Rachael Leigh Cook has been one of Hallmark’s leading ladies since 2016 — but she almost didn’t sign on with the network after questioning her personal brand.
“I really credit the Hallmark Channel with my pivoting into producing in earnest,” Cook, 46, said during the May 13 episode of the “I Love You So Much — ILYSM” podcast.
The actress noted that she began working for them a decade ago, but she “wasn’t sure how that was going to go.”
“One disagreement Daniel [Gillies], my ex-husband, and I always had was he was like, ‘You can’t handle challenging content!’ And I was like, ‘That’s not true!’ That was 100 percent true. Daniel, you win,” Cook recalled, noting that her so-called brand and aversion to darker story lines almost made her pass on Hallmark’s offer.
Cook confessed, “I cannot handle channeling content, so my resistance to working for the Hallmark Channel — is that I thought it was a little bit too soft.”
She remembered thinking, “It was sort of playing into my fears that I had about myself. Then I was just like, ‘Ah, screw it. This is who I am.’ I’m a huge cornball. I love love.”
Rachael Leigh Cook and Sam Page in ‘Rescuing Christmas.’ MarVista Entertainment/Hallmark Channel/Everett Collection
The She’s All That star noted that once she was honest with herself, she realized that Hallmark’s heartwarming stories were exactly what she wanted to work on both in front and behind the camera.
“I went and worked for them and they’re so supportive of women, of their actors,” Cook said of the network. “They’re honestly also just doing so much that they don’t handcuff you to the words, to the punctuation, to the stuff. They really give you a lot of creative freedom. That was really empowering.”
She recalled Hallmark’s belief in her work as a producer as the spark that “sort of set me on a journey of wanting to tell stories.”
Cook also revealed that Hallmark’s rom-com focused lineup perfectly aligns with what she likes to watch herself.
“I’ve always been so earnestly enthusiastic about the romantic comedy genre. I drink that Kool-Aid all day. I make it in my kitchen. It’s in my veins,” she said with a laugh.
Rachael Leigh Cook in ‘Cross Country Christmas.’ Kailey Schwerman/Hallmark Channel/Everett Collection
Cook made her Hallmark Channel debut in 2016’s Summer Love. That same year she portrayed Frankie Baldwin alongside Brendan Penny’s Nate Deluca in Autumn in the Vineyard.
The actors’ connection sparked two more In the Vineyard movies and made Cook a staple for the network. Autumn in the Vineyard was also Cook’s first credit as an executive producer for Hallmark and she has since worked behind the scenes on multiple projects for them.
Hallmark Media made headlines in 2022 when they upped their exclusive contracts following a mass exodus of their talent to competitor Great American Media. “It’s usually for either two movies, and some of them are for a Christmas movie,” Hallmark executive vice president Lisa Hamilton Daly told Deadline in May 2022 of their approach to […]
Cook most recently was a producer on her 2025 Hallmark hit Sisterhood, Inc. and starred in 2026’s Caught by Love.
Her connection to Hallmark has also led Cook to her own real-life romance with Brandon Routh.
Following her 2019 divorce from Gillies — with whom she shares daughter Charlotte and son Theodore — Cook started dating Routh, 46, in 2025. Both Cook and Routh are Hallmark stars, with Routh making his network debut in 2014’s The Nine Lives of Christmas.
