'THE CHICKEN SISTERS' COMES TO ROOST ON HALLMARK: MEET THE CAST!

The leading ladies share secrets from set and how they brought these strong, Southern characters to life.

Earlier this summer Hallmark invited Southern Living on a secret mission and now we can tell you that it was a visit to the set of the highly anticipated new series, The Chicken Sisters. I was allowed to walk around the sets and take in the magical, fictional Southern town of Merinac–the details y’all. They really captured Southern decor and charm. Shiplap, haint blue, spices in mason jars–they thought of everything. 

I also watched several scenes being filmed and for fans of KJ Dell’Antonia’s best-selling novel, while they do change a few things, they’ve really adapted the story well to screen. The changes that have been made only make the story richer and more interesting. 

Then I got to sit down with the four leading ladies, Wendie Malick, Lea Thompson, Schuyler Fisk, and Genevieve Angelson to hear all about how they brought this story of feuding families, fried chicken, and sisterhood to life.

Wendie Malick as Augusta “Gus” Moore

Malick plays Gus, the rough around the edges, more than meets the eye, owner of Mimi’s and mother of Amanda and Mae. “I always love playing characters who have some chinks in the armor. It’s so much more interesting and certainly Gus is unlike any character I’ve ever played. It’s the least glamorous that I’ve ever been as you can see,” she said with a laugh, gesturing to her long gray wig, flannel shirt, and baggy jeans. 

Mimi’s and Frannie’s are the two fried chicken restaurants in town and the families who own them have been feuding for generations. Everyone in the town has picked a side and it’s clear that Gus wants nothing to do with Frannie’s or the people who chose it over Mimi’s. She also struggles with trusting others and always seems on edge. The complexities of Gus are what drew Malick to the role. 

“She is just so fiercely loyal and she loves deeply but she has such a big wall that she’s built around herself just to protect herself. She’s been sort of marginalized in this town as sort of the bad seed.  And if you have a reputation like that from the time you’re young, I think it really can stick to you. It’s really hard to dodge it. To get out of it. But as time goes by I think we’re going to start to see the cracks in her armor. And realize that she has deep feelings and loves her daughters very much even though she has trouble showing it.”

“I like that she’s no nonsense. I like that she doesn’t suffer fools. And I like that she gets to wear really comfortable clothes. These are my favorite old pair of jeans and I donated them for Gus to wear. In fact this whole outfit used to be mine,” she said as she gestured down towards the jeans and flannel shirt she was wearing. 

“I actually dress like this when I’m home. We live on a ranch and when I’m not going out and playing glamorpusses, I’m shoveling horse doo. So it’s not that far afield for me.”

What is different for the veteran actress is the accent. “I’m from Buffalo so that’s about as different from the South as you can get… We actually had a dialogue coach come in before we started shooting so we’d all be roughly on the same page in terms of dialect.”

She continued, “It’s always fun to be able to immerse yourself. You know for me it’s about okay how do I sound? How do I walk? What am I wearing? What kind of hair do I have? What do my nails look like? All those things help you dive into a character and sort of create another alternative human being that you can slide in and out of.

Lea Thompson as Nancy Hillier

Over at the rival restaurant, Frannie’s, Lea Thompson plays owner Nancy Hillier. Wife to the late Frank Sr. and mother to Frank Jr. (played by James Kot). Long before the viewers join the story, Amanda fell in love and married Frank Jr. Now she is a part of Team Frannie’s and banished from her mother’s establishment, Mimi’s. Nancy has stepped in and filled the maternal void for Amanda, which Thompson told Southern Living she found exciting to play and somewhat relatable. 

“I have a son in law and it's such an interesting thing now to think, well now I have a son? And I kind of feel that way about him. And it’s a really interesting thing. I never thought about that in a way.” 

“I’m a very big family person. I love my brothers and sisters. We always have dinner on Sundays together. And we always celebrate all occasions. I’m obsessed with having a tight knit family. So that feeling of loving the person that loves your child is very interesting.”

She noted that Frank Jr. is not “such a great guy,” and her character has “this dreary son but this incredible daughter in law and I fall madly in love with her. And she loves me too. And it’s a lovely, interesting relationship.”

Thompson, whom we all remember fondly as the charming Lorraine from the Back to the Future films, Katryn from Space Camp, and Amanda Jones in Some Kind of Wonderful–just to name a few– has become equally known for her work behind the camera as a director. She spends a great deal of her time these days in the South on various projects that are filmed in our neck of the woods. It’s because of this that she found the idea of taking on a Southern character a welcome challenge. 

“I work so much in the South and I’ve done so many  movies in the South. Two in Austin, Two in Dallas, Tennessee, Atlanta. I’ve worked in Atlanta a lot. New Orleans. So I’ve spent a lot of time in the South… I think the way people in the South enjoy words is so fun. And they definitely captured that in the writing. I think maybe most specifically with my character. I think they are really enjoying giving me lots of interesting turns of phrases and different ways of saying things that are so much more interesting than usual for me as an actor.”

