Hallmark Channel Christmas movies have a reputation to uphold.
Getty Paul Campbell starred in Hallmark Channel’s 2021 film „The Santa Stakeout“ opposite Tamera Mowry-Housley. H allmark Channel Christmas movies have a reputation to uphold. They’re known and beloved for being as sweet as sugarplums and as wholesome as a Norman Rockwell painting. But one actor and writer who had a hand in three of this year’s Countdown to Christmas movies is encouraging Hallmark Channel to expand the kind of stories it tells and how it tells them. 42-year-old Paul Campbell first began pitching movie ideas to Hallmark in 2015 but it wasn’t until 2017 when one of the films he’d written aired on the channel. In 2021, he starred in “The Santa Stakeout” with Tamera Mowry-Housley and wrote “An Unexpected Christmas” and “Christmas at Castle Hart,” the latter of which was the highest-ranked Hallmark movie of the year. In an interview with E! News, Campbell admitted that he tends to “take a lot of leeway” and “a lot of liberties” as an actor in Hallmark movies. He also explained how he’s managed to inject more realism and humor into Hallmark Channel films while still delivering the feel-good fun audiences expect. A post shared by Paul Campbell (@paulcampbellofficial) In “The Santa Stakeout,” Campbell and Tamera Mowry-Housley play undercover detectives pretending to be a married couple. Campbell told E! News that the team at Hallmark has been good at giving him projects where he can experiment and bring some humor to the role. “They have been really good casting me in roles where they think I can be off the leash a little bit. Not always, but this one, they really wanted it to be more of a traditional rom-com and they were like, ‘We think Paul could probably go and have some fun with it,’ and I certainly did,” he told the outlet.
