022 and 2024). His most recent part is a Scotland Yard superintendent in Agatha Christie's Seven Dials, Chris Chibnall's three-part adaptation, which landed on Netflix on 15 January 2026. It's a supporting role, and one reviewer thought it was set up to come back in later series.
Marc Wootton, the one who stayed
Wootton played the overexcited teaching assistant, and he is the only adult who carried on through the next two films: he's back in Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger (2012) and Nativity 3: Dude, Where's My Donkey? (2014). He sat out Nativity Rocks! (2018), where Simon Lipkin took over as a long-lost brother.
He has spent more of the last few years on stage than on screen. The Royal Court bills him as a British Comedy Award and Rose d'Or winner with the National Theatre's Till the Stars Come Down among his credits, and he was in the cast of Rajiv Joseph's Archduke there, directed by Lyndsey Turner, from 20 June to 25 July 2026.
Jason Watkins, the rival
Watkins played the teacher behind the posh rival school's all-conquering nativity, and he played it straight, which is why it's funny. His 2026 has been busy. In Channel 4's three-part factual drama Dirty Business, about sewage in England's rivers, he plays a professor of computational biology who helps prove the local works isn't treating waste properly. He's also in Falling, Jack Thorne's six-part Channel 4 love story about a nun and a priest, which arrived in May.
Ashley Jensen, the one in Hollywood
Jensen played the teacher's ex, now a Hollywood producer, and his boast about her is the lie the whole plot hangs on. She was already known for Extras and Ugly Betty. These days she plays a detective inspector in BBC One's Shetland, and filming on its eleventh series started in April 2026. In September the BBC also announced Rambling, a new half-hour sitcom written by Iain Connell and Sharon Young, with Jensen and Mark Bonnar as two mismatched walkers in rural Scotland.
Pam Ferris, the head
Ferris played the head teacher of the Coventry primary school, whose last Christmas in charge is what hands the nativity to the teacher. In May 2026 she joined the second series of Amandaland on BBC One as a frail neighbour with a very desirable house.
Alan Carr, the first-timer
Nativity! was Carr's first feature film. His own site now leads with ITVX's Changing Ends, the autobiographical comedy where he plays his present-day self, and with The Celebrity Traitors, which he won in November 2025 before giving the £87,500 prize to Neuroblastoma UK.
What happened to the Coventry children
Isitt told BBC Radio WM that she went looking for ordinary primary school children rather than young performers, because she didn't want them learning lines or acting. They were primary school children in 2009, and they're adults now.
A few have been written about in the press over the years. We checked each one against what we'd accept for an adult actor: a current agency or Spotlight listing, a recent credited role, or a professional profile of their own. None of them cleared that bar in a form we could verify, so none of them is named here. If a former cast member has a public career and wants a mention, we'll happily add them from their agent's page.
What we can say is that they turned up. When the film had its world premiere at the Skydome in November 2009, the children were there on the night, and the city lined the way from Spon Street to the Odeon with Christmas trees.
How it was made: Coventry, a camera and no script
The idea came from a school nativity. Isitt watched one, thought the children were hilarious, and pitched the film to producer Nick Jones, who had worked with her before. It was made for BBC Films with support from Screen West Midlands, and Isitt shares the writing credit with May Chu.
The Coventry Telegraph reported at the time that the script was improvised, the same way Isitt had made Confetti. The adults made up their lines as they went, and the children were deliberately kept away from lines altogether so that they would react, not perform. Isitt told BBC Radio WM she wanted it to be "life imitating art, imitating life", and some of the audience scenes, with local children playing their parts in the school play, were real.
It was not a tidy shoot. Isitt told the Coventry Telegraph at the time that she'd assumed the old line about children and animals was a myth, and that what she hadn't reckoned on was the noise: 30-odd children per session, and no teacher's authority to fall back on. The animals, she said, were much easier.
The film was shot in six weeks in the height of summer, across Coventry, Warwickshire and Los Angeles, and people in Coventry put their Christmas decorations up to help. Isitt came away with around 120 hours of footage and spent 10 months cutting it at her Coventry home with editor Nicky Ager. So most of what ends up on screen was found in the edit, from hours of children being children.
It opened on 27 November 2009 and made nearly all of its money in the UK, which tells you who it was for. Three sequels followed, and in November 2017 Birmingham Rep premiered Nativity! The Musical. By 2022 the Rep said it had toured the UK, played three London runs and been seen by more than a million people.
Is Nativity! still worth watching?
Yes. It's shambolic in places and the plot runs on one very large fib, but the school-hall scenes are as close to a real primary school nativity as films get, tea urn included. Its official score is 87/100 Festive Factor, which puts it comfortably among the proper Christmas films.
It's rated U by the BBFC, and the kids can watch this one: some mild rude humour and a great deal of shouting, with nothing that needs explaining afterwards. When we last checked, in August 2026, it was streaming on Netflix UK.
Nativity! cast FAQ
Who played the teacher in Nativity!? Martin Freeman. Each sequel brought in a new teacher: David Tennant in Nativity 2, then Martin Clunes in Nativity 3, with Catherine Tate also in the cast.
Is Marc Wootton in all the Nativity films? Three of the four. He's in the 2009 original, Nativity 2 (2012) and Nativity 3 (2014), but not Nativity Rocks! (2018).
Was Nativity! improvised? Largely. The adults improvised their lines, and the children weren't given scripts at all. Isitt had used the same method on Confetti.
Were the Nativity! children real schoolchildren? Yes. Isitt recruited ordinary Coventry primary school children and deliberately didn't have them learn lines.
Where was Nativity! filmed? Mostly in Coventry, with scenes in Warwickshire and Los Angeles. Spon Street, Coventry Cathedral and the Ricoh Arena all appear.
Is there a Nativity! musical? Yes. Nativity! The Musical premiered at Birmingham Rep in November 2017 and has toured the UK since, with three London runs by 2022.
