EDGE Interview: Podcaster Danny Pellegrino Feels at Home in Hallmark's 'Deck the Walls'

Watch EDGE's Matthew Creith talk with podcaster and comic Danny Pellegrino about his role in the Hallmark Channel's new holiday movie, "Deck the Walls," that premieres on November 29.

Below are excerpts from their conversation:

Danny Pellegrino on his love of the holidays and finally getting to work with Hallmark...

I'm so excited. I love the Hallmark Christmas movies. It's always been a dream of mine to be able to work in some capacity with Hallmark. So, it was just a dream come true. The experience of making it was really so creatively fulfilling to me and emotionally fulfilling to me, that everything else now is just sort of the cherry on top. I'm very excited for people to see it and I hope that people like it. I hope people who love these Hallmark holiday movies like it, especially because I'm a fan of them. I want to please the fans of these movies, and so I hope they like it, and otherwise, I'm just excited to share it with people in the world.

On LGBTQ+ representation, adding a gay love interest into Hallmark Christmas movies, and any pushback he received from the network...

Hallmark was really fantastic. I love these movies. I have a holiday movie podcast where I cover a lot of holiday movies, and I think we're in our sixth or seventh year of that now. In the beginning, we were covering a lot of the Made-for-TV holiday movies. My complaint from the beginning was that there wasn't a lot of representation, even within the side characters, even taking away those leads. Oftentimes, I would watch these movies and not see myself represented anywhere. So not even a speaking part for an openly gay character. That was always my criticism. Then a handful of years ago, I think Hallmark really listened to those complaints from not just myself, but of course, so many other people. Jonathan Bennett has been doing so much great work on the network, and he's got a new one on the Hallmark+ streaming app that I'm excited to check out. I think they've done a great job of kind of expanding to include LGBTQ+ storylines throughout these and so I just felt so wonderful and supportive, and I felt so lucky.

My arch nemesis/love interest in the film is played by Claybourne Elder, who's an openly gay actor as well. I feel really proud of that part of the story. Of course, [the main] story is Ashley and Wes. They're our leads, and it's really their love story. But Hallmark was so great about also including my love story and letting me play with those emotions too, which was great. I get to have little moments with Clay that I just feel lucky because I remember sitting behind a podcast microphone all those years ago saying, "When are they going to have LGBTQ characters on these because they're producing so many of them. So please do that. Give us some characters." They let me be me.

What Pellegrino loved about playing the character of Sal in "Deck the Walls"...

The character of Sal, who I play, he's all of these different aspects of a gay character that, even as an actor auditioning, you don't normally see when you get a script or something like that. It can often feel like the character is just one level, one stereotype. What I love about Sal is he's kind of well rounded. He can be flamboyant at times. He also does construction. There's a relationship he has with the Wes Brown character that I'm really proud of. We play best friends, and he's a straight guy. There's nothing about Sal [being] gay and Brysen not gay and they're best friends. Like, there's never a thing about that. It's just sort of widely accepted. I'm very proud of that dynamic as well. I feel like that's a rare thing, and not in just these movies, but in film in general, it's rare to see a straight man and a gay man be friends like that. There's all these sort of little aspects about the LGBTQ+ angle that I'm really proud of and and some of it might not be like a flashy storyline.

Danny Pellegrino addresses there are many product placements in "Deck the Walls," as well as his brand of humor in referencing everything from the Muppets to the "Real Housewives" in the film:

It was my Hallmark Christmas movie, and I didn't know until I got to set that they were going to be doing a brand integration. So I was very excited. It felt perfect for there to be Home Goods. If you listen to my podcast, you know the "Real Housewives" integrations when sometimes you're watching the "Real Housewives of New York," and all of a sudden they're at the movies talking about "The Hustle." So it kind of made me laugh. But obviously nowadays people have to do them for these movies, but I think it was really fun. We had the Nutella scene, we baked cookies and we were just cracking up. Our main cast is in it, and we were just cracking up the whole time, because it's just a montage of us baking cookies, and we were all sugared up because the cookies were really good. I got a stomachache because I just kept taking a bite.

It was the first big role I've ever done. I've done little scenes here and there, acting wise and student films or indie projects and I've done plenty of hosting on camera. But acting wise, it's one of my first sort of big roles. I didn't realize when you eat something on camera, you eat it a million times. So with the cookie, I, like, took a bite, and then every time they had to, replace my cookie, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I have to keep eating this anyway." But the Nutella people were great. Then with the Easter egg stuff, I was so happy to add in some of those improvised moments that the director let me play around with on set. But a lot of those were in the initial scripts. The Muppet line was improvised, and I was really happy about that getting in the final script. Then, yeah, there's a bunch of other stuff, and little "Housewives" references too.

"Deck the Walls" debuts on the Hallmark Channel on November 29th.