Marla Sokoloff on Her Spicy Holiday Movie, The Merry Gentlemen: 'Gia Is Bringing the Controversy to Christmas' (Exclusive)

It should come as no surprise to Full House fans that Marla Sokoloff is bringing a little spice to the holidays this year. The actress who played Stephanie Tanner’s infamous bad-girl bestie Gia not only costars in Netflix’s The Merry Gentlemen alongside Chad Michael Murray and Britt Robertson, she also wrote the film’s screenplay.

The unconventional holiday flick centers on Robertson’s Ashley, a Broadway dancer who returns to her small hometown to help her parents (Michael Gross and Beth Broderick) save their beloved music venue. Her solution: a Christmas-themed all-male burlesque revue featuring handyman Luke (Murray) and other local hunks showing off their sexy moves.

“I mean, of course Gia is bringing the controversy to Christmas,” Sokoloff jokes of the film, which premieres Nov. 20 on Netflix. “I think there’s gonna be a lot of people really excited about it and relieved that there’s something new in this genre.”

But, she admits in an interview with PEOPLE, “There might be some grandmas who are like, ‘Why is Chad Michael Murray taking his shirt off for half this movie?’ ”

To be clear, The Merry Gentlemen is decidedly PG. Murray and his brawny fellow dancers don’t go the Full Monty, but Sokoloff says that after director Peter Sullivan and producer Jeff Schenck approached her with the idea for the film, she did revisit The Full Monty and the Magic Mike movies for inspiration — and to get a sense of what The Merry Gentlemen’s male strippers could get away with in the context of a family-friendly holiday movie. “What are the things we can do that won’t be completely offensive and over the top, but still toe the line of being sexy?” she explains.

Despite its slightly risqué premise, The Merry Gentlemen hits all the cozy, familiar beats that holiday rom-com fans have come to expect as the genre has exploded in popularity over the past decade or so. No stranger to Christmas movies — having both starred in Lifetime’s The Road Home for Christmas and directed the network’s Christmas Hotel in 2019 — Sokoloff says that predictability was intentional.

“I like to include all of the elements that we all know and love, and the thing that works,” she explains. “There are so many things that work about Christmas movies and why people revisit them again and again and again. So, those elements, I like to really lean into those.”

But she says she was determined to make The Merry Gentlemen stand out. “This other piece, making the men kind of the show ponies, when it’s usually the girl, I really loved that,” Sokoloff says. “And I loved that it was a strong female character — which they all generally have — but she was really making the calls. She was in charge and the men were kind of, you know, underneath her, so to speak. I really loved that angle. And I loved including as many women in this process as possible.”

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To that end she suggested fellow former child star and close friend Christine Lakin, now a director and choreographer as well as an actress, to oversee the film’s dance sequences. And Lakin, who starred in ’90s sitcom Step by Step, isn’t the only familiar face bringing the nostalgic vibes to The Merry Gentlemen. Alongside One Tree Hill’s Murray, Family Ties’ Gross and Sabrina the Teenage Witch’s Broderick, the film features Maxwell Caulfield, perhaps best remembered for his turn as smarmy pop star Rex Manning in Empire Records, as one of the titular Merry Gentlemen.

Sokoloff herself plays Robertson’s character’s sweetly supportive sister, a role that is a far cry from the “bad girls” she gained a reputation for playing in the ’90s. Besides Full House’s Gia, there was “Cokie” Mason in 1995’s The Baby-Sitters Club and spiteful high school cheerleader Lisa Janusch in Sugar & Spice.

Sokoloff speculates that casting directors back in the ’90s may have been responding to what she describes as her “resting b---- face.”

“At rest, I don’t think my face is very friendly,” she says. “I think that’s maybe something people responded to and then it caught on. I played Gia and then maybe there was one other role where I was the bad girl, and then for 10 years that’s all I played. I’m not exactly sure why, but they’re definitely the more fun roles to play.”

While Sokoloff says she was thrilled to revisit her Full House character in Netflix’s reboot, Fuller House, she’s less interested in reviving other “bad girl” characters than she is in seeing what Lucy Hatcher, her law firm receptionist character from The Practice, might be up to these days.

“I still think we’ve gotta do a Practice reboot,” she says. “That would be so fun, you know? Not a ‘bad girl’ character, but it would be so fun to catch up with the Practice people and see where all those characters are now.”

She also perks up at the suggestion of re-teaming with Jennifer Garner for a Dude, Where’s My Car? spin-off centered on their characters Wilma and Wanda.

“We still call each other Wilma and Wanda!” she says of Garner. “Like, I don’t know if we know each other’s real names. It’s only Wilma and Wanda.”

All this talk of Sokoloff’s early “bad girl” characters invites the question: What would Gia’s actual version of The Merry Gentlemen look like?

Sokoloff pauses. “I don’t know if it would be a family-friendly version of this movie,” she says with a laugh.