Shiri Appleby Shares Her 'Christmas' Present

Published
Lifetime

The past is incredibly important to Shiri Appleby's present. Not just professionally, since she stars in a new Lifetime movie about a woman who becomes a pseudo-Cyrano to her younger self through some holiday magic, but also personally. "I'm always trying to figure out what I can learn from what a past experience taught me," she tells ETonline.

In Kristin's Christmas Past, she plays a 34-year-old woman who is estranged from her family and goes to sleep alone on Christmas Eve and wakes up Christmas morning seventeen years into her past to relive the worst Christmas of her life. "I just thought it sounded like a really fun idea to go back and play a character that gets to go into her past where she realizes her present is exactly what it needs to be," she tells me of the initial attraction to the part.

"I think it's interesting when you start to look at your life and explore why you are where you are now. Even the things you think are mistakes end up informing so much about who you are today."

And if Shiri could give herself some advice at 17, it would be this: "You will eventually realize that all the things that seem important when you're starting out your career do not matter. It's all about enjoying the process and the people you're with. The only thing you have control over is yourself."


Kristin's Christmas Past
premieres Saturday at 8 p.m. on Lifetime.