Skyler Samuels Introduces Her Younger Version of Aurora Teagarden in the Prequel

“It’s the beginning of the love story of Aurora and solving crime,” Skyler Samuels says of when we meet the amateur detective in the newest Hallmark Movies & Mysteries installment.

Aurora Teagarden Mysteries: Something New (premiering June 9) is a prequel to the series of movies that starred Candace Cameron Bure as the titular sleuth. Now, Samuels plays her post-college, working as a TA in a crime fiction class, when her best friend Sally’s (Kayla Heller) fiancé becomes entangled in a murder mystery. Aurora, of course, gets involved.

Samuels talks about stepping into the young Aurora’s shoes.

How much of the franchise had you watched before taking on the role?

Skyler Samuels: I wasn’t super familiar. I knew of the movies and I think I had seen one in passing. When the opportunity to play the new Aurora came my way, I watched a bunch of the original ones and just really studied Aurora and her world and tried to hone in on her traits and characteristics that really made her her. Then from there, I just reverse engineered who I imagined she might have been when she was in her early to mid 20s, and that’s really where the fun of inventing the younger Aurora came from.

Talk about stepping into those shoes because like you said, you’re going back to who she was. 

The one thing that I love watching as an audience member is imperfect people. It’s just not interesting if people are too put together or too polished. It’s fun to see people be human and a little rough around the edges. When we meet Aurora as an adult, she’s pretty polished and she’s good at solving her mysteries and crimes. She’s in her stride.

I thought it would be really fun to just embrace the version of her where she’s not good at this stuff yet. She’s still definitely figuring it out, and you’re watching her stumble into her superpower of being this gumshoe mystery solver and how that love and obsession develops for her. Because it’s the early days. She is getting her master’s degree, she’s a TA at a university, but she’s also working at a diner. She’s kind of all over the place in life just trying to make ends meet and then finds herself engrossed in this crazy murder mystery. It’s the beginning of the love story of Aurora and solving crime. That’s the really fun part of going back in time is you get to see her figure out how to be good at the thing we know she eventually excels at.

How much is crime and crime solving part of her life at the beginning of the movie?

It’s definitely something that she’s always had a guilty pleasure for. She’s never without a book [in the] murder mystery genre. There’s always something like that that she’s reading or watching. It’s a hobby for her in the beginning. We know from the original movies – and it’s referenced again in this movie — that she had encountered a dead body once in high school. But since then, it’s not like she’s really been out solving things herself. It’s just been a passion and more of a theoretical interest.

Sven Boecker/Hallmark Media

Her best friend Sally is getting married and there is just utter chaos that surrounds this wedding. She finds herself at the center of a real-life murder mystery. I think it’s the first time for Aurora where we see it go from being a theoretical interest to a real-life application of “I can actually solve this mystery myself. I’m going to get involved and I’m going to do it hands on” and watching that excitement just engross her.

And Sally has a line about how Aurora’s found something for her in the past so she can help her.

Exactly. Aurora is an undoubtedly clever girl. She’s good at retracing her steps and a very linear thinker, Type A problem solver. She is good at finding stuff and she can piece things together pretty quickly. But I don’t think up until that point she’d ever really had the opportunity to solve a real crime herself, let alone one that was so close to home. It’s really fun to see her in the trenches for the first time just full on in murder mystery mode. You also get to see how her relationships with Sally and Arthur [Evan Roderick] inform her team because in the original Auroras, we know that Arthur and Sally are the backbone of her crime solving team, so to speak. In this movie, you get to see how those dynamics started to develop.

We knew about Aurora and Arthur’s past, but we’re seeing that now.

Oh, that’s my favorite part. The one thing I hope for the original audience of the Aurora movies to really get to dine out on is that they actually get to go in depth on “What did happen with Arthur and Aurora? What was that?” It’s always alluded to, but you never see it in fruition when they’re older adults, so [you’re seeing] them in their early to mid 20s, where they’re very much in the thick of the will they/won’t they. They’re both are interested in each other, but neither really knows how to approach it, and yet they find themselves working together on these cases. It’s really juicy and sweet and fun, and I think that’ll be a really fun relationship for the original Aurora audience to enjoy in this new reinterpretation.

