‘Sealed with a List’: Katie Findlay & Evan Roderick Preview New Year’s ‘Buddy Comedy’ With Feelings

“It’s a holiday clean sweep. You get everything,” Katie Findlay says of their and Evan Roderick’s new Hallmark Channel movie, Sealed with a List, premiering December 16.

Findlay plays Carley, who thought she was going to get a promotion at work only for the boss’s son, Wyatt (Roderick), to be brought in, so she quits. But the two find common ground when it comes to her finally tackling a list of resolutions before the year is over. Yes, it’s a rare New Year’s movie!

Here, the very delightful Findlay and Roderick preview their film.

Where are Carley and Wyatt in their lives professionally and personally when they meet?

Katie Findlay: When we meet Carley, she’s working incredibly hard at a job that she doesn’t necessarily find very rewarding. But she feels really dedicated to building a stable and responsible life because a stable and responsible single parent raised her, and all of that work and effort, she owes paying back to this parent, and [she feels] that being irresponsible or focusing on her own goals and dreams outside of stability is wasting all the effort that that parent put into making sure that she grew up safe and with food on the table. So she’s working at a chill, unrewarding job at a clothing company, but she’s showing up for it, and she thinks she’s going to get a big promotion. She has put everything into this. This is her whole life, and then some dude shows up. Personally, she has been putting off the things that bring her joy in her own life for so long that she’s started to feel like they’re not possible anymore. Hey, some dude, you want to go?

Evan Roderick: Yeah, let me pipe in. So Wyatt is pretty much gifted the head job at his father’s company.

Findlay: What’s it like being a man?

Roderick: He doesn’t even really care for it, doesn’t know what he’s doing, and he’s just floating through life pretty much. He and his father don’t have a great relationship. Everything’s just too easy. He’s never been challenged in his life. And I think it’s also fair to say that he’s not happy, which is a massive part of the story where I think Wyatt and Carley can teach each other different things about how to make your life full and how to chase the things that you want and have balance and have fun when you want to have fun and have a good work ethic when that’s required if that makes sense. I think meeting Carley is one of the reasons for him to find some sort of deeper life, engage in things that are better and healthier for him, and create more balance.

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Both characters want to make some changes in their lives. How do each think the other will do with that?

Findlay: In the beginning, Carley thinks that Wyatt has never had an original thought in his head in his life. I think Carley is deeply resentful of the fact that being rich and being a dude with nice hair kind of just lets you move through the world with so much ease when everybody else has to work really hard and really apply themselves in their lives and things they want. She thinks he’s a bit of a floppy dork. I think she thinks he’s [like] really hot guys in high school who probably didn’t talk to her that she deeply resented because she was like Daria. He’s just an extension of these dudes who get everything handed to them, who would come and ask her for math homework help and then leave. She expects slight disaster at the very beginning and then is weirdly pleasantly surprised by how sincerely he tries to do every single thing that she tells him to try to do.

Roderick: Yeah, I think he’s probably in the same boat as Carley in thinking that — there’s that scene where he’s teaching her how to run or train for a marathon. She has no idea what she’s doing — not Katie, but Carley.

Findlay: I can’t run. I don’t know what I’m doing.

Roderick: I don’t know how to bake a cake. There are different things where you kind of think I’m a moron, I kind of think you’re a moron, and we laugh about it. It’s a heartfelt story. It’s earnest, and it means what it sets out to do. And I think in his heart, he knows Carley’s going to get these things done, but on the surface, we laugh about how not great we are at doing these things.

Talk about working together and finding Carley and Wyatt’s dynamic.

Findlay: Both of us expressed that when we get to a new set, we’re worried that the person we’re going to have to spend the most time with will really not get us or that we’ll be just the opposite of who they would want to work with. We both have a projection of a person who’s too cool for us and has no interest in us. I think it took 19 seconds — I think I pretended to kick a door down, remember?

Roderick: You did some jokey thing when we were entering that new apartment, right?

Findlay: I pretended to bash the door down in a miniskirt.

