The Love Hard Scene That Makes Us Love Nina Dobrev And Jimmy O. Yang Even More
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The spirit of the holidays can help to bring family, friends, and even complete strangers together, and all of those twinkling lights and peppermint candles also make the winter season feel extra romantic for budding lovers. The trouble is, sometimes people can get a bit swept up in the merriment of it all and then find themselves singing the Christmas blues instead of those holly jolly carols.
Such is the case in "Love Hard," which features Nina Dobrev as Natalie Bauer, a Los Angeles-based writer who's been terribly unlucky in love but has a turn of fortune when she meets her perfect personality match on a dating app. After feeling a true connection to her new beau during their many late-night calls, Natalie decides to surprise her handsome fellow "Die Hard" fanatic by flying to the East Coast to spend Christmas with him in person. The bad news is the person she thought she was communicating with, Tag (Darren Barnet), is actually his estranged friend, Josh (Jimmy O. Yang), who's been using Tag's photos to communicate with Natalie the whole time.
Natalie is immediately humiliated and infuriated by being catfished, but she also came all this way for a chance at love, and she still wants to know the real Tag. So, instead of rushing back home, she strikes up a deal with Josh to help her date Tag in exchange for pretending to be Josh's girlfriend in front of his family. What could possibly go wrong? Well, what follows is a fun and lighthearted series of holiday hijinks as this unlikely duo works together on their unusual missions.
Nina Dobrev and Jimmy O. Yang are absolutely adorable as screen partners throughout their many misadventures in "Love Hard," and there's one scene in particular that makes us love these actors even more.
It's the climb
After Natalie decides to overlook Josh's disappointing deception, she begins going along with his plan to act as his girlfriend in front of his family. To hold up his end of the bargain, Josh then coaches Natalie on all things Tag and introduces her to his former friend as his "step-cousin" who's visiting for the holidays.
It's not exactly love at first sight between Tag and Natalie when they finally come face to face, but thanks to Josh's thoughtful tutorials on Tag's hobbies, she manages to pique Tag's interest enough to earn herself a date with the guy she came all this way for in the first place. The trouble is, she's just signed herself up to spend a day climbing walls with him, and contrary to what she's just told Tag, Natalie does not know how to make it up a mountain — stone, plastic, or otherwise. The tallest thing she's ever climbed is a ladder.
So Josh steps up to offer Natalie some last-minute lessons in wall-climbing at his family's outdoor store ahead of her big date, and in return, Natalie offers a spirited show of sticking up for Josh after some nay-saying from his much more popular brother, Owen (Harry Shum Jr.). When the time comes for Natalie's climbing date with Tag, though, she still needs some on-the-spot coaching, and that's when the chemistry between Nina Dobrev and Jimmy O. Yang reaches all-new heights.
Moving mountains
Natalie and Josh may have only had a little bit of real face time by this point in "Love Hard," but this moment makes it clear how much they already know about each other thanks to all those late-night phone sessions. When Josh sees just how nervous Natalie is about the bustling tower she's expected to scale with ease, he swiftly (and discreetly) gets to work calming her down and talking her through it.
But, as they experienced before in his family's shop, getting up the mountain is only half the battle. Natalie is also terrified when she sees how high she's gotten at the top, so there's no way she's coming back down without some serious guidance. Josh knows just what to do and leaps into action, joining her on the precipice and thoughtfully telling her how she's going to get down — before pulling a fast one on her and having her glide all the way down without a hitch, impressing the still-unsuspecting Tag below.
Fans of Dobrev may be used to seeing her conquer all manner of physical obstacles, particularly with her star-making turn as Elena Gilbert and her bloodthirsty doppelganger Katherine Pierce in TV's "The Vampire Diaries." But the maneuvers she has to pull in this scene are about so much more than elegant stunt work — her character is also doing some gymnastics with her own heart as she chooses to trust Josh again and let him guide her to conquer one of her biggest fears without anyone else knowing about it.
Meanwhile, you've no doubt gotten a stitch in your side courtesy of Jimmy O. Yang's previous roles in series like "Silicon Valley" and "Space Force." But here, he manages to be both hilarious and heartwarming as Josh, concealing how much he cares for Natalie and how much it stings to help her fall, quite literally, for someone else.
After deceiving each other and everyone around them for so long, it's at this moment that we start to see the people Natalie and Josh may really be lying to are themselves. Both Dobrev and Yang manage to layer the scene with their characters' deep emotional connection and denial of the same, all while keeping things light and quite humorous with a touch of physical comedy.