Baton Rouge-raised actor Wes Brown has built a career in Christmas movie magic

Christmas movie fans may recognize actor Wes Brown from his starring roles in dozens of Hallmark Channel hits. This year, he stars alongside Autumn Reeser in Christmas Delivered, which will kick off the channel’s beloved Countdown to Christmas celebration with a premiere on Thanksgiving Day. But at home near New York City, the Baton Rouge-raised actor starts the holiday season the same way he always has—with a roux.

“Each year around Thanksgiving and Christmas time, my daughter’s friends ask me to make my spicy soup,” he says with a laugh. “And what they mean is gumbo.”

Though Brown hasn’t spent Christmas in his hometown in decades, his Louisiana roots still run deep. He adorns the family tree with LSU ornaments and boasts a basement full of memorabilia from his alma mater. “Even though we live in the Northeast, you can definitely tell where I’m from,” he says.

Brown’s journey from the Boot to the big screen began just before he graduated from LSU in 2004.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to aspire to, but I knew what I enjoyed: theater at LSU and playing music,” he recalls. During his senior year, Brown persuaded his rock band, Anomaly, to move to Los Angeles. But just before their big move, a handshake with acting manager Stacy Abrams changed everything. She sent him on an audition for Disney’s Glory Road, and he landed the role of a young version of legendary coach Pat Riley. Because the film was shot throughout Louisiana and Texas, the band went west without him.

Brown joined them after filming wrapped, but music was quickly sidelined as his acting career launched. “Not long after I moved out there, I got my first TV series, Beach Girls, and that moved me for several months to Halifax, Nova Scotia, which ironically is where the Cajuns come from,” he says. As his career on the screen blossomed, he amicably gave his spot in the band to a friend.

After a stint in television as anti-vampire group member Luke McDonald in True Blood, he landed an audition with the Hallmark Channel. His breakout Hallmark role in the romantic western Love Begins marked the start of a new chapter in his career. Soon after, he became a staple figure in feel-good holiday classics, including Christmas at Graceland, A Newport Christmas, Haul out the Holly and several others.

Now, more than two decades after his first film, Abrams still works as his acting manager, and Brown has built a prolific career out of the Hallmark Channel’s iconic warm-hearted romances and holiday classics. But no matter how often he has played out the familiar tropes, Christmas is still magical, he says.

Harking back to his roots as a musician, Brown produced an original song for the Natchez-set movie Every Time a Bell Rings, which premiered as the first original Christmas movie for Hallmark+ in 2021. In 2023, he released his first album titled My Kind of Christmas, a project born from his lifelong appreciation for jazz, New Orleans and the holiday season.

In this year’s Christmas Delivered, Brown promises fans all the comforting seasonal motifs they know and love—Christmas trees, a little red truck and heavy snowfall—in what he calls the network’s “most Christmas-y Christmas movie.” Filmed at a ski resort about an hour west of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, where it snowed almost every day, the setting felt naturally festive and needed little production design, he says.

“It’s one thing to have those elements present,” Brown says. “It’s another to absolutely lean into that, and we leaned into that so far, we found ourselves on basically the other side.”

Between takes, the cast and crew huddled around portable heaters in the freezing Canadian air and swapped stories of Christmases back home.

“I wish people could see the time and preparation it takes to make these,” Brown says. “Because you turn one on, it’s got all the feel-goods. But that doesn’t just happen. There are a lot of people that spend an enormous amount of time, energy and money to make these movies look the way they look, and it takes a lot of dedication.”

In addition to sometimes intense filming settings and schedules, Brown is involved with Hallmark Channel events, including an annual Christmas Cruise with fellow Hallmark stars and 4,000 fans, which boasts a waiting list of more than 70,000 people. “As so many networks right now are fizzling out, this is one of the few that is growing at an enormous rate,” he says. “I feel very blessed that I get to be a part of that growth.”

No matter how far he has roamed, on screen and otherwise, Baton Rouge will always be home.

“Baton Rouge is a very special place for me,” he says. “Even though I haven’t lived there in quite some time, my Instagram handle is still @wesbrown225 for the obvious reason. And everything I do comes back to Baton Rouge.”