For Bell (pictured at top), deciding to spend the summer hiatus of Army Wives(the Lifetime series she was starring in at the time) filming the first Good Witch movie was, in a word, fortuitous. Following its 2008 premiere, Good Witch proved a ratings winner for Hallmark Channel and spawned six highly successful sequels. So when the network took the franchise to series, which is currently in its third season, Bell was thrilled.
“It’s really nice having it as a series,” she admits. “It was great when it was once a year; literally every time I had a break from Army Wives, which was a lot darker and serious with a lot of tears, I would get to do a Good Witch movie. It’s wild when you think almost ten years have passed since that first movie and it has certainly evolved. We did this one little movie, another the next year and it kept growing and growing. My character ended up staying in the little town of Middleton, got married, had a baby -- and now the baby has grown up into Bailee Madison.
“It’s been a really fun adventure,” she continued. “Turning [the show] into a series, we kind of thought it’s different from watching a show once a year. Watching it every week you have to make sure the audience stays interested. I thought, ‘Let’s not make Cassie so perfect; let’s have some things that throw her.’ What could do that more than having a teenage daughter with some witch abilities? We added a very handsome and single neighbor in James Denton, so there are things to make Cassie not so perfect and not know everything all the time, which can get annoying on a weekly basis.”
Bell wasn’t ready to reveal the details of Sunday’s episode. “I’m not going to divulge everything because I’d have to kill you if I did,” she laughed. But she was delighted to gush about Bailee (pictured below right with Bell).
“I have a few favorite things about the show, and one of them is Bailee Madison,” she said. “She’s a love and I adore her. She’s so sweet and talented and reminds me so much of my daughter [Gemma] who’s 14. So our mother-daughter scenes are so real, and we really have such a great bond. The episode on Sunday explores a lot of that, the mother-daughter adventures that us little witches have.”
In fact, Bell recently elevated her off-screen relationship with 17-year-old Madison, stepping in to act as her "real-life">