Catherine Bell, star of Hallmark Channel’s Good Witch franchise, switches networks this weekend for the premiere of her latest movie Home for Christmas Day on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. She plays widowed Jane McKendrick, protective mother of teenage daughter Betsy (Matreya Fedor), whose focus is to spare her daughter from life’s harsh realities. Her worst fears are realized when Betsy falls for a soon-to-be-deployed soldier, because Betsy’s father was killed while on active duty when she was young. Jane is determined that her daughter not experience the same heartache and attempts to persuade Betsy to abandon the romance before she becomes too attached. For Bell, who had some experience with the subject matter during her seven seasons on the Lifetime series Army Wives, the experience was a personal one.
“I’m so excited about this,” Bell (pictured at top and below) recently told me. “One of my dearest friends [actress] Jennifer Aspen came up with the story and was also an executive producer on it, so we got a chance to work together. I’ve known her for maybe 25 years!
“We started in acting class together,” she continued. “Her husband [David O’Donnell] was in the same class and was an executive producer also, so we all had a blast. We kept pinching each other saying we had this idea and now we’re sitting here on set making it and saying these words!”
Bell, who also serves as an executive producer on the movie, was thrilled to be working for