On grief, quirkiness, guitars, and finding the person who was always meant to play her.

Before Brigid Baelfyre was ever a casting call or a film role, she was something much more personal than that.

She was a feeling.

The feeling of losing someone so essential to you that the world rearranges itself around their absence. I lost my Papa (grandpa) when I was seventeen. He had such a profound influence on who I became — and when he was gone, I felt it in a way I didn't have words for yet. That loss lived in me quietly for years, the way deep grief does. And when I was learning what story Brigid was truly trying to tell, I found it there, in that place. She carries his echo.

Brooklyn Summer as Brigid Baelfyre in The Christmas Witch Movie.

But Brigid carries something else too. She holds the wounds of feeling othered. Of being different in ways you don't fully understand until much later — of being teased and laughed at and set apart, not knowing why, just knowing that you were. Those are my wounds too. And writing them into Brigid wasn't about processing pain for its own sake. It was about something bigger than that.

Wounds that shine light. Stories that help others heal.

That's what Brigid is. That's what she's always been.

What I Was Looking For

When it came time to cast her, I knew one thing clearly: Brigid couldn't be perfect.

Not polished. Not what everyone else thinks a teenage girl should look like on screen. I wanted her to feel real — the kind of real that makes you catch your breath a little, because you recognize something of yourself in her. I wanted her to feel like the friend people wish they had. The one who gets it. The one who makes you feel less strange for being exactly who you are.

Finding that kind of presence in an actor isn't just about talent, though talent matters deeply. It's about something harder to name. An energy. A genuineness. A person who doesn't perform their personality — they just are it.

I needed to feel, when I found the right person, that she understood what Brigid was carrying. Not just the lines. The weight beneath them.

There She Was

Brooklyn Summer walked into this role with a magical quirkiness that stopped me in my tracks.

Her audition was wonderful. But it was getting to know her — talking with her, watching how she moves through the world — that made everything clear. She has that wonderful, unself-conscious spark that some people try to dim in themselves because the world has told them it's too much. Brooklyn hasn't dimmed it. She's let it be exactly what it is.

And that is Brigid.

Brigid, who was teased for being different. Brigid, who carries grief she doesn't always know how to name. Brigid, who has a magic that other people can't always see at first but can't deny once they feel it. Finding an actress who carries that same quality in her own life — that wasn't casting. That was the story finding who it needed.

The Guitar

Here's the detail that means the most to me.

Brooklyn is also a singer. Genuinely, beautifully talented. And when I realized that, something clicked into place that felt less like a creative decision and more like an inevitability: Brooklyn needed to sing in this film.

So I wrote it into the script.

And then the story took it further, the way good stories always do. In the flashback scenes — where young Brigid is played by the wonderful Melissa Edwards — her father Duncan gives her a guitar. It's a moment of pure love between a daughter and her Da, a gift that carries everything he wants for her.

Present-day Brigid plays a different guitar. Duncan is gone. But the music remains. She carries him forward in the only language that has always made sense to her.

I loved connecting those dots. The guitar she can't have back, living in memory and candlelight. The guitar she plays now, in his absence, because of him. Grief made visible. Love that outlasts loss.

That's what music does. That's what this film is trying to say.

What I Hope You Feel

When you watch Brooklyn as Brigid — when the story settles into you and the credits roll — I hope you feel understood.

I hope you feel seen.

Brooklyn Summer and Melissa Edwards as Brigid Baelfyre.

I hope something in Brigid's journey touches the part of you that has ever felt different, or lost, or like the magic in you was too strange for the world to hold. Because Brigid carries a magic we can all learn from. And Brooklyn brings it to life in a way that is beyond anything I could have hoped for when I first put pen to page.

A Note to Brooklyn

You are so talented. So professional. So funny and warm and genuinely, wonderfully yourself.

The magic you bring to this role — to Brigid, to this whole story — is more than I dreamed when I was writing a grieving teenage girl and hoping someday someone would understand her the way she deserved to be understood.

You understood her. You are a little bit of her. And I am so grateful this story found you.

I believe in you. 🎸✨

The Christmas Witch is currently in production. Stay tuned to or donate at christmaswitchmovie.com for updates, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and all the Amberlight Valley magic yet to come.