Danica McKellar's basically the reigning queen of Christmas rom-com movies -- with her recent catalog of work making it clear she's got it all down to a festive science.
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00:00Christmas is upon us, and all any of the girls in my office care about is Christmas movies.
00:07That's all they're watching.
00:08That's all they talk about.
00:09Awesome.
00:10Is that your, like, new lane now, like, Christmas movies?
00:14I have done 11 Christmas movies now.
00:16I did one for Lifetime, seven for Hallmark, this is my third for Great American Family,
00:21and that one comes out this November 29th on Great American Family, it's called A Cinderella
00:25Christmas Ball.
00:26I love that we make movies where, yes, people have struggles, they're trying to figure stuff
00:30out, but they're not solving their problems with greed and selfishness and bad behavior,
00:34they're trying to do their best, they're really trying their best, and that kind of earnestness
00:38and heartwarming and buoyancy, that kind of attitude is something that I think we need
00:42more of in the world, and I love putting it out there.
00:45Great American Family is doing so well, like, I didn't think that they would be as big and
00:51as competitive as they are now, but a lot of these movies that we're talking about,
00:56we hear Great American Family, Great American Family, what do you credit that success to?
01:00Well, Bill Abbott ran Hallmark Channel for 20 years and really created this whole genre
01:06of the Christmas movie rom-com, the way it is on cable television now, and then he left
01:11and started a new network called Great American Family, and so it's still him, so it's that
01:15consistency of that genre that we've gotten to create and win the hearts of many, many
01:22Americans.
01:23How do you get creative with, like, how we're going to go about making a script for a Christmas
01:28movie?
01:29I mean, for me as an actress, it's about making it real, really real in every moment.
01:35A lot of them follow a certain kind of pattern, there's screenwriting books out there that
01:37will tell you, here are the nine different types of movies out there, and then every
01:41movie pretty much follows that, or it's not fun to watch, so we as humans have certain
01:46kinds of stories that are satisfying and fun to watch, and in the rom-com genre, it's limited.
01:53It's going to be a happy ending, it's going to be a fight that happens right before things
01:56get better, I mean, and in Christmas movies, you add to that, you're always going to have
02:01a snowball fight or hot cocoa or all the elements that make it feel Christmassy, and the truth
02:06is, they are pretty similar to each other, but that's okay.
02:09And people like that, people go to their favorite restaurant back and back and back.
02:13Yes, it's familiar and it's heartwarming and it's satisfying and it feels so good at the
02:16holidays and I'm so blessed to be able to make them.