But there is another potential love interest for Aurora in this movie…

It’s never interesting if there’s only one boy — you have to have two! It’s not a love line, it’s a love triangle. Aurora is working at her local diner as supplemental income, and there’s a very handsome, charming cook who really catches her attention and you can see that she is not the best at the flirting. It’s one of the things I love about Aurora: I don’t think being a suave romantic comes naturally to her.

It’s something that in the original movies, Aurora and Aida [Marilu Henner] always say: The Teagarden women are not sentimental. We’re not very romantic. That’s not our vibe. You get a sense of that in this movie, but you can also see that it’s one of the spots where Aurora doesn’t know best necessarily. She definitely has a little bit to learn when it comes to love and romance. It’s fun watching her navigate flirting. She does have her eye on this cook, but at the same time, this old friendship with Arthur has reignited what might be a new flame, so maybe that’s of interest, but she doesn’t really know how to solve those yet. It’ll be fun watching that unwind.

I love Aurora and Aida’s dynamic.

They’re so fun. We love each other. We really got on so well, and Aida and Aurora have such a quirky, funny mother-daughter relationship. It’s really fun to build that backstory for them, especially because in this new movie when we meet Aurora, she’s moved back in with her mom after being on her own for eight years and all of a sudden it’s like she’s a teenager again because she’s an adult, but she’s living with her mom and they’ve kind of reverted to their old ways. And yet Aurora is like, “Mom, I’m 26 years old, I can go out and not have to call you at night.”

Sven Boecker/Hallmark Media

What’s Aurora’s approach to crime solving here? What’s the most important thing she’ll learn?

Aurora learns how far to put yourself in the case. We really watch Aurora get herself into some dicey situations and really in the thick of danger in a way where you’re watching it and you’re like, “Oh my God, please don’t do that. It’s so dangerous.” Then she does it anyway, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, how is she doing this?” Because there’s a certain naivete that Aurora has about approaching this whole thing. She’s so consumed by wanting to solve the mystery, she starts to lose sight of [the fact] it’s actually dangerous to her as well. She’s not just solving a mystery, but she, too, might find herself in the line of fire if she’s not careful.

Balancing how much of yourself you put into a case when you’re trying to solve it is a really interesting struggle for her to navigate because this murder is surrounding her best friend’s wedding, she’s the maid of honor. This is all very much happening in and around her, so it’s hard for her not to be personally involved. But I think it’s true of any sort of murder mystery detective type — you have to try to stay objective-ish with the case. We’re watching Aurora figure that out in real time.

What I love about these movies is Aurora and Sally’s friendship and how strong it is. We can see that immediately.

Absolutely. Kayla Heller is just the most delicious, adorable human being I’ve ever met. She’s so much fun and we met and fell in love immediately. We just got on so well in real life that it was so easy to bring that love and friendship and silliness and closeness to Sally and Aurora. It’s been so much fun to see them forge the fire of their relationship in these early movies, which totally informs why they’re so close in the original movies.

What surprised you the most about Aurora by the end of the movie?

While she can be so analytical and definitive about certain things, she is still very undecided and mixed up about other things. She really is a woman in transition between figuring out this hobby, this passion of hers that will eventually become her job, [but] while that is becoming more clear, her personal life is becoming less clear. [There’s] that dichotomy of “I’m finally starting to figure out what I’m meant to do in life. Also, who the heck am I and how do I figure this out? Working two jobs and finishing grad school and being caught between two very attractive, very different men and how do I navigate this?” It’s fun to see her get better at her mystery solving life and maybe a little bit messier in her personal life.

Related

Alison Sweeney Talks Hannah Swensen's Next 2 Mysteries — Yes, Another Is Coming!

Will we see more of you as Aurora in future movies?

I hope so. That’s definitely the plan. There’s a lot more young Aurora adventures to be told, so hopefully we get the chance to come back and give the audience a few more juicy movies.

What do you want to explore as Aurora in future movies?

I’m really interested to see Aurora go too far when it comes to some of the crime solving stuff [and] as she’s figuring out how to do this, some of the boundaries she might cross or sort of pickles she gets herself into. It’ll be interesting and challenging and exciting to see her go too far as she figures out what are the boundaries of solving a murder and protecting yourself in the process. There’s a very good chance that some of the murders are going to hit even closer to home. The more personally involved they become, watching how that might affect how she navigates solving them will be really interesting.

Aurora Teagarden Mysteries: Something New, Movie Premiere, Friday, June 9, 9/8c, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries