[Warning: General spoiler ahead.]
Hallmark Channel closes out its summer season this Friday with the Shakespeare-themed Much About Love, where the play’s the thing for former sweethearts sneakily thrown together, 20 years after their first love flamed out, for a summer Shakespeare festival retelling of “Taming of the Shrew.” Co-written (with Ramona Barckert) and co-produced by Ashley Williams and her husband, Neal Dodson, and directed by Shamim Sarif the film reunites Williams with her Never Kiss a Man in a Christmas Sweater co-star, Niall Matter.
Williams is Bea, a successful TV director, who returns home to the collegiate summer Shakespeare festival run by her mom, Toni (Jennifer Dale), and from which she graduated years earlier. Tasked with directing the centerpiece production that will close out the festival, Bea has enlisted the star of her TV series, Hannah (Lindura), to headline the play in her theater debut.
When she arrives home, Toni drops some unexpected news on Bea on a few fronts, most alarmingly, that she’s already given the lead role to Bea’s former flame, Benny (Matter), with whom things ended badly when she fled her acting career long ago at the end of their theater season together. That’s where the “Much Ado About Nothing” shenanigans kick in. The other news is more promising, but of course how that plays out solely rest on her shoulders if she delivers a hit show. No pressure.
Last weekend, I chatted with Williams about the movie; the recent Hallmark bus tour, the upcoming Dance Party to End Alz, and joining Ali Sweeney for a holiday movie directed by her first Make Her Mark director, Yan-Kay Crystal Lowe.
Williams was excited to bring this passion project, which is firmly rooted in her and Dodson’s lived experience, to life with him. “Shakespeare was my first love. I went to a conservatory for theater and then I studied in London for a year. I did LAMBDA’s program and I did RADA’s program for Shakespeare. So, I assumed I was going to be graduating from college and going straight to Ashland or Utah. I did go to Williamstown and I did theater there. And then I went to New York and did theater there,” she recalls.
“But then I came out to LA for pilot season and started working in TV, much to my complete shock, and my parents’ shock, because I was just absolutely immersed Shakespeare, and Ibsen and Chekhov were my other loves. I still feel, when I approach any material, that I go straight to the punctuation and the rhythm of the comedy because of that training. That’s embedded in me.”
“When I first met my husband, literally the day that we met, he was working as an assistant and I ended up coming into the office and as we’re talking, he started handing me plays that were on the shelf and saying, ‘You should read this, you should read this, you should read this.’ And I was like, ‘I have never been so attracted to anybody in my life,’” she laughs.
“Most women would not think that was a sexy move, but I was so in. He went to Carnegie Mellon and he’d been an actor and then he started producing film. But that’s both of our backgrounds. We always had talked about this rendition of ‘Taming of the Shrew’ that he had done at Utah Shakes in 99, directed by Peggy Shannon, who is a theater director who’s been around a long time. And some of the antiquated aspects of Shakespeare just really kind of don’t hold up,” she explains.
“But she had this concept in “Taming of the Shrew,” which is the most problematic maybe of all the plays when it’s a modern-day rendition. She had this idea that what if she was manipulating Petruchio so that she could get the dowry. And it kind of blew his mind and then it blew my mind. We’ve been together for almost 25 years, and this is the kind of stuff we talk about on date nights.”
“[Hallmark development executive] Jessica Callahan and I have talked a lot about Shakespeare. She’s also a Shakespeare nerd. So she emailed me one day and said, ‘I kind of feel like you’re a Beatrice. Do what you want with that.’ And the idea of setting ‘Much Ado About Love’ at a Shakespeare festival where they’re putting on ‘Taming of the Shrew’ was really where the whole idea became unlocked. And two people who cannot agree about how to tell the story because it’s pretty uniquely anti-feminist. And that’s sort of where our Bea and Benny come in.”
Williams and Dodson took the idea and ran with it, turning the story into a film, and then bringing in Hallmark writer Ramona Barckert to do the final pass. “There are very specific rules to the genre. We wrote our drafts, and then we needed Ramona to do a Hallmark spin on it and make sure that it was true to the form,” she explains.
“And she really helped us with that. It sort of became an amalgam. Neal is in the world of independent film and a short film I wrote was at Sundance, and that’s our world. We needed to make sure that it was consumable via a Hallmark audience.”
