[Warning: General spoilers ahead.]
Sexy and Hallmark movie aren’t typically terms that commingle, but get ready, because Texas Two-Step is throwing down Saturday night. The first-time pairing of Heather Hemmens and Brendan Penny follows Olivia and Luke, former childhood besties turned first loves whose romance ended badly 20 years earlier. When they meet again during Olivia’s trip home to see her Aunt Ruby (B.J. Harrison), who owns the local honky-tonky destination, it becomes apparent very quickly that the former sweethearts are definitely not over each other.
Olivia comes home at the behest of her cousin, Mason (Nathan Witte), and brings her bestie, June (Kaylah Zander), with her. While Mason and June are smitten right out of the gate, Olivia and Luke argue and flirt in equal measure. When Brian (Zach Smadu), a former classmate who they didn’t know well but who has gone on to become a dating app tech mogul while still being a nice small-town guy, enters the chat, Olivia’s focus is split when she sees him with fresh eyes.
As Aunt Ruby astutely calls it, once Olivia and Luke stop dancing around each other and instead dance with each other, nobody else stands a chance. Throw in a little threat to the bar and Aunt Ruby, and Olivia’s yearning to move out of the shadow of her boss, renowned photographer Meryl (Loretta Walsh), and whether or not to try again with Luke isn’t her biggest quandary.
It’s a very good film, and I’m telling you here now that Hallmark is straight up trolling you with Brendan Penny. Black hat, white t-shirt, horse, smooth moves on the dance floor. They’re leaning waaaaay into relaunching Penny as not your nice boy next door. He had a good run. Get ready for 2.0. And the chemistry between him and Hemmens is not for the faint of heart. The whole ensemble is aces. Eva Tavares, a graduate of the Make Her Mark program, who also helmed last year’s The Christmas Baby, directs a script by Mel Cowan.
I chatted with Tavares this evening about the project, which she was eager to do from the moment it was casually namedropped as a “line dancing movie.”
“This one was a little bit of a special circumstance. I was on a Zoom call that was hosted by Ashley Williams through the Make Her Mark program with our execs at Hallmark … a meet and greet for me to get to know folks. Everyone in the Make Her Mark program got the same meeting. And Dickie Copeland, my amazing exec on this, was on that call and she just kind of casually mentioned a line dancing movie without going into it at all,” she recalls.
“And it stuck in my brain, like, ‘Oh, I would love to do a dance movie. I wanna do a dance movie.’ And so I just kind of filed that away. And then I had to be in LA and I asked her if we could do a lunch. I prepared a pitch of what I would do with a dance movie. I’ve shot a lot of music videos and I come from a dance background, so I put together little video clips of what I had done before and reference images.”
“And while we were at this lunch, I said, ‘Hey, you mentioned this line dancing movie. Can I show you some things? I just had some thoughts.’ I kept it casual, but at the time she didn’t really say anything more about it. I left it and forgot about it. And then six months later she called me and said, ‘You know, I’ve never forgotten about that pitch. Will you do this movie?’ And of course it was an immediate, ‘Hell, yeah.’”
The film was a perfect fit for Tavares, whose directing career was born out of the pandemic and her initiative to keep busy and still be able to work when the entertainment industry had to pivot.
“It’s honestly been a bit of a windy road to get here. I have a Bachelor of Music in opera performance. For most of my life, I grew up dancing and then I moved into singing, and then I exclusively did musical theater and opera until the pandemic happened. And then I started acting in Hallmark movies and other rom-coms,” she explains.
“I had been coaching actors for a long time before that. And as I started acting more for film, I thought about coaching actors for film. And then that kind of transitioned into, ‘Well, what is the storytelling medium, the technical side of it, cameras and framing and shot fitting?’ And I just started to be fascinated by it.”
“During the pandemic, I bought myself a little gimbal for my phone and an editing program and I just started shooting scenes for friends and editing on my own and learning by practice. And then I started shooting actual short films. I collaborated with some friends and did some independent projects that did quite well in festival rounds. And then I started applying to programs and it just kind of snowballed from there.”
Tavares applied to and was accepted into the Make Her Mark program in 2024. “I got to shadow Peter Benson and Gail Harvey and Ali Liebert, and so many of the established directors. I shadowed Peter Benson through the program, but I sought out my own shadowing before that and just started to accumulate knowledge from all these amazing, generous humans,” she shares.
“I believe that everything I’ve done thus far has brought me to this moment. I’m an opera singer. The kind of prep and technique that you need to do that instills a lot of work ethic within me that I think I carry over into my prep. I’m a dancer, so I move the camera like it’s choreography. I’m an actor, so I understand how to speak to actors, and I also have been there so I can have the empathy and the presence to hopefully show up for them and make them feel safe and comfortable to give their best performances.”
“It feels like the meeting of all of those different parts of myself. I also feel the most free in it because I love being a part of the team and I love being able to collaborate in that way. Some of my favorite moments are on set are when we’re doing something big, like those dance sequences or those montage sequences, and you get to the other side of it and you just kind of stand back and we look at everyone around you and we all did it together.”
“You take this collective breath of like, ‘Wow, look at this thing that we did in this moment.’ And then we get to see it up on screen and it’s immortalized forever and it’s just such a special, special thing. And I’m so grateful to be here.”
