Who says you can’t go home again? As Kristoffer Polaha’s directorial debut becomes available to rent or purchase via Amazon Prime on March 24, 2026, the beloved Hallmark star is eternally grateful for the experience — including the chance to truly go home after decades away.
Polaha fulfilled multiple dreams by making the spooky and charming romance “Mimics,” which first hit theaters in January. He told EntertainmentNow that he had long dreamed of filming a movie in his hometown of Reno, Nevada — not only because it’s where he was first inspired to go into acting, but because it would feel like a “gift” to spend so much time with his parents after leaving home at the young age of 14.
Kristoffer Polaha’s Dad Has the Last Line in ‘Mimics’
Panoramic PicturesPolaha, who has decades of movie and TV roles under his belt, including starring in more than 20 Hallmark movies, told EntertainmentNow that he felt destined to “chase something bigger” by the time he was 12 or 13, and knew he needed to leave Reno to do so. He went to boarding school in California and, after graduation, headed for New York City to pursue his creative dreams at NYU.
“I left my mom and dad at 14,” Polaha said, noting that he went home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and summers, but that he was always working, whether installing refrigerators or washing cars or being a busboy. His dad — a successful lawyer who later became a renowned judge in Reno — insisted that being a “hard worker and good worker was tantamount to manhood,” Polaha recalled.
After attending college and working summers in New York, he said, “My life began. I was in New York City acting, I had an agent, a manager. And within two years, I met Julianne, I got married, I had my own family. I really think my mom had always thought, ‘We’ll let him go to boarding school, we’ll let him go to college, and then he’ll come back to Reno.'”
Now that two of Polaha’s three sons have left the nest, he realizes how he “kind of robbed” his parents of precious time and memories with him. So getting to stay with them in Reno for nearly two months during the pre-production and filming of “Mimics” was a very special homecoming.
“My parents came to the set, my dad has the last line in the movie, and it was really a beautiful way for me to just, sort of, go home and do what I do,” Polaha smiled. “It was kind of my gift back to them. And I thought, ‘If nothing else comes out of this thing, I had this moment in time with them, and this (creative) dream, too, that I carved out of nothing and made real.”
Kristoffer Polaha Credits His Parents for Fostering His Love of Movies
Polaha has fond memories of growing up in Reno, telling EntertainmentNow he had an “incredible childhood of imagination and BB guns and sage brush and dirt trails, endless hours of safe, outdoor wandering. I mean, I was an adventurer as a kid. And then I had my first job in fourth grade.”
His favorite thing, though, were family movie nights. Polaha wistfully recalled how he’d tag along with his mom, dad and three older brothers to see a new movie each Friday night, remembering, “We would stop at 7-11 and my mom would get Red Vines, I’d get the Jujubes or Reese’s Pieces. We would sneak our candy into the Park Lane Cinema 16 or the downtown theater, and we would watch movies as a family. I can remember seeing ‘Tootsie,’ ‘Chariots of Fire,’ and then one day, my dad took me out of school at noon to a matinee of ‘Neverending Story.'”
“I have these incredible memories of the cinema experience,” Polaha said, which fueled his desire to one day make movies rather than follow in his dad’s footsteps as a defense lawyer. “He used to be like, ‘Dude, you would have made such a good lawyer’ and I was like, ‘Nope, not for me.’ He practiced law for 51 years and he had so much integrity, his reputation was impenetrable. He also had to work his ass off, waking up at 4 a.m. to pour over files and learn all the facts of a case.”
But it was a conversation with his dad that shaped Polaha’s vision for his own life’s work, after they saw Oliver Stone’s “JFK” together. He recalled how his dad watched the movie through the lens of a lawyer.
“My dad was like, ‘It’s interesting what Oliver Stone just did. He made such a compelling case that JFK wasn’t killed by just one guy'” Polaha recalled. “And then he said, ‘That’s what I try to do in a court, I try to take a thing that everyone thinks happened, and I try to build a scenario where there’s a little bit of doubt, and if I do that, they can’t convict the guy. That’s how I win cases, by creating even a shadow of a doubt. And Oliver Stone was able to accomplish that with a movie.'”
“We had this really beautiful conversation about the power of cinema,” Polaha shared. “And I think that was a really defining night for me, because I realized all of a sudden, you can make art that moves culture, that shapes vision, that steers society. Like, you can actually you can make a change. I felt like I could do something important, even if it (was) just through entertainment.”
It’s no wonder, then, that “Mimics” is much more than a light “horror-romance,” but also a thought-provoking story about chasing fame and fortune, and the power of family and faith. The movie is now available to stream via AmazonPrime.