Williams loved reuniting with Matter and said he was the exact right choice for them to play off each other in these roles. “Niall is one of those guys that, I throw the ball, he throws it back just as hard. And it’s rare for me to find an actor that can talk as fast as I do. In Christmas Sweater, Nina Weinman Swift, our writer, in the middle of shooting, had to write extra scenes because we were talking so fast that it was coming in too short. So we had to add in extra scenes,” she laughs. “In many ways, he’s my Benny because he ignites my creativity. He makes me laugh so hard. He challenges me, he frustrates me. He’s my intellectual and creative equal that way.”
The dialogue-heavy film plays into their dynamic, and in the film’s most emotinal scene, which I won’t spoil in detail because it really is something very special, that dialogue is no longer spoken. Williams says she and Dodson lived that scene at the beginning of their relationship and loved putting it in the movie for Bea and Benny.
“It was really important to us that this movie felt analog. So we really tried to eliminate phones, texting, all of that. It’s a part of our daily lives, so it makes sense that it’s in so many Hallmark movies. But there was something about this movie that we really wanted to feel more renaissance, more theater, more brick and mortar,” she says.
“My husband and I have been together for almost 25 years, and the first time we said, ‘I love you,’ we were at a restaurant in Venice Beach and they had these white tablecloths and a little jar of crayons on the table. And we started writing to each other, and it was upside down. You’re forced to see the world through the other person’s perspective when you’re writing upside down, and it looked childlike.”
“So we started just playing, and we stopped talking. We spent most of the dinner not speaking and just communicating on this tablecloth. And we started making jokes and, it became this, tête-à-tête, clever, witty, back-and-forth thing. The waitress must have thought we were insane.”
“And we’d only been dating for two weeks or so, but this was the guy. All of that [scene] was real [and the tablecloth] is framed in our living room. It still has food on it. It’s real. It’s messy. It was folded for a couple of years in a Ziploc bag and then when we got married, I had it framed.”
Williams was excited to working with legendary Canadian actress and SurrealEstate and Coroner alumni Jennifer Dale (who, funnily enough is also one half of a popular sister actress duo with her sister, Cynthia), and to discover she had a personal connection to the production.
“I’d never worked with her before, but she’s such a legend,” she shares. “What’s amazing is we rented all of our costumes from the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, and she had worn some of the costumes when she was doing theater at Stratford. Her name is literally in some of the costumes. So having her there, playing this legendary queen of theater was so cool.”
Earlier this summer, Williams was part of the “Hallmark Stars Live” caravan of Hallmarkies faves who traveled by bus and made stops for live theater shows across part of the US in celebration of the Hallmark Channel’s 25th birthday. She’s become a fixture at the in-person events, and she says that her colleagues are now her found family through the shared experiences, which ramped up coming out of the pandemic and continue this winter with the Hallmark Christmas Cruise and multi-weekend Hallmark Christmas Experience event in Kansas City.
“At this point, Nikki always says we’re like this little traveling circus, because of the cruise. There’s this core group and they’ve become my best friends. We’ve done movies together, we’ve done press together, we’ve been to parties together. People have had babies and gotten married and divorced, and we’re living our lives together, and it’s like we’re this ensemble,” she shares.
“And there’s a feeling among this group of people that they have my back no matter what, in the same way that that I used to feel when I was in the cast of a theater production. And if Paul Campbell’s on stage with me, I know I’m safe. And same with Nikki. All of them have your back. We’re in it together.”
Williams and DeLoach are both away from home filming in Vancouver right now and Williams says DeLoach asked her if she missed the bus because she did, and Williams said not the bus, but the decompression sessions at the end of the night. “l miss getting off stage. Nikki and I would wash our faces, put our pajamas on in the theater after the show, go straight to the bus, and then we would just get, crunchy, salty snacks and sit together in our pajamas and just talk about the show, talk about what worked, gab, talk about our kids, talk, all of us together,” she explains.
“And then we would go to sleep for, like, three hours in our weird little bunks. And then we’d wake up at 2:00 AM, go into some hotel in a random city that all felt haunted at 2:00 AM, sleep for seven hours, get up, have breakfast together, get back on the bus, now with coffee but still in our pajamas. It was like grown-up summer camp.”
Williams and DeLoach will be back in their pajamas in September, this time on the dance floor with the return of their Dance Party to End ALZ fundraiser in Los Angeles on September 13th. Williams is proud of the event and even more so that the funds raised have gone toward research that is now actually benefitting patients, some of whom will be there in person.
