Why Andrew Walker & Lacey Chabert’s Hallmark Reunion Was ‘Very Emotional’ Behind the Scenes (EXCLUSIVE)

The highly-anticipated onscreen reunion of Hallmark stars Andrew Walker and Lacey Chabert — whose Christmas movie “She’s Making a List” premieres on December 6, 2025 — was very different behind-the-scenes than when the duo filmed 2018’s “My Secret Valentine.”

“I feel like we’re just different people now,” Walker told EntertainmentNow, noting that in the years since their last film, they’ve both been shaped by loss, change, and becoming involved parents — all things that made the premise of their new movie “very emotional.”

---

Andrew Walker Says He & Lacey Chabert Were Touched by Movie’s Message

Play

In “She’s Making a List,” Chabert plays an auditor from a consulting agency hired by Santa and his elves, whose job is to determine whether kids belong on the Naughty or Nice List based on a very specific set of criteria. But things aren’t so black and white once she meets widow Jason Duncan and his 11-year-old daughter Charlie, played by Cadence Compton, who’s been acting up since her mother’s passing.

“We’ve both been parents for like a decade,” Walker told EntertainmentNow, “and once you’ve gone through a lot of things that life throws at you, and you get more experience, it changes you.”

“So for Lacey and I to do a movie now centered around this one little girl,” Walker continued, “and to do a movie focused on whether kids make a naughty or nice list, it was a very emotional and visceral movie for both of us.”

Hallmark

Walker said playing the dad of a girl who’s similar in age to his eldest son — a girl who’s grieving her mom and “has gone through a really traumatic moment in her life” — was particularly moving for him.

“She lost her mom, my (character’s) wife, a year and a half, two years ago, before the holidays,” Walker explained. “So this is why she’s acting out, and this is the message in the movie — that no kids belong on a ‘naughty’ list. For most kids, it’s just circumstances that they go through that make them do things that are uncharacteristic for them, right?”

“I feel things so much more deeply now being a dad,” Walker told EntertainmentNow. “I was able to connect with the material so much more now than I would have years ago.”

---

Andrew Walker Says ‘She’s Making a List’ Was a Stretch for Him & Lacey Chabert — But His ‘Most Magical’ Movie

View this post on Instagram

Since filming “My Secret Valentine,” Walker and Chabert’s friendship has grown, he told EntertainmentNow, adding that she’s also become close with his wife. That level of comfort allowed them to be authentic with their feelings while filming “She’s Making a List” and really intentional about the message their movie sends. The result, he said, is the “most magical” movie he’s been part of.

His and Chabert’s rapport also helped as they stretched outside their comfort zone as actors. Acknowledging that Chabert is as “consistently” kind and sweet as she seems to fans, Walker said, “I think this movie really stretched her to break out of the ‘normal Lacey’ that you would see, in the best way possible. She really took this role on. She is so good in this movie.”

Meanwhile, Walker said that in recent movies like “The Wisest Men” and “The Reluctant Royal,” he’s played “the guy who’s always trying to hold it all together, but in an extroverted, kind of frantic way.”

However, in “She’s Making a List,” he said, his character is facing “a pretty dark time in his life, because it’s the second Christmas without his wife, he feels like he’s losing this relationship with his daughter, and, you know, it’s a beautiful father-daughter story and how he is trying to rekindle that (connection).”

Between the heartwarming subject matter and meaningful roles, Walker said of his onscreen reunion with Chabert, “I think this movie was the perfect movie for us. I could not imagine doing this movie with anybody else.”

“She’s Making a List” premieres on December 6 at 8 p.m. Eastern time, and will be available to stream via Hallmark+ the following day.