Mae Whitman’s New Hallmark Series Reminds Her of ‘Best Friend’ Lauren Graham (Exclusive)

Mae Whitman is happy to be taking a page out of her best friend Lauren Graham’s book.

Whitman, 37, stars as Saville Row textile pattern designer Kate, who finds herself taking part in a local matchmaking program in the small English town she lives in, thanks to her best friend, in Hallmark’s Twelve Dates ‘Til Christmas.

She tells PEOPLE that starring in the series — which was adapted from Jenny Bayliss’ 2020 novel, The Twelve Dates of Christmas — feels like a “Hollywood fairy tale,” and it reminds her of the experience her longtime friend, Graham, 58, had on Gilmore Girls.

“It’s infinitely freeing to be on a project where you don’t feel like something’s out to get you, or you have to be over-revving your engine, or trying to give something that you don’t have. It really makes a big difference,” Whitman says while on set of the series in Ireland earlier this year.

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“It’s like, my best friend Lauren, she was on Gilmore Girls, obviously, and that was like — it’s obviously the Mecca of that [fairy-tale] feeling,” Whitman says. “It’s nice to get a little slice of that in my own professional life, where I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m in this little nice world where I can just sort of let go for one second, and just be among the twinkly lights.'” 

In Twelve Dates ‘Til Christmas, Kate (Whitman) is “lovingly coerced” by her best friends, Laura (Lucy Eaton) and Callum (Julian Morris), to participate in the holiday matchmaking program — “an attempt to get Kate out of her rut.”

“A reluctant Kate ultimately gets into the spirit of the program and is caught off guard when she meets someone (Toby Sandeman) who reinvigorates her zest for life,” reads the official synopsis.

Things get complicated, though, when her mother, Delilah (Mary McDonnell), “unexpectedly shows up on her doorstep,” which throws a wrench in both Kate’s holiday plans and her father’s (Nathaniel Parker), who lives next door and has begun a romance of his own with a local widow (Jane Seymour).

Whitman relocated to Ireland with her infant son, Miles, to film the series, which she says was a “real treat.”

“I think I am somebody who, in my career, I’ve been lucky to do projects that kind of run the gamut. I’ve been in the darkest, lowest, most intense, dramatic things. And even with Good Girls, it was funny, we were all like, ‘The crew gifts should be Botox this year, because we’re having to look like we’re constantly about to die, and our frowns and the panic and the stress,’ ” she says.

“When you’re doing a dramatic project, your body feels that. You’re tense, you’re stressed, you’re holding all that stuff,” she says. “So it’s a real treat to be able to do something that kind of is this fairy tale.”

“It’s a fairy tale for me, to be in these beautiful places, and celebrating these beautiful moments. But also for me as an actor, it’s a fairy tale, because of how great the crew is, and because of what a wonderful working experience it is,” Whitman continues. “That is, as [I get older], what feels like the biggest priority to me.”

The first two episodes of Twelve Dates ‘Til Christmas premiere Friday, Dec. 5, at 8 p.m. ET on Hallmark.