As the star (and an executive producer) of the Hannah Swensen mystery movies, Alison Sweeney is used to baking sweet treats while also solving unsavory crime.
But for One Bad Apple: A Hannah Swensen Mystery (premiering Friday, April 5 at 9/8c on Hallmark Mystery fka Hallmark Movies & Mysteries), Sweeney decided to cook up the script as well — and fold in former co-star and fellow Days of Our Lives alum Victor Webster, as icing on the cake.
Based on the Joanne Fluke novel Apple Turnover Murder, One Bad Apple finds Hannah teaching a baking class at the college in town. When her equipment is tampered with — and after a colleague winds up dead — Hannah gets to putting together the puzzle of the mysterious murder. Along the way, Lake Eden’s prosecuting attorney, Chad Norton (played by Webster), enters her life.
TVLine spoke with Sweeney about cracking the recipe for actually scripting a Hannah Swensen movie, reuniting with Wedding Veil movies co-star Webster, and why Cameron Mathison’s Detective Mike is MIA this time around.
TVLINE | You said at the winter TCA press tour that you were nervous about writing this script. But what about the process specifically proved harder than you thought?
Honestly, the hardest part is hitting “send” and sharing it [once completed], knowing other people were going to read it. As for the actual process of it, I watched some YouTube videos and read about how writers allocate their time, and once I had done the outline — developing the mystery and “Where are the clues being laid out?” felt like the trickiest part — I dedicated myself to writing 10 pages a day.
TVLINE | I was thinking that one specific challenge you faced was you had a new character in Chad, so you had to ask yourself: What does he sound like? Does he use more “SAT words” than Mike? Fewer?
That was all about brainstorming with my creative partner on the series, Craig [Baumgarten], and also with the network. Initially, when we approached Victor, I had to pitch him how I see this character. How do I think he fits into Hannah’s world? And how is he going to be different [from Mike]? The lucky thing for me is I’ve worked with Victor before and I know him really well, and I had this vision in my mind of the guy he could be that would really be new to Hannah’s world. He’s a little more resistant to her charms, a little more about following protocol, rules. That was a really fun twist to bring into Hannah’s