Vanessa Lengies and Corey Sevier are about to star in their second Hallmark Channel movie together, Take Me Back For Christmas – but that wasn’t the first time they met, or even worked together.

The two actors opened up to Just Jared in an interview this week about their film, revealing just why they think they work so well together, and it all comes down to having known each other since they before they were teenagers.

Head inside to see what Vanessa and Corey shared about their friendship off the screen…

Vanessa and Corey first met on the set of the 1990s series, Lassie, and they say that knowing each other since then as not only child actors, but friends, helps them on screen too.

“I love Corey,” Vanessa shared with us. “I think Corey is one of the most wonderful men I have met in my lifetime. I think he’s a wonderful friend and actor, and now I know him as a director twice. I know him as a father to his children and a husband to his wife…he’s just an all around good person.”

Vanessa went on, saying that since she’s known him for “over two decades, [that] history really helps, especially now this is my first time playing husband and wife. I think that really helps to have the audience feel the soul, the soulful love there and our mutual respect.”

Corey agreed, adding that he feels the same way.

“We’ve known each other since we were, I was 12 and you were 10, I think when we first worked together,” he recalled. “In both films that we’ve done together, the characters that we played had history, and that was important. In Heart of the Holidays, it had been a long time [for us], which actually sort of ironically mirrored us in real life because for many years…life gets busy and I’m having kids and Vanessa’s off doing all this incredible stuff, but then we reconnected and that was very much a good way to reconnect on Heart of the Holidays.”

Corey continued, sharing that in Take Me Back For Christmas, “we are playing husband and wife, you know, we’ve both grown as people in our own relationships in our own lives, and too bring that experience to these, these characters was really fun.”

“We were excited that this felt like a slightly more mature love story for us to put on screen in. And I just, you know, Vanessa’s just such an incredible person, uh, and an incredible actress.”

“I was just thinking too,” Vanessa chimed in again. “We both were child actors in Canada around this in the same time. So when we got together creatively at as adults, that also added a lot to it, because we kind of have a similar way of working. And when these movies, you have to, you know, film it a lot in such a short period of time, our creative styles really blended well together.”

“A hundred percent,” he agreed. “A lot of history. We love working together, so hopefully it’s been translating on screen.”

Take Me Back For Christmas, part of the Christmas in July programming, will premiere this Saturday, July 15 at 8 p.m. on Hallmark Channel.

Stay tuned for more of our interview!