5 Questions With Jaicy Elliot of ‘My Southern Family Christmas’ on Hallmark Channel

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Jaicy Elliot has gone full circle now that her Grey’s Anatomy character, surgeon Dr. Taryn Helm, works at a bar, following the end of the residency program at Grey Sloan Memorial. Elliot bartended for years while she was going to college in Paris. “It was a lot of late nights, so it was very tiring. But it was a lot of fun,” she says of her former job.

Pivoting even more from her yearslong Grey’s character in the upcoming Hallmark Channel original movie My Southern Family Christmas, which will air Thursday, Nov. 24, at, Elliot plays a journalist who travels to Louisiana to meet her long-lost father (Bruce Campbell). The film is a bit of a departure for Hallmark, Elliot believes, because it’s not solely focused on romance. “It’s about a different kind of love. It’s about family and self-identity, and the discovery of that,” she says. “Also, we discover the story through the lens of Louisiana, specifically the Cajun culture. That was exciting to be part of, because I feel like a lot of people have an expectation of a white Christmas, and this is very different.”

Perhaps because she is originally from France, Jaicy seems drawn to these “less traditional” spaces — in her first Hallmark film, Romance in Style, she played a feisty fashion designer specializing in plus-sized clothing. After spending some time gushing over Cédric Klapisch’s 2002 French film The Spanish Apartment and its two popular sequels (starring French icons Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou, as well as the future Yellowstone star Kelly Reilly), we eventually got to our “5 Questions.”

1. You have an interesting background. Can you tell us a bit about where you grew up?
I grew up in a hub for nanotechnology in Europe. It’s in this town called Grenoble, by the French Alps. French was my first language, but it was installed very early on in our lives that we had to learn how to speak English and French.

2. That explains why you don’t have an accent! What sorts of jobs did you have when you first moved to the States?
It’s a little bit of a cliché, but I was a waitress for a very long time. I will say, altogether, for about 10 years. I also worked as night help for elderly sick people who can’t be placed in homes. I would go and stay with them, and make food and clean the house, and just make sure that they were set up to go to bed. I would be there until 11 or 12. It was not an easy job, but it was a very gratifying job, because it felt like I was truly helping people and making them a little happier and a little more comfortable, as much as I could.

3. Did that help prepare you for playing a doctor on Grey’s Anatomy? With English being your second language, the medical terminology must have been extra difficult for you.
You would think so, but not really. I was just there to support their at-home comfort. It was like medication for the soul, maybe a little bit. But it’s very different than what it feels like to be a doctor, on Grey’s at least. Grey’s Anatomy is famous for its fast pace, and its very extensive, precise and difficult words to say … it is still very daunting. I landed in the States maybe a year and a half, two years prior to getting Grey’s Anatomy. I’d read my script and then for a week I’d repeat this one word over and over and over again, like a mad scientist, just trying to get it to be as natural as possible. It’s one of those things that no matter what I do, the minute I’m done with the scene, I forget what the word is. It does not stick in my mind.

4. What three movies would you watch over and over?
The Holiday. I just like it so much. I love Kate Winslet. The whole California versus England thing is awesome. I’ve seen that one quite a bit. Also, Being John Malkovich, which just so happens to have Cameron Diaz in it as well. It’s such a funky story. Then another one is O Brother, Where Art Thou? We know all the songs by heart in my family, and I love the movie and the Coen brothers.

5. Tell us about a time you were starstruck.
It’s not so much a time, as it’s like a couple years of my life when I started Grey’s Anatomy. I grew up watching it as a kid. It was one of the only shows we had in English. That, and Friends, I believe, were the ones we had in English. When I started on Grey’s I was in a permanent starstruck mood. Looking back, it feels like I was maybe a little checked out, because it was very confusing to be there and be talking to all these iconic people and interacting with these characters. It was hard, I’m not going to lie. But it helped that I also started with a whole class of interns, and so we got to freak out together on the regular outside of work. We got it out of our systems.