Jen Lilley is the ultimate multi-hyphenate. She's an actress, producer, author, advocate, podcaster, wife, mother, and singer. Ask her what she does for a living and the common thread in her response is clear. "I would describe myself as a storyteller," she says, "because I can tell stories through acting. I can tell stories through producing. I can tell stories through books. I can tell stories through music. I can tell stories through inspirational speaking. So I think that's really what ties it all together for me."
Long before Lilley was known for her work in holiday movies, she was growing up in a home where the concept of family was expanded. Her parents were, as she describes them, "unofficial foster parents," consistently opening their home to families and teenagers navigating hard seasons of life. The idea of someone staying in her house who wasn't a blood relative was not a foreign concept.
That foundation led her to eventually become a child advocate through Child Help, an organization she describes as possibly the original child abuse prevention organization in the country, and one she remains an ambassador for to this day. Through their Special Friends program, similar in structure to Big Brothers Big Sisters, she became a mentor. And through that mentorship, she and her husband fell deeply in love with one of their mentees.
In the effort to get licensed as foster parents as quickly as possible to maintain their relationship with that child, they met Kayden. "Our very first placement actually was our son Kayden," she says, "and then we fostered other children, but then we fostered his biological brother, Jeffrey, who is also our son now. So we adopted both of them out of LA County's foster care system through Child Help."
The child they originally set out to foster eventually aged out of the system and is now part of her family. "She's in college and she's spending all of her holidays and stuff with us," she says. "So that had a happy ending."
That emotional journey became the catalyst for her book Called to Foster, co-written with Dr. John DeGarmo, a nationally recognized expert in foster care whom she met during the pandemic when they both appeared on a CNN segment. A shared trip to Capitol Hill to lobby Congress for foster care reform solidified their partnership.
"I really realized that I wanted to duplicate myself," she says, "because there's only so many kids I can help." The book is an honest and personal account of what foster care actually is, written by someone who has lived it. "My specific mission has really been to recruit other people to foster and to demystify it because there's just so many myths and misconceptions."
Chief among them: the idea that children in foster care are somehow difficult or troubled. "51% of surveyed Americans believe children in foster care are bad kids," she says. "Children in foster care are often associated with the juvenile justice system and things like that. But that's really the aftermath of being abused or neglected and then being passed through a broken system with no one who's consistent or no one who says your story can look a different way."
"If I can do this, you can do this," Lilley says, "because I have no business fostering. I'm traveling all the time. I have a thousand hats that I'm wearing sometimes at the same time. And so I just feel like I want to make people think that they can do it, but I also want to be honest and say, here's what it entails. So don't go into this with rose-colored glasses. It's hard."
Foster care advocacy aside, this month brings one of the most meaningful acting roles of Lilley's career: Gloria Stewart, wife of the legendary James Stewart, in the biopic Jimmy, opening in theaters nationwide on November 6th, just ahead of Veterans Day, with the movie's premiere planned at The Franklin Theatre.
"I fell out of my chair," she says of the moment she got the call to play Stewart's wife. "Who doesn't love James Stewart?" The film explores Stewart's deep desire to serve his country during World War II. MGM famously tried to circumvent his service on his behalf, and that briefly made him a target of public criticism before the full story became clear. He served without special treatment, flew missions the military called suicidal, and came home profoundly changed.
"He came back as a shell of a man," Lilley says. "Hollywood didn't want him anymore. He served, I think, three years and they were like, 'You're a has-been.' And that was before Hitchcock, before It's a Wonderful Life, before the work that we really remember him for mostly."
"I truly believe with everything in me that when people leave the movie theater, they're going to leave feeling a lot more united as a country and as a nation," she says. "And that's something we desperately need right now."
Beyond the biopic, Lilley remains one of the most recognizable faces in holiday cinema. Her latest Hallmark Channel film, Love Under the Mistletoe, has her playing Grace Rankin, an interior designer whose high school crush returns to town to settle his grandmother's affairs, and with whom she eventually rediscovers something she never quite let go of. "I love stories like that," she says. "I love when they have a longstanding relationship that you get to build from the get-go."
As for why audiences love their holiday movies with the same predictable stories that continue to draw enormous viewership, Lilley says it's an "escape. There is a lot of psychology behind why classic stories or classic movies are watched over and over, and it's because they're predictable and it's a break for our brain." She cites psychological research suggesting that these comforting stories are genuinely beneficial and that the genre's most devoted viewers are perhaps not who you'd expect. "They say lawyers, judges, detectives, police officers, people with very high-stress jobs are the number one demographic. And moms," she adds.
This coming year is, predictably, full for Lilley. A new song called "It's Going to Be Okay," recorded with an artist named Roosevelt, is releasing with 100% of proceeds benefiting Child Help and their child abuse hotline. A new book, Into the Supernatural, based on her podcast of the same name and co-written with Billy Hallowell for HarperCollins, is coming in 2027. And another biopic, One Beautiful Life, in which she plays Jenny Phillips — a remarkable singer who left her career to become a mother and eventually built one of the most successful homeschooling curricula in the country — is also on the way.
When asked what she most wants people to know about her, she says, "I love people. I want people to know me by my love, and I want people to just feel seen and known and heard and loved when they're around me. So that's my number one driver." JenLilley.com / @jen_lilley