What Hallmark Stars Have Said About Their Contracts

Hallmark Media made headlines in 2022 when they upped their exclusive contracts following a mass exodus of their talent to competitor Great American Media.

“It’s usually for either two movies, and some of them are for a Christmas movie,” Hallmark executive vice president Lisa Hamilton Daly told Deadline in May 2022 of their approach to keeping stars such as Lacey Chabert and Nikki DeLoach. “It’s really to make sure that we have access to that talent during the year.”

Chabert and DeLoach were among the network’s biggest names who stayed with Hallmark after former stars Candace Cameron Bure and Danica McKellar left that year for Great American Media. (The former Hallmark CEO Bill Abbott is in charge at GAM.)

Hallmark isn’t new to inking massive deals with big names. In fact, Brooke Shields revealed in her January 2025 memoir, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman, that she signed a 16-film deal with Hallmark in 2014.

While the contract was lucrative, the actress ended the working relationship after just three Flower Shop Mysteries films.

“I’d completed only three when I realized I had to renegotiate. I’d been hired, I was told, to help change the face of the network,” she wrote. “They wanted me to be funny and bring more comedy to their offerings, but as filming progressed on each of the Flower Shop Mysteries — the franchise I was hired to headline — all the humor had evaporated.”

Scroll down to see which Hallmark stars past and present have talked about their respective contracts:

Brooke Shields

After playing flower shop owner and ex-lawyer Abby Knight in three Flower Shop Mysteries movies in 2016, Shields cut ties with Hallmark.

“Not everything is for everyone, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Hallmark Channel — God knows it has a huge fan base — but it was not the future I wanted for my career,” Shields wrote in her Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old memoir, which was released in January 2025. “I’m never against hard work, but I am now a believer in only saying yes to work that serves me.”

The actress realized, “I simply could not do ten more films that were not what I was promised and felt completely wrong for me. So I quit. I definitely surprised some people, and in plenty of ways I surprised myself. I certainly would never have done that in my 20s.”

Luke Macfarlane

Macfarlane, who has been a Hallmark staple since 2014, explained that his contract has changed over the years.

“I’ve had overall deals with them and in [the terms it says,] I’m gonna commit to five Christmas movies or five movies, but I can’t work for any other network — and they name all the other networks — and they can’t be holiday-related movies,” he explained during an appearance on Tosh Show in December 2023. “So I was able to do [Netflix’s Single All the Way] because I was outside my deal with them.”

The actor noted that Netflix paid less than his Hallmark projects which pay “well.” Macfarlane is also a fan of his residuals from the network.

“They have to air a certain amount of time before you start getting [residuals],” he said of Hallmark. “If you end up doing one of the ones that kind of hits and is popular, it gets aired more and more, so you eventually get residuals.”

Candace Cameron Bure

Cameron Bure stepped away from her role as Hallmark’s “Queen of Christmas” in April 2022. She gave insight into her decision to move to Great American that September, claiming it was partially because of negotiations.

“The truth is I’ve been under contract with Hallmark for a very, very long time. And those have been absolutely wonderful,” she told Variety at the time. “It just so happened that my contract was expiring when Great American Family started up.”

Cameron Bure — who starred in 18 Aurora Teagarden Mysteries on Hallmark Mysteries — alleged that she waited until the contract was up before talking with Great American Media. “We did not start having those discussions until we were well into negotiations with Hallmark Channel for renewing,” she continued. “And as every businessperson knows, you’ve got to do what’s right for contracts. It didn’t work out with Hallmark and so we started talking to Bill.”

Danica McKellar

McKellar became a fixture on Hallmark in 2015, but parted ways with the network in October 2021 as one of the first stars to ink a deal with Great American Media. In November 2024, she revealed that she wasn’t under contract with Hallmark at any point.

“At Hallmark, I never had an overall deal. And, with Great American, I had these multi-picture deals,” McKellar claimed during an episode of the “Sex, Lies and Spray Tans” podcast. “They let me be way more involved in the writing and the producing. It is so creatively fulfilling.”