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For the past few years, Jonathan Bennett has been bringing beautiful, nuanced love stories to Hallmark Channel — and the actor, who stars in A Keller Christmas Vacation on Sunday, Nov. 9, has been intentional about them.
“I know I have a responsibility to make sure that it stands out in a good way, that the storyline is so good that the audience watching it cannot deny it and has to keep watching. That’s my goal,” he tells PEOPLE. “For people that might not know a gay person or might not normally watch movies with gay love stories, I don’t want them to change the channel.”
He adds, “I want them to see that our love is just like everyone else’s. So my responsibility lies there in making the story so good that you can’t not watch it.”
Hallmark Media/Adriana Yankulova
That certainly appears to have been the case for such movies as The Christmas House, The Holiday Sitter, Christmas on Cherry Lane and the Groomsmen trilogy.
In A Keller Christmas Vacation, Bennett, 44, plays Dylan, who joins his older brother Cal (Brandon Routh), younger sister Emory (Eden Sher) and parents on a holiday river cruise vacation in Europe. Just before he leaves for the trip, Dylan proposes to his longtime boyfriend, played by Anand Desai-Barochia, and receives an unexpected “not right now” answer. (The reason for that response becomes clear later in the movie — and it’s a good one.)
“He rejects me, and it sends me on a downward spiral,” says Bennett. “I just pulled from every audition and screen test I’ve ever done in my life that I didn’t get. Having that rejection at the beginning of the movie sets the tone for my character where everything is just heightened.”
Hallmark Media/Adriana Yankulova
Inspired by Bennett’s own “dysfunctional family,” he says, Dylan’s main love story in the film is the one he shares with his siblings.
“When you can see the full life and not just fixation on whatever fear that is built up by society, it helps,” Routh, 46, tells PEOPLE. “It’s great that we have people like Jonathan who are helping move society, evolution, humanity forward by telling human stories. We all love who we love. It’s just people being people, and all these stories hopefully give us some ability to learn how to be better people and to appreciate the people that are in our lives in a more holistic, healing and peaceful way.”
Adds Sher, 33: “I think part of what I was so impressed with was how seamlessly all these storylines fit together, and there was no calling it out as like, ‘Jonathan’s is the gay storyline.’ It was like, we’re all a family, Jonathan has his relationship that is crumbling. Cal’s also is crumbling. My life is crumbling, and they’re all crumbling together in the exact same way. There’s no differentiation and it really just incorporates everyone, it’s inclusive. I love it.”
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Bennett also co-created and hosts Hallmark’s reality competition series, Finding Mr. Christmas, which airs Mondays on Hallmark Channel.
A Keller Christmas Vacation premieres Sunday, Nov. 9 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Hallmark Channel, and it airs the next day on Hallmark+.
