With the holiday season just around the corner, Jaicy Elliot caught up with HELLO! to talk about her brand new Hallmark movie – My Southern Family Christmas. Plus, the Grey's Anatomy star opened up about her co-star Ellen Pompeo's surprising departure from the long-running medical drama.
The actress, who has gained widespread recognition in her role as Dr Taryn Helm on Grey's as well as the popular spin-offs Station 19 and Grey's Anatomy: The Webisodes, is officially a proud member of the Hallmark family. Joining the Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell and One Tree Hill's Moira Kelly in her latest movie role, Jaicy revealed what drew her to the project, and she also talked about her special connection with Ellen Pompeo.
What drew you to the role of Campbell?
When they called me for the role and they offered me the role, obviously I wanted to do a Hallmark Christmas movie because it's kind of an iconic American tradition, so I was very inclined to say yes without even having read the script. But then I read the script and it was sort of a no-brainer for me because the character's arc, and the storyline, is about her relationship with herself and her identity through her relationship with her father whom she's never known and she's grown up without him.
It's her story about her going to find him and there's a bit of a vaudeville sort of situation where she doesn't tell him who she is. She's there under, you could say, false pretense but not really because she's a journalist so she's there to do an article about the Cajun culture where her dad lives and so it was a perfect mix of discovering Cajun Christmas, which I knew nothing about and being French, it sounded like something I wanted to discover. Also [it is] about the love between a daughter and her father which I felt was something different for Hallmark and was exciting.
The actress portrays Campbell in the Hallmark movie My Southern Family Christmas
Those were the initial things that pulled me in, and then I heard about the cast and working with Bruce Campbell, Moira Kelly and Ryan Rottman. It was all sort of a pretty little package, it was hard to say no.