Roderick: Yeah, you were funny. We laughed. It’s as simple as that, and we were like, “Okay, we’re going to be okay.”

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Findlay: I was like, “Oh, we’re going to be fine.” There’s a montage where we drag a Christmas tree into a new apartment, and it’s beautiful, and we put things up and we decorate. And at one point, I was like, “Is there any room in this for you to stop to fix your hair and drop the tree on me, full drop the tree on me?” And Evan was like, “Yes, that’s excellent. Are we allowed to do that?” And then, I don’t know if it ended up in the movie, but we shot it, and I was like, “Alright, this is a man who is willing to drop an eight-foot Christmas tree directly onto my body for a joke.”

Roderick: This kid’s got a good heart.

Findlay: Yeah, we’re going to fine.

Roderick: Me and Katie kind of have the same phobia, or I don’t even know if you want to call it phobia. It’s just like when you don’t want to work with someone who thinks they’re too cool for school. And I think right away we got that. We’re like, okay, we’re both people that just want to connect and have a really good time.

What’s going to make people fall in love with their relationship?

Findlay: Well, I mean, we’re adorable. You can see us; look at us.

Roderick: Speak for yourself, Katie.

Findlay: We’re incredibly cute. Evan’s hair is unparalleled in the industry. I’m going to put that on paper.

Roderick: I can think of three names off the top of my head that would outdo my hair.

Findlay: I don’t have to agree with you. And this is my answer to this question. I think that Wyatt and Carley are equals in a way that is really endearing. I think that Wyatt is not afraid to treat Carley like she’s being a dork and jostle her around and poke fun at her and then also try to dive for her rescue as something is falling on her. For most of this movie, they’re friends. They are genuinely friends. They’re not artificially held apart until all of a sudden, oh my God, they’re in love. They really are having a time, getting to know a new person, feeling really vulnerable and weird, and showing up for each other in ways that are sometimes not super graceful or are exposing or silly or a bit strange. They really do become friends without meaning to before any idea of, “Oh my goodness, actually, this might be a person from my heart in a different way.”

I think that that’s really endearing because I think that’s the way that it happens to a lot of people. I am sure there are lots of other times where that’s not the case, but often you do start out getting to know somebody, and you have a really interesting or comfortable friendship, and then you go, “Oh my God, I love you.” But I just think that it’s really clear for a lot of the movie that these people have really decided to just go all in for each other and try to figure some weird stuff out together. And that’s my favorite kind of thing to watch.

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Roderick: I’m not going to add to that because that was perfect.

Findlay: Right, though? I think that’s what it is. It’s not like we’re going to pretend not to like each other until suddenly we do. It’s like, “No, I like you. I think you’re weird.”

Roderick: Yeah, in a weird sense, it’s like a buddy comedy until feelings set in.

Findlay: And then it’s a buddy comedy of people that are trying not to wreck the buddy comedy by being, “By the way, can you just date me, please? Is there any world where I could just get you to date me? Cool. We’ll circle back to this.”

I loved both Millie (BJ Harrison) and Jamie (Kelcey Mawema). Those characters were so fun. And then to watch the way that Wyatt also became involved with them as well was great.

Findlay: I agree. We would be lost personally without Kelcey and BJ, but then our characters and the entire movie would be worthless without them.

Roderick: Oh, I know. I know. They’re so good. BJ was so good.

Findlay: There’s a scene where I pick up Kelcey, and it’s not scripted. I was just like, “Do you think I can pick you up?” And she was like, yeah. And then that became what happened. It has yielded some of my favorite film stills of myself of all time. I look really strong and cool, picking up a whole little adorable lady.

It shows a genuine friendship between these two characters.

Findlay: Yeah. No, she’s a wonder. She’s so much cooler than me in basically every way, and I’m just really glad that she wanted to hang out with me the whole time. [Laughs] I was like, “Please don’t leave. Just tell me the stuff that you do that makes you this cool. What outfit did you wear today? What kind of music do you listen to? Be my friend.”

Sealed with a List, Movie Premiere, Saturday, December 16, 8/7c, Hallmark Channel