Tonight, Hallmark has big plans to re-air The Wedding Veil. Yes re-air. A re-airing of a popular Hallmark film would normally not be “news” in the traditional sense, but this second premiere of the Lacey Chabert starrer is special, because it official kicks off the airing of a trilogy of network films the former Mean Girls star has called a “longtime dream.” In fact, the movies starring Chabert and uniting her with Alison Sweeney and Autumn Reeser took a lot longer to get off the ground than you might have guessed.
Lacey Chabert has been hyping up The Wedding Veil’s airing tonight with posts related to getting to work with the other two major Hallmark names. In a post on Instagram Stories, she noted:
Well, it had been a longtime dream of mine to act alongside my Hallmark sisters. And I just loved the idea that these are amazing friends who met in college and they remained close.
Having a “trilogy” of movies with different stars is a new and unusual concept for the Hallmark Channel, and it's one that Kelly Clarkson referred to the other day as the network's version of "The Avengers." It’s also a dream that Chabert had come up with on her own and pitched to the cabler with help from Beth Grossbard and the two writers on the movie, Sandra Berg and Judith Berg. It’s awesome to see Chabert grow from acting in Hallmark movies to sharing her own voice and telling her own stories, but from the sounds of things, Covid might have kept us from seeing The Wedding Veil and its two subsequent projects.
In fact, Autumn Reeser took to her own social media to explain that we were supposed to actually get these movies some time ago. The films were just coming together when Covid-19 shut the world down, and it took a lot of time effort and patience to work out how to get them off of the ground again. She noted on Instagram:
Two days before the world shut down, I signed on to a trilogy of movies with Hallmark. We were supposed to start filming them in April 2020…which of course did not happen as the world scrambled to make sense of our new reality. A lot of hard work and logistics and sacrifices went into getting this ship back in the water, which finally happened one year later.
In particular, Reeser’s film The Wedding Unveiled is set in Italy and was partially filmed in Italy, which I’m sure added a whole layer of “how are we going to get this done?” to the production. It sounds like it took a year for schedules to open up and logistics to be worked out.
Meanwhile, in general Hallmark films as a whole were honestly among the first productions to be able to come back online with rigorous Covid safety protocols in place in 2020. The network’s stars and crews adhered to strict quarantine rules and even filmed in “pods” in order to make productions work. If that hadn't happened who knows where the movies would still be?
Still, it took a while to make The Wedding Veil, The Wedding Unveiled and The Wedding Veil Legacy happen. They were supposed to film in April of 2020. It’s been nearly two years since then and the trilogy is just airing in full for the first time this month. While we got a sneak peek at Chabert’s flick last month -- and she shared a special look at a detail she added you can look out for -- after re-airing airing tonight, The Wedding Unveiled will premiere next week with the third movie heading to the schedule on February 19th.
If you are going to have to wait this long to air a passion project, I suppose there are worse times for a network to do so than around the Galentine’s Day holiday. Meanwhile, I hope fans of the channel have some ice cream and perhaps even some rosé handy over the next few weeks.
