Lacey Chabert and Scott Wolf portrayed siblings for six seasons on Party of Five — and the pair are reuniting 23 years later Hallmark’s 2023 Countdown to Christmas.
Chabert, 40, and Wolf, 55 — who starred as Claudia and Bailey Salinger, respectively, on the Fox series from 1994 to 2000 — will be paring up as another sister-brother duo for the new original movie A Merry Scottish Christmas. The film, which was written by Andrea Canning and Audrey Schulman, will premiere later this year during the network’s annual holiday programming event.
“Scott and I have talked for years about doing another project together. When we first read this story about these siblings at a crossroads, we both knew it was the perfect opportunity,” Chabert said in an official statement on Tuesday, January 27. Wolf, for his part, is just as excited to share the screen with his longtime pal.
“Working with Lacey on Party of Five was one of my favorite experiences ever,” the Nancy Drew actor gushed on Tuesday. “Reuniting after all of these years to tell such a beautiful story together is a dream that I’m so glad is coming true.”
The film will follow estranged siblings Lindsay (Chabert) and Brad (Wolf) as they travel to Scotland for Christmas to reunite with their mother, Jo (Fiona Bell). Once they’ve arrived, however, a big family secret is revealed — and it may just change everything.
“We are so excited to reunite Lacey and Scott and know our viewers will fall in love with this movie,” Lisa Hamilton Daly, Executive Vice President, Programming, Hallmark Media, said on Tuesday. “The nostalgia of seeing Lacey and Scott together again on screen is going to be a special holiday treat for our viewers.”
While Wolf is relatively new to the Hallmark family — he starred in 2019’s A Christmas Love Story opposite Kristin Chenoweth — Chabert, for her part, has made her mark in over 25 films for the network over the years.
“These movies mean so much to me. I really am genuine when I say that,” Chabert exclusively told Us Weekly in October 2021 about making both holiday and year-round Hallmark flicks. “They’re not just jobs and I feel a responsibility to the audience to make the absolute best movie I can.”
The Mean Girls star noted at the time that she’s tried to “raise the bar” on each project to keep fans coming back for more.
“[When] someone lets you into their living room for two hours, it’s kind of an honor,” Chabert told Us. “I want to leave people with a good feeling.”
Wolf, meanwhile, has starred as Carson Drew on The CW’s Nancy Drew since 2019. That same year, he got candid with Us about rewatching scenes from his Party of Five days — a family drama that was known for its emotional beats.
“There’s a particular scene where [my character] Bailey is kind of falling on the sword for the last time for the family and saying he’s not going to go to school and stay home so [my sister] Julia (Neve Campbell) can go to school and that he’s OK,” Wolf said. “There was something so … I’m emotional right now talking about it! After all that time, they wrote this beautiful scene between [brothers] Charlie (Matthew Fox) and Bailey, it so encapsulated who he was throughout the course of the entire thing, that it was really, really moving to see because I had forgotten about the scene.”
Despite not allowing his children to watch the series quite yet — Wolf shares sons Jackson, 14, and Miller, 10, as well as daughter Lucy, 9, with wife Kelley Limp — he confessed that he’s considered allowing them to tune in due to how relatable the show continues to be even today.
“I think they [his children] hear Party of Five said so often that it looms in the background of our life, to finally put a face to that thing would be cool,” he told Us. “I talk to people all the time who are watching it with their families and they say that the stories are so human and authentic and timeless. It was a really cool conversation starter for parents with their kids back then, I think I would take advantage of that too.”