She added, “It feels almost like, even though I am not from the South, it feels very familiar. And fun… There’s a wonderful tradition of women characters. I think just of women and the language is more delicious.”

Genevieve Angelson as Mae Moore

Genevieve Angelson plays Mae Moore, daughter of Gus and sister to Amanda. Mae is the one who left Merinac. She has shed her accent and much of her origin story to reinvent herself in New York City as a star of the unscripted, home improvement television variety. When things go awry in her professional life, Mae learns of the national attention Merinac is about to receive. Maybe she actually can go home again, and it just might be very beneficial to her career. 

“I do know what it feels like to love certain things about where you come from and want to leave the rest behind,” Angelson said of her connection to Mae. 

“I think that my character in particular tells a distinct story because of her experience with, she has sort of a shameful relationship to her past. And so much of her identity is founded upon being a New Yorker now. I think what you’ll see over the course of the season is the ways in which she sort of rewrites her relationship to things about being from the South that she really loves.” 

Angelson may not have been born in the South herself, but she proudly declared to us that it is her chosen home. 

“You know when you find the place that isn’t where you grew up but is where you are from, spiritually. That’s me in New Orleans.”

A job working on a film with a friend from college first brought Angelson to the Crescent City right after Hurricane Katrina. Her sister then moved to New Orleans and the actress has been either working or visiting steadily for a decade or so now. 

“My sister became a public defender and has made her career pursuing criminal justice and now works for the Innocence Project of New Orleans… So I’m obsessed with her. And her husband is an author and a journalist and yeah they live uptown and it’s just my favorite place in the world.”

“It’s the best place in the world to spend Christmas, apart from Hallmark. Because it’s like anything else, in the way that a funeral in New Orleans is a Second Line, Christmas in New Orleans is like lighting up the levee with bonfires. Everything is such a party. And the way that they use the incredible hardship that the city has overcome and turn it into flamboyance and celebration is so meaningful to me… Joie de Vivre. A zest for living that I find to be so utterly unique. I love it so much, I get teary-eyed.”

Another Southern city is also close to Angelson’s heart. “Memphis is the first place that I ever shot a feature film. I was in a movie there for a couple of weeks. Right before I went to graduate school. And the movie, which was called Open Five, was basically just a love letter to Memphis and to the soul music there and to the food there. And oh my gosh. Memphis is my second favorite city.”

She added in a whisper, “So much better than Nashville. I’ve never been to Nashville but that’s what I think!” This Memphis-born editor couldn’t agree more. 

Schuyler Fisk as Amanda Moore Hillier

Schuyler Fisk plays Amanda Moore Hillier, daughter of Gus, sister of Mae, wife of Frank Jr., and daughter-in-law to Nancy. When Amanda married Frank Jr., she switched sides and became a Frannie’s girl. She then became an outcast in the world in which she grew up. She was no longer allowed into her mother’s restaurant or to her home. And her sister Mae had flown the coop, so to speak, which left her with strong feelings of abandonment. 

“Amanda is the closest with her mother-in-law, played by Lea Thompson, and that relationship is really important to her.  She’s  really taken over a very motherly role. It’s been so sweet working with Lea in that way because Amanda has a very strained relationship with her own mother. And her sister for that matter,” Fisk explained. 

“I feel like people can really identify with the [idea that] people you love the most, you can hurt the most. And you can get the most mad at. But it’s because you love them so much and you care. Those relationships are really complicated and really complex and I just love that the show is going there. Nothing is simple. It’s not glassed over. These are complicated relationships with complex women. Strong women. They’re all coming from something. From somewhere. They all have a backstory that informs why these relationships are the way they are. It’s been really fun to sort of uncover those backstories and find where this all came from and how we can figure it out.”

Strong, Southern women is not a foreign concept to Fisk. She is the daughter of Academy Award winner Sissy Spacek, and she grew up in the South. 

“The two states that I call home are Texas and Virginia. My mom grew up in Texas and all of her side of the family is there and has always been there. So that was always the place where we spent a lot of time when I was growing up. I was raised in Virginia and that is my true briarpatch. I love the South. I love small towns. I feel like a lot of times small towns, especially in the South, are really misunderstood and not given enough credit. I feel like this show really honors what’s special  and what’s complicated about growing up in a small town.”

“I feel like there’s a very, very, big sense of community where I grew up that I’m so grateful for. That I recognize more as an adult even. I definitely felt it as a kid but didn’t really register. As an adult I feel so lucky.

The cast of The Chicken Sisters also includes Ektor Rivera, James Kot, Rukiya Bernard, and as we previously reported, Emmy winner Margo Martindale serves as the show’s narrator. 

The Chicken Sisters is out now. The first episode premiered exclusively on Hallmark + on September 10 and a new episode will drop each Thursday beginning September 12. If you’re on the fence about adding another streaming service into your life, let me tell you, this show is worth it.

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