Hallmark’s Rachel Boston and Brendan Penny Share How They Were Paired (Exclusive)

Some matches are made in heaven. Others can happen on a cruise.

Such was the case for the pairing of Hallmark Channel favorites Rachel Boston and Brendan Penny for this year’s Christmas movie, The More the Merrier, which premieres Friday, Nov. 28.

“We met one year ago on this cruise, and we made each other laugh a lot,” Boston, 43, tells PEOPLE from a lounge on the 2025 Hallmark Christmas Cruise.

“We did not know each other before then at all, and we had a really good time on the cruise,” Penny, 47, agrees. “It was the dress-up night that we kind of were like, ‘Hey, let’s go talk to Tatiana [Erasme], who’s head of casting.’ And so we threw the idea that we haven’t worked together yet, we’d really love to, and if that was a possibility, to strongly consider it. And it landed.”

“And here we are!” Boston adds. “We made each other laugh the whole time. I don’t know how funny we were, but we made each other laugh.”

“I was hilarious,” Penny deadpans.

“You were hilarious, specifically,” Boston laughs. “We did this game show thing together, and we created this whole backstory where we were newlyweds, and we had just this whole thing that we played. And then they were like, ‘Ooh, maybe we could play them, they could be doctors.'”

Sure enough, the actors play doctors in The More the Merrier. According to the official synopsis, “Alice (Boston), an emergency room doctor at a small, rural hospital, always volunteers to work the Christmas Eve overnight shift and goes the extra mile to make the holiday merry and bright for patients and staff.  When the hospital gets snowed in, Alice and Brian (Penny), the newly hired top-rated cardiologist, find themselves in the middle of a bona fide baby boom when three women — including the only OBGYN for miles around — go into labor on the rarest birthday of the year.  As they team up to bring these bundles of joy into the world as the night wears on, Alice, Brian and the rest of the staff also work hard to make the holiday feel festive for all the patients.  Though they may have different approaches to medicine — and to life — there’s a spark between them, and by the end of their shift, it’s clear that this may be the Christmas Eve that changes them both forever.”

See what they had to say about their experience making the movie below.

PEOPLE: What do you think it is about you that makes you believable as a doctor?

BRENDAN PENNY: Probably the wardrobe. Even though the character is a doctor, it’s more about his personality. He’s very intense about his work and very focused and takes it very seriously. And then he’s kind of a bumbling fool when it comes to his love life. So I could dial into that.

RACHEL BOSTON: The role was looking for a bumbling fool.

PENNY: Yeah, that’s me. That’s right.

BOSTON: No, he did a really great job. It was very believable that you were a cardiologist. My sister-in-law is a nurse in the emergency room, so I called her before we started filming and got some wisdom. I love medical shows, so I thought that was really a fun way to have a Christmas movie. And then getting to see two people that are also really intelligent who meet each other on the same plane, and they are now suddenly going to be working together for potentially years and years on end is an interesting way to start a Christmas movie.

Rachel, you’ve been on ER, so you’ve been in a hospital drama before on the other side.

BOSTON: Yes. That’s how I met Andrew Walker. I was a patient. John Wells discovered our great love story, Andrew Walker and I. I played a soldier who had just returned from Iraq, and he proposed to me at the end of my treatment from John Stamos.

PENNY: There you go. And on Chesapeake Shores, I was actually an FST, so I was off in the Army as an emergency doctor.

How hard was it to do the medical jargon?

PENNY: I had to talk about heart problems with one of the actors, but it was written so well that it actually wasn’t hard to slide the jargon in.

BOSTON: When they called me about this and playing a doctor, that’s immediately what I prepped for. I was picturing just page after page of words that I had to research and look up. But there are a lot of babies. It’s called The More the Merrier, and it is a baby boom in this town on Christmas Eve.

PENNY: It’s a baby kaboom! That’s how many there are.

That means there were a lot of babies on set, I assume. How was that?

BOSTON: I loved it so much. They were so little.

PENNY: It was great because they were actual tiny newborn babies, but everyone was very respectful. You only have a certain amount of time. When they came on set, you could hear a pin drop, which is something you can never hear on a film set unless you are rolling. But in between setups, it was just dead quiet.

BOSTON: It’s the only time I have ever seen Brendan be silent.

PENNY: Yeah, it was a struggle.

Was that an added challenge trying to work around all those babies?

BOSTON: It was nerve-wracking for the team. For us, it was heaven.

PENNY: Yeah. It’s so easy to look at a baby that you’re supposed to be in love with and be in love with it. I mean, it’s the easiest thing in the universe.

BOSTON: It was so sweet. They were just weeks old. When you do have infants on set, there was a level of pressure of us needing to be on our A-game because we only had a very short window.

PENNY: Which as you’ll see, we were.

Rachel, did it give you flashbacks to when your daughter was that age?

BOSTON: Oh, so many. I mean, when I was reading the script and just thinking about women in different chapters of their lives. We had a lot of different just storylines where you get to celebrate women and how strong they are and the just beauty of creating life. So I thought that was a wonderful way to live in a Christmas miracle.

And there’s a whole miracle element to this movie because of the Damar Hamlin of it all.

PENNY: That’s right.

BOSTON: Abbott has a program called HeartMates that Brendan’s character works a lot with because he is a cardiologist and it’s a program that Damar Hamlin started for children who have similar heart conditions to what he went through very publicly. And it connects them online to a community of children that might feel a little more isolated, being really young.

PENNY: And the program isn’t that old, but it’s developing at such a rapid rate. What he’s doing over there and what the whole organization is doing is absolutely fantastic. So it was a real privilege to be able to promote it and give it the light that it deserves. That was really awesome.

BOSTON: I think seeing children that are in such a vulnerable place, but that find community, I mean, he’s giving so much of his own heart.

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The More the Merrier premieres on Friday, Nov. 28 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Hallmark Channel and the next day on Hallmark+.