For her new Lifetime Christmas movie The Holiday Junkie, Jennifer Love Hewitt enlisted her husband Brian Hallisay to play her onscreen love interest — and when the actress told their 11-year-old daughter Autumn about the plans, she was met with an unexpectedly hilarious reaction.

“The first thing she said was, ‘Mommy is he going to be nice to you this time?'” Hewitt, 45, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue, on newsstands Friday. “I was like, ‘Yes, sweetie, it’s a Christmas miracle. He’s playing a kind character to me.'”

Hallisay, 46, indeed has a history of playing the bad guy in Hewitt’s TV worlds: from 2012-2013, he played her estranged husband on the Lifetime series The Client List, and in the TV drama 9-1-1 he plays her character Maddie Han’s abusive ex-husband.

“On The Client List, obviously he wasn’t kind, and then in 9-1-1, for sure, not kind,” she says. “So it was really funny. My daughter was super psyched that daddy was going to be nice to me on screen.”

The movie, premiering Dec. 14, also features all three of the couple’s kids: Autumn, Atticus, 9, and Aidan, 3. It was inspired by Hewitt’s journey with grief after losing her mom Pat to cancer at 67 in 2012, and how she declared herself a “holiday junkie” in 2013 when she started leaning into the joy of the season to cope.

“It was really fun to be in a movie honoring my mom with Brian because he does such a great job of honoring her in our life, even though he only met her once,” Hewitt says. “So it was special having him there. I’m really proud to be one of very few grief Christmas movies out there for people who feel things other than just joy at Christmas.”

Just like her new film, Hewitt channeled her journey with grief into her book Inheriting Magic: My Journey Through Grief, Joy, Celebration, and Making Every Day Magical, which also offers tips for making the everyday feel special.

“If you had asked me when my mom was still on the planet if I could live without her, I would’ve said no,” Hewitt says. “So I’m really proud of myself for the way that I handled grief after writing the book.”

To have both projects come out in the same week is “wild,” Hewitt says. “I feel like it’s my mother up in the sky going, ‘Okay, let’s make this work, guys.’ It’s a very ‘her’ thing to do.”

“Now, having written the book and doing the movie, I feel so much closer to her in some weird way because I feel like she is watching and knows that she’s being celebrated on such a big level,” she continues. “I had a good cry about her a couple of days ago, just missing her and wishing that she was here to see all this actually happen, but the grief is in a better place now.”

As she looks forward to 2025, Hewitt is following new dreams, including expanding “Holiday Junkie” into a full-blown brand. She’s also eyeing a return in the upcoming I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot. (She starred as final girl Julie James in the original 1997 film.)

“I’d love to say that I finally signed on to I Know What You Did Last Summer, but I can’t yet,” she says. “It’s been complicated because of my 9-1-1 schedule. I’m going to manifest that.”

In the meantime, she’s taking stock of everything she worked for over the past year.

“When I sat down with my vision board for 2024, this is what I wanted,” she says. “I wanted all of these things to happen. I’m able to be a mom and able to be this person that people have known me as for a long time, but shifting it into a way that they both come together. So I’m feeling very excited and super grateful.”

The Holiday Junkie premieres on Saturday, Dec. 14 a 8 p.m. ET on Lifetime.

Source: People