Hemmens and Penny were already attached when Tavares received her offer, but she was part of the team who filled out the cast with an impeccable ensemble, many of whom are Hallmark staples. “We generally don’t have say for [the leads]. The [network] already have thoughts of who those people will be, and thank goodness, they know their stuff. Heather and Brendan were perfect. Couldn’t be better. I just love them both so much. And we had such a great time,” she says.
“For the rest of the cast, we do go through auditions and we get to collaborate with the network in a more hands-on way. I could not have asked for a better cast. I just count our lucky stars. It was just a plethora of riches with BJ and Zach and Kaylah and Nathan and Loretta and oh my God, all the bands, and Damon [Gregory] and Johnny [V. Wright] and David [Fung]. It was just so solid across the board.”
“I just watched a YouTube interview that Heather did today, and she said the same thing that we all were feeling, which is we knew when we were doing it, that it felt special. It just felt like the right people were in the room with a script that was so much fun with the movement, the dance, and the puppy, and all these different familial connections. Something felt different. There was some kind of synchronicity and divine intervention of all of us being here at the same time doing this thing. And we all really felt the magic.”
Before filming started, the cast and crew went to the OK Corral, the Kelowna bar used in the film. “It’s a real line dancing bar. Our entire team went there for a line dancing night, and it was wild. It was amazing. Everyone knew every dance, and it was such a good energy in there,” she says. “It’s a really cool place. We could not have done it anywhere else. It was perfect for our needs.”
“I also want to shout out our choreographer, who is one of my close friends from childhood. We grew up dancing together and she did some music videos for me, and then I asked for her to come on this. She is also someone who’s acted in Hallmark movies, so that’s a kind of fun crossover for everyone to know. Her name’s Sarah Formosa. It’s just fun when we get to say that we’ve been in front of these movies as actors, and then we’re also on the back end, and we’re creating these stories together.”
In the film, Mason is caring for a pup he is about to adopt out, and this week the network shared that the pup, Greta, was actually adopted by Penny when the film wrapped production. That’s not the only pay-it-forward that Tavares championed.
“I grew up on farms. My parents actually live two hours away from where we shot. We have tons of rescue animals. Wherever I can do that kind of thing, I [will]. The other thing that we were really adamant about as a team on our set was making sure that nothing got wasted,” she explains.
“So, for example, in the vet’s office, we had a bunch of set dressing that was dog toys and treats and those kinds of things. Those all got donated to the Humane Society. Our general store set had a lot of food that we donated. I really want to make sure that we have some consciousness when we’re making these films and some outreach when we can.”
“And with Greta, our puppy star, that was just kind of a no brainer. I said, ‘Let’s just look into it.’ And there were some little protocol things we had to figure out and what the logistics of that would be, and to make sure that we were being supportive. When we were posting it on the call sheet and we were making those announcements, the producers were also adamant that they pay for adoption fees.”
“That was part of our mission statement. It just kind of felt like, ‘Of course, why wouldn’t we do this? We need a puppy, and it’s supposed to be a rescue. Why don’t we actually reach out to a rescue and see if they have a puppy that would be willing?'”
Tavares says her background working onscreen with pups helped her with directing the puppy here. “I’ve worked with dogs a lot in film. I’ve done two rounds of dog treat commercials for a brand called Bully Bunches. And so I feel pretty confident working with dogs, even if they’re not perfectly trained, because you kind of just choose your angles and your shots, and then you roll the camera and [in] the edit, you find the pockets where they’re doing the thing you want them to do,” she points out.
“So just having that understanding makes me feel like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s no problem. I don’t need a perfectly trained movie dog for this. I can make it work as long as we have a dog that’s comfy.’ And so, it was one of the first thoughts that we had and we followed through and I’m so glad. What a perfect ending to the story.”
Last December’s The Christmas Baby was Tavares’s directorial debut, and this spring, it was nominated for a GLAAD Award. She’s been so grateful for the response to the holiday film starring Ali Liebert and Kat Barrell as a double income/no kids couple who find an abandoned baby just before Christmas, tipping their relationship on its axis as the life they thought they wanted fades into the background of the life they suddenly have.
“Again, I’ve just been so incredibly blessed with the movies that I’ve been attached to. Christmas Baby is incredibly precious to me. I’m a queer woman myself. Having that story out in the world and to bring so much heart to it was truly the biggest gift. I am so incredibly honored. The response was tremendous. So much love for that movie was flooding towards me during that time,” she recalls.
“It was an incredible full-circle moment for me because I shadowed Ali when she was directing A Holiday Sitter. And then she directed me in one of the Christmas on Cherry Lane movies. And then I got to direct her, and what a gift. And Kat and Barbara Niven and Sydney Scotia and Katrina Reynolds, and just an incredible group of humans that came together with the same, singular goal of bringing the most authenticity and heart to this story. And I really think we did that. I’m so proud of that film.”
You can catch The Christmas Baby now on Hallmark+ and next month it will be back in the linear Hallmark Channel rotation for Christmas in July. Our preview of the film is here. Next up, Tavares has already banked directing a third Hallmark film (yet to be announced) that will be part of the 2026 Fall Into Love line up. Stay tuned for that!
Texas Two-Step premieres Saturday, June 13th, at 8 pm/7c on Hallmark Channel in the US and W Network in Canada, and streaming on various outlets in the US. It will also be streaming the next day on Hallmark+ in the US and StackTV in Canada. Here are a couple of sneak peeks.
Photos courtesy of Eva Tavares and Eike Schroter for Hallmark Media;; video courtesy of Hallmark Media.
