Exclusive Interview
’12 Dates of Christmas’: Lucy Hale & Ian Harding on Reigniting Their Chemistry After ‘PLL’
Next stop, Rosewood?
With the internet ablaze with whispers of a possible revival, Pretty Little Liars vets Lucy Hale and Ian Harding are getting a do-over of epic proportions as they finally get to play an on-screen romance that is much lighter than the darker and devious PLL.
“We were talking about this,” Harding told Swooon while describing the duo’s older, wiser energy in Hulu’s new holiday rom-com The 12 Dates of Christmas. “It’s so fascinating and beautiful and wonderful because…there’s so much history there. So it feels very comfortable, very lived in, very familiar. And yet, because we’ve grown up a little bit more, and we’ve had our different careers and lives and everything, we bring more to it. I had such a wonderful experience of getting to work with Lucy and kind of taking her in, in the middle of a scene. I’ll be like, ‘Oh, that was nice.'”
He added, “So it was both familiar and new and magical at the same time.”
In the film, Hale stars as Christina, a perpetually single (and reasonably pessimistic) shop owner who reluctantly lets her bestie (St. Denis Medical’s Kahyun Kim) use an app to set her up with a dozen different guys in hopes of finding someone before Christmas. Harding, in a mercifully age-appropriate role, is seven layers of appealing as Peter, a former classmate Christina doesn’t really remember who keeps popping up in between her various dates from Hell.
Courtesy of THE 12 DATES OF CHRISTMAS
Playing their meet-cute in the movie’s opening scene proved tricky for Hale, having already established chemistry with Harding back in 2010.
“I think it was so easy for me to just fall into feeling so comfortable with you,” she told her costar during our chat. “So I did have to consciously be like, ‘Oh, Lucy, you’re meeting him for the first time.’ And there is that spark. You want to feel the chemistry. But I think automatically, the way the characters were written, we just had this really fun banter, which we didn’t really get to have in PLL. We got to play around a little bit and improvise a little bit.”
As for what convinced them to work together again after so long—Hale admitted there may have been offers in the past similar to their PLL dynamic—the two of them agreed the time was right to give #Ezria stans something new.
Eric McCandless / ABC Family / Everett Collection
“That’s exactly why we wanted to do this,” Hale continued, adding that she actually suggested Harding to the movie’s director, David Lipper. “I was like, ‘What about Ian? I know we have this built-in fan base, but I think it could be really interesting.’ Because I’ve always wanted to work with Ian again and instead of shying away from it, we ran towards it.”
Harding chimed in, “I was cognizant of it, and I wanted to work with Lucy again so badly, but I also didn’t want it to just be like, ‘Oh, just for the sake of doing it.’ But it’s also great to play outside of the PLL world. I mean, I think we’ve all had that discussion of like, “Oh, if there was a reboot or a reimagining of the series, would we want to do it?’ But to have something like this in its own world was also a delight to get to play with each other as actors, as opposed to these characters that we were before.”
As for that reboot he just brought up, what do you think? Would you go back to Rosewood with Hale and Harding?
The 12 Dates of Christmas, Streaming Now, Hulu
