Trent Green does not have a long acting career. His IMDb page is basically his football career. For example, it lists him as appearing in 11 episodes of NFL On Fox as “Self,” while quarterbacking Washington, St. Louis, and Kansas City. Now Green has a real credit to his name, though he’s still playing himself—Trent Green is in a Hallmark Christmas movie.
Earlier this week, Alex, Kelsey, Sabrina and I discussed Christmas in the Spotlight. That was a Lifetime Christmas movie featuring not-so-thinly veiled versions of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. It was like any other football movie that existed in a world outside the NFL, in that the teams were fake—the Kelce character, Gonzo, played for the Bay Springs Bombers—and the extra-large end zones in the football scenes were proof that the film was made in Canada. But Trent Green’s movie debut features the real Kansas City Chiefs. Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story, which premieres Saturday, is an actual honest-to-God NFL-licensed Hallmark Christmas movie. Score one for Hallmark in the annual contest for made-for-TV Christmas supremacy.
With that NFL license, Holiday Touchdown is not another fake Taylor and Travis film, and much more of a Hallmark experience. This one follows Alana Higman, a Chiefs superfan from a family full of them, and Derrick Taylor, a Chiefs front-office employee who is part of the committee vetting contestants for the fan of the year contest. Alana is played by Hunter King, a Hallmark vet who was in last year’s Santacon-themed film The Santa Summit; Derrick is played by Tyler Hynes, who is in a Hallmark sequel this year called Three Wiser Men And A Boy.
But the movie has some real recognizable character actors in it as well, which I will share alongside some of my favorite roles of theirs: The Higman Family includes the guy on The Simpsons who has a go-kart powered by his own sense of self-satisfaction, who is also the same actor who smokes with Henry at the Seniorlicious seminar in Party Down (Ed Begley Jr.); the neighbor in Office Space, who was also on 233 episodes of The Drew Carey Show (Diedrich Bader); the mom in Grounded for Life (Megyn Price); and the guy from Office Space who melts down in front of the Bobs and gets laid off, and then invents the Jump to Conclusions mat after getting in a car accident (Richard Riehle). There's also Christine Ebersole, an incredibly accomplished stage, film, and TV actress who I could not come up with a favorite role for. This is a cast! Ed Begley Jr. probably gets the most screen time of all of these folks; I am not spoiling anything when I tell you that he doesn’t drive a go-kart.
The whole family is not just Chiefs-obsessed, but the proprietors of a Chiefs-themed store in Kansas City. Along with the NFL license, there are a couple of Chiefs-related cameos: Andy Reid and his wife Tammy Reid; Clyde Edwards-Helaire; Mecole Hardman Jr.; George Karlaftis; K.C. Wolf; and, of course, Donna Kelce. There is an extended scene where Alana freaks out over meeting Trey Smith. Chiefs and Tecmo Super Bowl legend Christine Okoye is also in the film, too, although he is credited as “Nudgie Customer” and not himself.
Warning: Spoilers ahead! The movie’s plot involves a lucky hat, given to the family by Santa Claus himself, that has been in the Higman family since the Chiefs won Super Bowl 4. (Here’s a nice touch: The hat is absolutely modeled off an actual hat, as I have a vintage Eagles one in the exact same style.) Derrick and Alana meet up, start a relationship pretty quickly but split up despite Alana winning the fan of the year contest. The lucky hat is lost—Alana announces this to the Christmas Day game crowd after taking the mic from Jenna Bush Hager, who is also playing herself—but the Chiefs give out replicas of the same hat to all the fans. The movie ends with Santa showing up to magically give the old hat back to the family. It’s a Hallmark Christmas movie, in short, just one that happens to have George Karlaftis and Mecole Hardman Jr. in it.
But who steals the movie? Trent Freaking Green, that’s who. He appears in one scene, presumably because the film could not afford Patrick Mahomes and Len Dawson is dead. Green is running a charity football toss at the same Christmas event where Alana meets Trey Smith. He asks Derrick and Alana if they want to play. “I can’t say no to Trent Green,” she says of the man who went 48-40 with 118 touchdowns and 85 interceptions for the Chiefs over six seasons. (The Colts and Peyton Manning ended his best season, where the Chiefs went 13-3, in the divisional round in a memorable game where neither team could stop the other in the second half.)
Derrick takes a football for the toss, and hands over some money for charity. Hilariously, Green puts the money in his pocket, as if he’s either a) keeping all the charity money in his jeans the whole night or b) simply stealing money that’s supposed to be going to a good cause. You know how the rest of this scene goes: Derrick misses his throw, Alana tosses hers through the hole. “Where we come from, that’s called skill,” Green says, perhaps confident that no matter what happened he has just pocketed some sweet cash.
The scene ends with Green tossing a football through a hole as well, then throwing up his arms. “And nobody here to see it,” says the two-time Pro Bowl quarterback. He just better hope nobody saw where he put that charity money.
All in all, it was a pretty great film debut for Trent Green. And you know who coached Green? That’s right: Dick Vermeil, lynchpin of the Dick Vermeil Cinematic Universe. It took me until now to realize it, but Holiday Touchdown is one of those side films the studio makes to tide over fans between primary story installments. Hey, Marvel has done far worse.
