Vanessa Lengies & Corey Sevier Talk Being Inspired by 'It's A Wonderful Life' & Feeling All Their Emotions While Filming Hallmark Channel's 'Take Me Back For Christmas' (Exclusive)

ON TAKING NOTES FROM ‘IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE’:

While It’s A Wonderful Life was a great inspiration, Corey says that The Family Man also played a part.

“It’s A Wonderful Life is a movie that is an epic film emotionally…the arc of that film,” he says, adding that screenwriter Kate Pragnell (also his wife), were also inspired by The Family Man, which “had that sort of magical fish, fish outta water, wake up in a new life aspect to it.”

He continued, “Taking two films that I really adore and saying, you know, how do we kind of mash it together? And then Kate taking it and making it her own with the script was a really exciting opportunity for us to tell a Christmas movie that has all the Christmas elements, but also has unexpected things.”

“Then the question that comes is that now that we’ve written this incredibly complex character that demands everything from huge comedy swings to huge emotional swings. Who can we get to play that? Who has the chops? And of course, Vanessa was the obvious choice for us. She and the rest of the cast do so beautifully, in my opinion, is take the material that Kate created and elevate it even beyond what we had hoped for.”

Vanessa then chimed in, saying that she wanted to play Renee as just an honest person.

“An honest person’s journey through those wild circumstances of getting a second chance,” she shared. “I love the comedy of trying to win your husband back. That’s just so, you know, you’re like, ‘I already, I already married you and now I have to do this all over again?’ Just the love that drives her through all of that, and the heartbreak that follows of her struggle to kind of control her new reality and not being able to.”

“Really you just see, you just see a woman who, at the beginning, I got to play this woman who was struggling,” Vanessa added. “She was stuck out of grief and was stuck out of the fear of things changing too quickly or losing the things she already had.”

That’s when a “strange chance to have all the things she ever wanted” comes along, but “not on her terms. It was a real story of surrender or control and then finding that appreciation for what you had right in front of you.”