The Stunning Transformation Of Hallmark Channel Star Skyler Samuels

Hollywood has not always been kind to its child stars. Celebrated and feted for their cuteness and precociousness, these youngsters can experience all the perks of fame at an early age — only to have the rug yanked out from under them when they grow too old for the roles in which they once excelled. 

Yet there have also been numerous former child stars who've managed to navigate the often treacherous transition to a successful acting career as adults, and such has been the case with Skyler Samuels. Just a kid when she garnered her first screen credit — portraying a spoiled child star in an episode of Nickelodeon comedy "Drake & Josh" — she went on to become a staple on the Disney Channel. After appearing in several series (including the Selena Gomez sitcom "Wizards of Waverly Place"), at age 17 she went on to star in her own TV series, from which she was able to successfully catapult from teen roles to more adult fare.

These days, she's enjoying a particularly fruitful stage of her career, having taken on a popular franchise with the Hallmark Channel, seasonal purveyor of delightfully sappy holiday movies, while boasting an array of screen credits that are as impressive as they are eclectic. To find out more about the journey of this talented actor, keep on reading to experience the stunning transformation of Hallmark Channel star Skyler Samuels.

Born in 1994, Skyler Samuels is the middle child of five siblings, and she comes from a somewhat unusual background. "My dad, Scott, is a U.S. Marshal," she explained in an interview with the New York Post. "My mom, Kathy, is a producer for unscripted shows like 'Access Hollywood.'"

In fact, it was her mom's association with that very show that led to Samuels receiving her big break when she was just 8 years old. When her mother was seeking someone to cover a press junket for the second "Harry Potter" movie, she came up with the novel idea of enlisting her daughter as a "junior correspondent," sending her to interview actors who were roughly the same age that she was. In 2019, Samuels shared a brief snippet from that 2002 segment, in which she's identified via an onscreen chyron as "Skyler Rose" (Rose is her middle name). "#tbt to 17 years ago when I was the biggest little ham on tv," she wrote in the Instagram caption, accented by an emoji of a baked ham. 

She continued to serve in that role sporadically, which also included interviewing with the "American Idol" Season 2 finalists — including eventual "Idol" winner Ruben Studdard — during the 2003 season. 

Skyler Samuels' on-camera experience on "Access Hollywood" opened the door to Hollywood, and fed her childhood acting aspirations. After booking her first acting gig on "Drake & Josh," she was cast in more roles, including a guest spot on Disney Channel series "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody." That led to another guest-starring role on a Disney show, "That's So Raven," and then a three-episode stint on "Wizards of Waverly Place" as snooty mean girl Gigi Hollingsworth. 

Samuels kept on acting after that, and she'd clearly made an impression on  the powers that be at Disney. That was evident when she was cast in the leading role in a short-lived sci-fi series for the Disney-owned ABC Family channel (which has since rebranded as Freeform). In "The Nine Lives of Chloe King," Samuels played a seemingly average teenage girl who discovers she's not human, but Mai, a race of beings who have all the heightened feline abilities of cats.

When she first read the script for the "Chloe King" pilot, Samuels knew she'd found a role that she'd be able to sink her claws into. "She's fearless, she's fun, she's funny, she's quirky, she's honest, and she's cool," Samuels declared in an interview with Collider. "Just everything about her, I wanted to look up to her. She's totally a role model, in my mind. I was like, 'I've got to be this girl. She's incredible.'"

Having just come off her first starring TV role, Skyler Samuels' acting career was red hot by 2012. Rather than capitalize on that, however, she instead decided to fulfill a long-held dream by attending Stanford University.

As she explained during an appearance on the "Wizards of Waverly Pod" podcast, it was being directed by former "Wonder Years" star Fred Savage while working on "The Wizards of Waverly Place" that first set her on the path to Stanford. A huge admirer of his work as both an actor and director, that was when she learned that he'd hit the pause button on his own acting career in order to attend Stanford. "And that's how I decided that's where I wanted to go to college," she recalled. "That's where that decision came from."

Looking back, Samuels can see how the hand of fate guided her decision to attend Stanford, which became a relentless pursuit during her teenage years. "If I hadn't done 'Wizards' ... I don't know, I don't think I even would have thought of Stanford," she added. "But it sort of planted this thing in my brain." When she finally got there, the experience more than lived up to the high expectations that she'd been carrying in her mind for all those years. "I got to take all different kinds of classes, in different disciplines with different professors," she explained. "It was awesome! I had such a great time."

While Skyler Samuels was attending Stanford, she also managed to squeeze in a few acting jobs. One of these was a role in Season 4 of "American Horror Story," playing a young woman abducted by a homicidal clown. As she'd done with Disney Channel, Samuels impressed the series' head honcho, acclaimed producer Ryan Murphy. When he began casting for a subsequent project, the Fox horror-comedy "Scream Queens," he'd kept her in mind, offering her the series regular role of sorority sister Grace Gardner. 

Not wanting to pass up the opportunity to work with one of Hollywood's hottest producers, she opted to pursue it. "I took a semester off to film 'Scream Queens,' which was a great decision because it was an incredibly wild experience that did a lot for me as far as my career," she told Yahoo! Life. 

Even though she took that semester off, she remained serious about her studies. "I still think of myself as a student first, then actor. When I had to take a semester off school to film this show, I sort of had to realize that I'm totally an overachiever, a do-a-million-things-at-one-time kind of girl," she said in an interview with Elle in late 2015, insisting that despite taking the time off she was still on track to graduate the following June. "I'm getting my degree one way or another — that's definitely not changing," she declared.