“I’m so excited about this year. It’s sleep-themed. The money that we raise goes directly to the research grant program at the Alzheimer’s Association. It’s separate from The Walk to End ALZ. This goes directly to science. What’s really exciting and what makes it really unique is that last time we did it, Nikki and I got to sit down and choose which studies we want to fund,” she points out.
“And one of the studies that we chose was this amyloid study for the amyloid fusion for people with Alzheimer’s symptoms. We were the last funders in this study. And now, people are undergoing the amyloid treatment because of the positive results of that study. So we now, in real time, get to see where this money is going. And people who are attending the dance party this year are literally undergoing the amyloid fusion treatment.”
“It’s so rare in fundraising to be able to see where your dollars go so quickly in real time. We’re actively helping people with symptoms now. And it makes me so excited to see what next year I can report. We’ll be able to say we funded the study that now you’re being able to utilize the benefits of. I’m really excited.”
“We also funded a sleep study that said that deep sleep, where the glymphatic system is able to clean your brain while you’re sleeping, that 90-minute sleep cycle, is absolutely critical in the prevention of Alzheimer’s. We have real science telling us to make sleep a priority [so that was part of the choice of theme]. It was also that Nikki and I just wanted to be able to wear our pajamas.”
Williams and DeLoach were both caregivers to their parents—Williams’ mom and DeLoach’s dad both died from the disease—so they’re very focused on resources for patients and their caregivers, who are often family members, and predominately women. “Caregiving is generally a female thing, and [many of us are] also doing the children. That’s the sandwich generation thing,” she says.
“But interestingly enough, the research grant money, I think it was two years ago, went towards a study for caregivers because the health risks for caregivers end up being almost as dangerous as the people living with the disease because of the stress level, the lack of sleep, the lack of having the wherewithal to care for your own food, exercise, stress, work, all of that.”
“So another thing that is a big priority for Nikki and myself, who were both caregivers for our parents, is making sure that we have the research so that caregivers can properly take care of themselves. And when you get a diagnosis, the caregiver is also given a prescription for care and reminders from the doctor that, ‘You need to go to the doctor, as well. You’re gonna need to exercise. Let’s make sure that you get support. What kind of help can we bring in for you?’ Integrated into any kind of Alzheimer’s diagnosis is how to help the caregiver as well.”
During the 25th anniversary fan event earlier this month, a new holiday film in the vein of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles was announced, pairing Williams with her Barcelona movies co-star, Alison Sweeney for Make Her Mark director Yan-Kay Crystal Lowe. It’s a full-circle moment for Williams to co-star and co-produce again with Sweeney and to have her first graduate Lowe direct her.
“We are having the best time together. Getting to produce with Ali again is such a lesson in watching somebody work at the very top of their game,” she says. “Most of the time, we get a producer who is all over the logistics. But when Ali and I produce, and when she produces Hannah Swensen, we’re approving every sign, every graphic location, every prop. And I get to watch her.”
“She’s so good at food because of Hannah Swensen. So if there is a cookie in a scene, there’s a 20-minute conversation about that cookie. I’m not kidding. By the way, it’s necessary. It’s those kinds of details that make somebody a really good producer. And Ali’s always like, ‘Is someone gonna bite it? Cause If they’re gonna bite it, we have to make it soft. We can’t make it too crispy because then it’ll crumble all over the place.’ I’m learning so much about cookies on set.”
“And Ali has a rule that when you’re eating, you have to eat. Which meant that in Barcelona, my character literally just always had her mouth full. Just was constantly shoving food in my face. But I love working with strong women who have great opinions, and I always learn from Ali. I’m a better producer now than I was before she and I started working together. I feel so lucky to get to watch her and learn from her.”
“And getting to watch Crystal in action is so much fun. She’s such a fan of romcoms. And she’s referencing romcoms all day. ‘Do you remember that one scene in this movie and this movie?’ And then she’s coming up and showing me clips from, from movies all from the ’80s and ’90s. And it’s really fun to watch somebody truly inspired by the material. I love it. It’s written by Alejandro Alcoba and it’s about two women trying to get home for the holidays who run into multiple obstructions.”
Much About Love premieres Saturday, August 29th, at 8 pm/7c on Hallmark Channel in the US and streaming on various outlets in the US. It will also be streaming the next day on Hallmark+. I’ll update when I have news on a Canadian outlet. Here are a few sneak peeks.
Photos courtesy of Olive Martier for Hallmark Media; videos courtesy of Hallmark Media.
