Those of you who know and love Eden Sher from her star turn as the indefatigably optimistic Sue Heck on ABC’s long-running The Middle will thoroughly enjoy seeing a little bit of that iconic character in her new role in Hallmark Channel’s A Keller Christmas Vacation (premiering Sunday at 8/7c). The actress couldn’t help but imbue her performance with with a smidgen of Sue, she tells Soaps.com. “So much of me is her. So viewers are going to see some Sue-isms because they’re also Eden-isms.
“You can’t escape that,” she adds. “It’s just who I am.”
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Her New Character Kinda Invited Her to ‘Sue Me’
At first, Sher fought the impulse to allow any of her old character to seep into her new one: Emery Keller, whose holiday river cruise with her siblings (Brandon Routh and Jonathan Bennett) turns out to be a gift she should’ve been more excited to unwrap. Eventually, though, “I let go of trying to make it as not Sue Heck as possible. Once I did, I was just able to have fun with it.”
Siblings Dylan, Cal, and Emory are at a crossroads in their lives and have drifted apart. To help, their parents plan a family Christmas river cruise visiting Germany and Austria. Photo: Brandon Routh, Eden Sher, Jonathan Bennett Credit: ©2025 Hallmark Media/Photographer: Adriana Yankulova
To be clear, Emery is a character unto herself. “She’s little more mature,” Sher says. “Emery’s got a fun romantic storyline, and she’s kind of anxious, which is a little more Eden [than Sue].” Emery is also an endearing goof, which gave her portrayer a chance to indulge in some physical comedy. Sher’s not exaggerating, either, when she exclaims that “I look so dang cute in this movie — my wardrobe, my hair, my everything.” (She’s not kidding; see above.)
Sher Also Has a Dark Side… a Hilarious Dark Side
Over the course of this interview, in which Sher makes it clear that she is every bit as delightful as any character she’s ever played, talk turns to her cameo in a reading of TVLine founder Michael Ausiello’s Beverly Hills, the soap opera that he wrote 500+ episodes of in his tweens. Sher was called on stage to sub in for the estimable Patty Guggenheim as the show’s villainess, Joan Dupre.
“When he told me what the role was going to be, I was like, ‘Sign me up yesterday,’ because that is the other side of me: the very dramatic, very big, very evil side,” Sher says.
Though she anything but radiates wickedness, she suspects that that’s what makes it so funny on the rare occasions when she gets to go dark. “I do not have an nasty bone in my body. But I love it,” she admits. “And so playing it, doing it evil but goofy, I think it’s always a winning combination.”
Agreed. In fact, Sher had such a blast playing the murderous Joan that she told Ausiello that she’d do it again in a heartbeat. “I think he thought it was a favor [I was doing him],” she says. “And I was like, ‘This was so much fun. I will do this again in one second.’”
Get the lowdown on what’s up with Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas in the below photo gallery.
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