Who’s Coming for Christmas? Builds a Movie Around a Dining Room Table
Julie inherited her grandmother’s dining room table. That is the object the entire movie hangs on, and it is a better choice than it sounds.
She has just moved to a new town and is furnishing the place with the things her late grandmother left her. The table is the centerpiece, and she decides the right way to honor it is to host Christmas Eve dinner, for eight, in a town where she has been living for about five minutes.
Who’s Coming for Christmas? premieres Friday, October 30 at 8/7c.
Then the weather turns
The plan involves her new neighbor Mark and his daughter Vanessa, and a guest list Julie assembles with more hope than evidence. Bad weather starts wiping people off it. Hallmark’s copy promises a series of small Christmas miracles that fill the table anyway, which tells you where this lands without telling you how.
The premise is quiet by this network’s standards. There is no failing bakery, no inheritance clause, no corporate buyer. It is one woman, one evening, and the question of whether anybody comes. Hallmark does this version less often than you would think, and when it works it is because the movie is willing to sit in the hour before the doorbell rings.
Rhiannon Fish is a Signed, Sealed, Delivered regular
Fish gets called the Australian Hallmark actress a lot, which is half right. She was born in Calgary and moved to Melbourne at four. She broke out as April Scott across three years of Home and Away, played Ontari on The 100, appeared in Neighbours, and finished second on Dancing with the Stars Australia.
Her Hallmark shelf is past a dozen and still growing: You’re Bacon Me Crazy, A Splash of Love, When Love Springs, My Norwegian Holiday, A Costa Rican Wedding, Polar Opposites, A Machu Picchu Proposal, A Picture of Her, Remembering Love, Aussie at Heart and more. She has also become a fixture of the Signed, Sealed, Delivered franchise across three installments, and played Nora in Nikki & Nora: Sister Sleuths on Hallmark Mystery.
Jake Foy came from the stage and stayed for the writing
Foy is best known to Hallmark viewers as Tuff McMurray on Ride, which makes him one of the relatively few actors in this rotation who has led a Hallmark scripted series rather than only its movies. This is his sixth Hallmark film, after Eat, Drink and Be Married, Love in Store, A Little Daytime Drama, When Christmas Was Young and The Wish Swap.
He trained in music theatre at Sheridan College outside Toronto and got his first professional contract at nineteen in a staging of High School Musical. He played Melchior in Spring Awakening and appeared in an early production of Come From Away. He also directs: two short films through Second City Toronto’s conservatory and beyond, plus a 38-minute musical short he wrote and directed called More Together.
Mila Morgan plays Vanessa, Mark’s daughter. She is not a first-timer either, with Christmas at the Catnip Cafe, North to Home and The Holiday Sitter behind her, plus Ginny Lisko on Apple TV+’s Home Before Dark and a run on Netflix’s The Baby-Sitters Club.
One thing to sort out before you search for it
There is a 1990 movie called Guess Who’s Coming for Christmas? with a nearly identical title and no connection to this one. If you go looking for a trailer and land on something from thirty-six years ago, that is why.
On which note: this film has no trailer, no photo gallery and no cast page on Hallmark’s site as of late September. Three actors have been announced for a movie whose entire premise is a dinner for eight, so there is more cast out there that simply has not been published. No director or writer has been named either.
When to watch
Who’s Coming for Christmas? premieres Friday, October 30 at 8/7c on Hallmark Channel, with an encore Saturday October 31 at 6/5c, streaming next day on Hallmark+. See the 17th Countdown to Christmas schedule for everything else this season.
Setting a table for people you are not sure will come is a real thing that real people do every December, and it is a more exposed position than most of what this genre asks of its leads. A movie that takes it seriously has somewhere honest to go.
Sources: Hallmark Channel, TVLine.
