Exclusive Interview
‘My Secret Santa’: Alexandra Breckenridge & Ryan Eggold Break Down Her ‘Wild’ Transformation
What To Know
- Former Dirt costars Alexandra Breckenridge and Ryan Eggold reunite in Netflix’s new holiday film My Secret Santa, streaming December 3.
- Breckenridge plays Taylor, a single mother who takes a job playing Santa Claus at a ski resort where Matthew (Eggold) is the manager.
- In an exclusive interview with Swooon, the stars open up about Breckenridge’s transformation into Santa Claus and how their onscreen reunion came about.
Alexandra Breckenridge and Ryan Eggold, who costarred on the show Dirt in 2008, are reuniting onscreen for the upcoming Netflix holiday rom-com My Secret Santa.
In the film, Breckenridge plays a single mother named Taylor who is struggling to make ends meet and takes a job playing Santa Claus at a ski resort where Eggold (Matthew) is working as the manager. The actress donned prosthetics, along with a wig and beard, to go undercover as St. Nick.
“It’s pretty wild to watch your face transform into a completely different person,” Breckenridge tells Swooon. “The first time they put all the pieces on, I wasn’t sure where it was going to go. If you see the pieces on without the beard and the wig, I do look like a witch from Snow White or something.”
Courtesy of Netflix
Eggold notes that the “transitions on the way to Santa were interesting,” but Breckenridge says the process overall was “wonderful” for her. “I got to come up with all these different characters underneath the Santa Claus, like, before Santa was completely one full Santa,” she explains. “But the first day we did the camera test for Santa Claus, I was just freaking out. But what was so great about it is it looked so good. I was completely unrecognizable, and once I realized I was unrecognizable, I knew the movie was going to work.”
The process of transforming into Santa took “three hours at first,” but was down to “about” an hour and a half by the time filming ended.
Of course, there was more complexity to her character than just being Santa Claus, and Breckenridge says she liked the fact that Taylor was a free spirit musician before she became a mother. “I like that she had a funky style and funky taste. She was more of a rocker,” the Virgin River star shares. “I don’t feel like you see that very often in Christmas movies, so that’s what attracted me to that part of the character.”
For Eggold, he loved Matthew’s “really fun arc” throughout the film. “[He started] just sort of being this playboy, kind of floating through life, and then sort of finding meaning and growing up and becoming, maybe, a better version of himself and who he’s supposed to be,” he explains. “It felt like a very Christmas story arc.”
The actor jokes that working with Breckenridge again was “brutal every step of the way,” and recalled how he got involved in the film through his costar. “We worked together on a show called Dirt a hundred years ago and had become good buds,” Eggold reveals. “So she texted and said, ‘I’m going to be playing Santa Claus,’ and I said, ‘Of course, naturally. That makes sense.’ [She said], ‘Do you want to come make out with me while I have a beard?’ Yeah. Let’s do that. On camera. For the movie, just to be clear.”
My Secret Santa, Streaming, Wednesday, December 3, Netflix
