One of the nice things about Hallmark+ is that if you’re still knee-deep in fall and not quite ready for Countdown to Christmas, you can enjoy still your fall favorites from this year’s lineup and the Fall Into Love vault. Home Turf is one of the new class, and when I chatted with Warren Christie last week for A Royal Montana Christmas, we also chatted about that first film.
You can read our full preview here, but the TL;DR is: Christie reteams with Nikki DeLoach as a college football coach and president, respectively, who find themselves unwittingly co-parenting the freshman football players when they’re relocated to the president’s residence.
Christie loved getting to work with DeLoach again, and doing his first sports-themed Hallmark entry. As the dad of a rising teenage hockey player, he could also tap into that papa bear athlete mode. “I actually played football at university, it was always my main sport. So when a football movie came along, it was a no-brainer,” he laughs.
“We spent about a month in Utah. Salt Lake City was beautiful, and I was able to do a few things in the area. And it was a little different than the regular films, because you had all these storylines with the boys and what they were doing. It wasn’t your regular guy meets girl. All of the actors that they brought in were great.”
Reconnecting with DeLoach, and so soon after their Christmas film, was a bonus. “Nikki and I obviously have a relationship. We work very well together. And we have that comfort level, which helps,” he explains.
“Sometimes, you’ve got to meet someone new and you get lucky and you catch lightning in a bottle, but to actually already have a relationship with Nikki was huge. She’s right in her pocket and really good at that comedic tone. So it was a really, really fun movie with a lot of fun elements.”
Home Turf is now streaming on Hallmark+ in the US and StackTV in Canada.
Photos courtesy of Natalie Cass for Hallmark Media.
