‘Aurora Teagarden’ Prequel Star Skyler Samuels on the ‘Challenge’ of Taking Over Role From Candace Cameron Bure
Aurora Teagarden is back on Hallmark, but with a twist. Skyler Samuels is taking over the title role from Candace Cameron Bure in the prequel movie Aurora Teagarden Mysteries: Something New. It premieres June 9 on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries.
Samuels weighed in on what it was like to portray a different version of a beloved character in a live chat with her co-stars Marilu Henner and Evan Roderick (via YouTube). The project excited her as an actor, she said.
“I was vaguely familiar with the Aurora franchise and world before, and when I had the opportunity to reprise young Aurora, I thought it was a really interesting challenge,” Samuels said. “I’ve never sort of reinvented or taken the reins of a character that already exists before.”
Bure – who ended her relationship with Hallmark in 2022 to move to competitor Great American Family – starred in 18 Aurora Teagarden movies between 2015 and 2022. That gave Samuels a lot of material to work with when it came to figuring out what made Aurora tick.
“I thought it was really kind of a fun challenge to study this character and person that this audience loves and then kind of reverse engineer who she might have been in her early to mid-20s,” Samuels, who’s also appeared in Lifetime’s The Gabby Petito Story and American Horror Story, explained. “It’s fun. There’s a lot of juicy stuff happening with Aurora Teagarden. I got to get my hands dirty and it was awesome.”
Skyler Samuels says her Aurora Teagarden is ‘kind of the opposite of the Aurora we knew’
The result is a slightly different Aurora than the one audiences are familiar with. She’s “kind of the opposite of the Aurora we knew in the other movies,” Samuels said, adding that her Aurora is less polished and less confident than the older version of the character. In Something New, she’s moved back in with her mom as she pursues her graduate degree and works as a TA and a waitress to make ends meet. But viewers will still be able to “see all the seeds of who she’ll become,” she added, especially when she gets caught up in a mystery involving her best friend Sally (Kayla Heller).
Aurora Teagarden Mysteries: Something New will also feature a younger version of another character viewers know and love: Aurora’s mom Aida. Henner played the role in the original movies and returns for the prequel. But she had to take a different approach when it came to her performance, she said.
Aida is “much less sure of herself” in the prequel, Henner explained, which was “fabulous for me as an actor.”
Aurora Teagarden fans can also expect some fun callbacks to the original movies, Henner shared.
“I think the audience … they’re going to fall in love with all the little hints that we’re dropping along the way,” she said.
Aurora Teagarden Mysteries: Something New airs Friday, June 9 at 9 p.m. ET on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries.
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