When a musician is invited to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry, the membership is for life and comes with the responsibility of becoming a steward of country music. Hallmark’s A Grand Ole Opry Christmas will now become a steward of the Opry’s story as it celebrates its 100-year history.
The leading cable network of all things holly-jolly have really outdone themselves with this new original movie, filmed on location at the Opry. The cast and crew have truly captured the magic that takes place within the backstage walls and displays the reverence anyone who has ever attended a show and sat in those iconic wooden pews feels for the history made in this monumental building. This is a can’t miss movie in the annual Countdown to Christmas lineup.
Thirty years after the sudden and tragic death of country music legend, Jett Wade (Rob Mayes), his daughter Gentry Wade (Nikki DeLoach) is faced with the regrets of her past and the grief she still feels for her late father when the Grand Ole Opry comes a calling. The folks at the Opry invite Gentry to represent her father in their centennial celebration at Christmas but for Gentry, the invitation is bittersweet. When she lost her father, she abandoned her own dreams of songwriting and walked away from music all together.
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©2025 Hallmark Media/Katherine E. Bomboy
She reluctantly goes to visit the Opry to see how she feels about it all, running into the other half of her father’s musical duo, played by James Denton, and an old family friend played by Sharon Lawerence. As she wanders on stage, her head dancing with memories of her dad, Gentry sits on one of the famous pews where friends and family sit on stage and is then transported back to 1995.
Her lifelong best friend Mac (Kristoffer Polaha) also finds himself at the Opry and manages to also take the leap back in time on that very same pew. Gentry finds herself right in the middle of the drama unfolding in her father’s career at this time, backstage at the Opry. She and Jett, although he doesn’t know who she really is, form a bond and Gentry gets precious time back with her late father. Mac is by her side, supporting her as their relationship finally crosses out of the friend zone, all those years later.
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©2025 Hallmark Media/Katherine E. Bomboy
The cast and crew worked throughout the night since the Opry shows didn’t stop for production. Filming couldn’t begin until their regularly scheduled live radio broadcasts were finished, as Nikki DeLoach explained to Southern Living.
“My call time would be nine o’clock at night for hair and makeup. We wouldn’t be able to start shooting until after the tours backstage were done after the show was over. And sometimes that would be at 11 and sometimes that would be midnight. And then we would shoot all the way into the next day at 11:00a.m. and then go home, get a few hours of sleep, and go back. So when I tell you that it was the hardest schedule that any of us had ever worked and everybody did it with such an incredible attitude and joy in their hearts. As hard as it was, there was not one single complaint on that set.”
And that’s because they all knew what it meant to have the opportunity to tell this story in this very special location. As DeLoach put it, “we understood the assignment.”
Her co-star, Kristoffer Polaha agreed. “The Opry, they call it the Mother Church Country Music and it feels like a church. It feels like it feels like sacred space,” he told us.
“There has been a transcendence in that circle for 100 years. Music is medicine. Music is a conversation between an artist and a community of people and it’s a galvanizing thing…there’s these little hot spots spiritually all over the planet and I would argue that the Grand Ole Opry has a hotspot right there on the stage that has been forged through 100 years of music and that transcendence which happens when a performer does something special for an audience.
This movie is also chock-full of cameos from country music legends and Opry royalty from Mickey Guyton, Megan Moroney, and Brad Paisley to Bill Anderson, Pam Tillis, and even Opry stalwarts Riders in the Sky.
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©2025 Hallmark Media/ Michael Larsen
“I would come in early when we were shooting there on nights. And there’s a little bench that sits right next to where Kelly Sutton and Tyler and all the people that run the show and make everything happen backstage. They’re right off the side of the stage. They would let me come and sit on my little stool and watch the show before I had to get into hair and makeup. And what magic! They would just let me sit there and take in everything because they knew what it meant to me, but they also know what this place means to so many people,” DeLoach recalled.
Credit:
©2025 Hallmark Media/Katherine E. Bomboy
She added, “You can feel the sacredness. You can feel the legacy. And it’s because they put the mission first of making sure that they maintain the specialness of this place and its mission. And, God, what an honor to be a part of it.”
“It really is about this guard of people that have been doing it for a lifetime. And it’s a beautiful way to honor them too, to have the movie,” Polaha shared.
While DeLoach was involved in pop music early in her career, for Polaha, this once in a lifetime experience had him thinking about his eldest son, Caleb, who is a student at Belmont University with hopes of a career as a singer-songwriter. He even brought his son along for the week they filmed at the Opry as his assistant so he could share this experience with him. The budding musician met and received invaluable advice from the likes of Bill Anderson and Drew Baldridge and he felt a little of that Opry magic himself, as his dad explained. “One night in one of the dressing rooms, it was just him in the dressing room, and the vibe of the Opry. He wrote a song and he said, ‘maybe one day I’ll sing this song on the stage.’ Which I think is really cool.”
Along with all of the Opry magic, musical performances, and star-studded cast, there are also some incredibly dramatic performances, and in particular between DeLoach and Rob Mays and it’s a storyline we don’t often see in these Hallmark movies: the love between a daughter and her father and the grief that comes when she loses him.
As Polaha put it, “It’s like the romance is almost taking a second seat to the father daughter relationship.”
For DeLoach who lost her father four years ago, this storyline is particularly meaningful. And while she said her acting technique is “ not to substitute real life. It is to use imagination and to build a character from the ground up,” she also admits that, “When you were put situations that where art is imitating life and sometimes, you know, it could be too much.” And that grief is still with her. “It’s in every cell of my being. The thought and the feeling of, oh my gosh, what if I could go back in time? What if my dad did come alive before me?”
She told us that there was one scene where, “my real life caught up to me in that moment and everything that I had gone through with my dad. It was so real. And it was, I think, exactly what that moment needed.”
Don’t miss A Grand Ole Opry Christmas, premiering on Hallmark Channel on Saturday, November 29 and next day on Hallmark +.