McNally and his longtime partner, Julie Gonzalo, welcomed a baby girl last June.
Chris McNally has one word that best describes what fans can expect for the upcoming 10th season of When Calls the Heart -- thrilling. The same can be said about how fatherhood's treating him.
The 34-year-old actor spoke to ET's Denny Directo on Wednesday at the Hollywood premiere of Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies and he dished some deets about the biggest obstacle his WCTH character, Lucas, will face in season 10, slated to premiere July 30 on the Hallmark Channel. Fans will remember the season 9 finale ended with Lucas popping the question, and Elizabeth (Erin Krakow) saying yes.
"I don't want to give anything away but I will say that Lucas has not faced an obstacle this large, this drastic since he's joined the show," McNally tells ET. "So, we have some pretty epic, pivotal conflict to overcome and it's sort of all-encompassing."
More than 3.1 million viewers tuned in to the season 9 finale, and with season 10 fast approaching (and season 11 already renewed!), fans of the hit show will take anything at this point in terms of what else they can expect in the upcoming season. Luckily for fans, McNally spills a bit of the tea.
"I think people will enjoy the first section of this season because there is almost, perhaps, a lack of romance, but not for lack of trying. It's just that we take an angle that I think people can all register with, which is, sometimes life gets busy," McNally says. "And so you get to find these two people who are newly engaged, they're in love with each other, infatuated with each other and they feel like there's other things that are kind of pulling them apart. And there's this desire and need to kind of fight to play the wedding."
While fans will have to wait until the July premiere to see what Lucas and Elizabeth have been up to, fans can take solace in that McNally's real life has been just as thrilling, if not more, when it comes to fatherhood. McNally and his longtime partner, Julie Gonzalo, welcomed a baby girl last June.
"Fatherhood is fantastic. It's my favorite job," he says. "It's a job I've always wanted to do and I'm really, really grateful that right now, at least, I've got a wonderful dad job because for When Calls the Heart we film four and a half months, the hours are not crazy, we don't really have a lot of night shoots so I can be really present with her. And then I get the rest of the year, which is like, it's just such a blessing. So, since wrapping in mid-November I've just been on dad mode and it's fantastic."
Besides dad mode, McNally's also in Grease mode, as part of the upcoming original music series Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, which chronicles how the iconic all-female high school group came together.
Set four years before the events of Grease, which followed a group of seniors during their final year of high school in 1958, the prequel will show how "four fed-up outcasts dare[d] to have fun on their own terms, sparking a moral panic that will change Rydell High forever."
The series features McNally, Marisa Davila, Cheyenne Isabel Wells, Tricia Fukuhara, Shanel Bailey, Madison Thompson, Johnathan Nieves, Jason Schmidt, Maxwell Whittington-Cooper and Jackie Hoffman. To get ready for the role, McNally says he brushed up on the 1978 musical starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.
"I am one of those people who, of course, we were aware of Grease. I watched it when I was little and then it wasn't until this show came around I was like, 'Oh, I need to, you know, get back into it," he says. "I watched it again. It was kinda like I watched it for the first time because I was so small when I watched it the first [time]. I'm embarrassed to say that but, on the other hand, I fell in love with it again. I'm, like, 'This is just the best.' And I'm so happy to be a part of this reincarnation of it."
Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies premieres April 6 on Paramount+.
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