<\/p>\n
\u201cA Christmas Story\u201d actor Peter Billingsley is coming to the Florida Theatre on November 28 for \u201cAn Evening With Peter Billingsley.\u201d The event will feature a screening of the beloved Christmas classic, followed by a Q&A event with the actor. Billingsley sat down with WOKV\u2019s Chase Bunker ahead of the show to talk about the movie\u2019s rise in popularity, life as a child actor, and the worst Christmas present he ever received.<\/p>\n
When it was first released, \u201cA Christmas Story\u201d was not as popular as we know it is today. A reflecting Billingsley says, \u201cIt was a little disappointing, I think, for everyone because the filmmakers had worked so hard for so long to get the movie made, about 12 years it took them to get the movie made. It came out, and you know it did fine, and this was really sort of before, it came out in \u201883, so this was before the home video boom. I think people still had Betamax and VHS players, and not everyone really had a home video system, but it was growing. So it came in the theater and went, and we sort of thought, \u2018Alright, well I guess that\u2019s it.\u2019 Like it was cool, but it wasn\u2019t some mega hit. And then people started, what I learned was, handing VHS tapes around to each other. So the movie came out on VHS, and they would share it family to family, and say, \u2018You got to see this movie,\u2019 and it started to build a cult following. And I remember I was in a video store, we were living in Phoenix at the time, and I was just there to rent a movie, it was probably seven or eight years later. I came around the corner to get a video, and there was a cardboard cutout, a standee of me, huge, life-sized, holding the Red Ryder BB Gun in the cowboy outfit. And I marched up to the desk and I said, \u2018What the hell is this?\u2019 and he said, \u2018Oh, hey, you\u2019re that guy!\u2019 I\u2019m like \u2018Yeah, I know, but why is this here? It\u2019s like nine years later,\u2019 and he\u2019s like, \u2018People are asking for it. Every year, we can\u2019t keep it on the shelves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tickets for \u201cAn Evening with Peter Billingsley\u201d<\/a> are on sale now. You can hear more about the worst Christmas gift Peter ever received in the full interview<\/a>. It\u2019s worse than the pink bunny pajamas.<\/p>\n You can hear more of Chase\u2019s interviews in the Chase Chats section<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u25b6 Listen to Jacksonville\u2019s Morning News Interviews<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n Read more local news from WOKV<\/a><\/p>\n Click here<\/a> to download our free news, weather and traffic app. And click here<\/a> to subscribe to our daily 3 Big Things newsletter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cA Christmas Story\u201d actor Peter Billingsley is coming to the Florida Theatre on November 28 for \u201cAn Evening With Peter Billingsley.\u201d The event will feature a screening of the beloved Christmas classic, followed by a Q&A event with the actor. Billingsley sat down with WOKV\u2019s Chase Bunker ahead of the show to talk about the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2161522,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[350157,414483,414482],"class_list":["post-2161521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-a-christmas-story","tag-christmas-present","tag-peter-billingsley"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/A-Christmas-Story-actor-Peter-Billingsley-talks-movies-rise-ahead.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2161521"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2161523,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161521\/revisions\/2161523"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2161522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2161521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2161521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2161521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}