While Skyler Samuels didn't return for the second (and final) season of "Scream Queens," by no means was she remaining idle. The same year that she appeared on that show, she was also seen in a feature film, teen comedy "The DUFF." Part of an ensemble cast that included Robbie Amell, Mae Whitman, and fellow former child star Bella Thorne, Samuels starred as Jess, described in The Hollywood Reporter as "a free-spirited girl who is the town's youngest yoga instructor and PETA activist."

For Samuels, the film's premise — Whitman's character, Bianca, is the "Designated Ugly Fat Friend" of the popular mean girls in high school — definitely rang true to life. "I was really interested in doing 'The DUFF' because I had a very rocky, realistic high school experience," she said in an interview with HeyUGuys. "Reading the movie, it's not only refreshingly funny, but it's also really true to the struggles that we all go through in high school ... it feels like real life, not like a movie." 

While "The DUFF" wasn't a blockbuster, the film — which was made on an $8.5 million budget — was nonetheless considered to be a success, taking in a cool $43.7 million at the box office worldwide.

It took her a while, but Skyler Samuels finally graduated from Stanford in 2020 after re-enrolling to complete the units she was missing. A big reason for the delay in her graduation was her role in "The Gifted," a Fox series set within the Marvel Cinematic Universe that premiered in 2017. In the series — following a group of super-powered mutants within the same world populated by Marvel's X-Men — Samuels played a somewhat unique recurring role — actually, make that roles, given that she portrayed all three Frost sisters, a set of mutant triplets (eventually revealed to be clones) who share a telepathic connection to each other.

As one might expect, portraying all three siblings within a single scene possessed its own unique acting challenges. "It is very hard to cut yourself off in an argument! And I have to remember who cuts off who when and looks at whom when each thing is said," she said in an interview with Marvel.com. "There's definitely a lot of details." 

For Samuels, being in an "X-Men"-derived project ticked off a big box when it came to her own siblings, given that she grew up with brothers who were big fans of the Marvel comic books. "I think this is the first job I've ever done that my brothers think is cool," she told Assignment X, "so that's a huge accomplishment in my book."

In 2022, Skyler Samuels starred in her first project for the Lifetime network, known for its ripped-from-the headlines TV movies. Starring in "The Gabby Petito Story," Samuels portrayed the titular travel blogger, who was murdered by her fiancé Brian Laundrie (who subsequently died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound).

When the offer came, Samuels immediately realized that playing Petito carried a lot more responsibility than any of her previous acting roles. "When I was presented with the opportunity to portray Gabby I was admittedly quite overwhelmed and it was a hard decision to make," Samuels told ET. Ultimately, Samuels felt that telling Petito's story in the movie was a respectful way to honor her memory. "I also felt it was a chance to give Gabby a voice in her own story that I don't think the media did justice with," she explained. "I think we, as a consumer media culture, came in at the tail end of a much more complicated story and so Gabby's life is much more than the headlines that we read when all of these tragedies started to occur and I just think she deserves better."

Despite those good intentions, the film was pilloried before it even premiered, with online critics complaining the film not only came too soon after the tragic events it was dramatizing, but that the movie would essentially be profiting from Petito's murder.

Big-screen action star Jason Statham ventured into deep waters for 2018's "The Meg," in which he fended off a megalodon, a ginormous prehistoric shark that's been released from the depths of the Mariana Trench. When Statham returned to the well with the 2022 sequel, "The Meg 2," Skyler Samuels joined the party as one of his co-stars. 

"I think what's nice about 'The Meg 2' is that it's more than about just the sharks," Samuels said in an on-camera interview with Hollywood First Look. "Obviously it's the Meg, we come for the megalodons, but being in the trench we get to be in an environment where we realize the Megs are not alone. I mean, they are these giant predators, but they've got company, which includes these enormous octopi and these other creatures that are just big in a way that we've never seen before."

If there is a third "Meg" movie, Samuels won't be in it — because her character wound up being eaten by the Meg. Interestingly, that proved to be something of a bone of contention with the franchise's fans when that particular death was actually featured in the trailer, before the movie even opened. In that brief snippet, her character is within an underwater base on the ocean floor, boasting about being behind fortified "Meg-proof glass" — which immediately shatters when a giant shark bursts through, swallowing her in a single gulp.

Skyler Samuels has typically kept her personal life private, but eventually it emerged that she was dating actor Lucas Till. While Samuels hasn't discussed it publicly, it's easy to assume that they bonded over their past experiences as child stars in Disney Channel projects — Till, after all, co-starred with Miley Cyrus in "Hannah Montana: The Movie," before going on to play Havok in the "X-Men" movies, and starring in the CBS reboot of "MacGyver" for five seasons. 

As she explained on an episode of "Wizards of Waverly Web," she met Till while she was working on "The Gifted," which filmed in Atlanta. "He's from Georgia, so I live now here with him," she said, marveling at how taking that job wound up completely altering her life. According to Samuels, their romance had been a long time in the works. "For the first three years that we had known each other he was, like, really shy, and I couldn't get a read," she recalled. "I was like, 'This guy doesn't like me at all. I don't know what his deal is." It wasn't until the two reconnected in 2021, however, that she was finally able to convince him to go on a date with her, at which point the sparks truly began to fly.

In 2024, Samuels revealed that she and Till had tied the knot. 

When Candace Cameron Bure exited Hallmark Channel for new rival channel Great American Family, it spelled the end for her popular Aurora Teagarden mystery movies. Hallmark, however, wasn't done with the character, and hired Skyler Samuels to portray a younger version of Aurora, essentially rebooting the series with its new star in "Aurora Teagarden Mysteries: Something New." 

Speaking with People, Samuels explained that she had no intention of mimicking Bure's performance, and envisioned her iteration of Aurora as essentially a whole new character. "When it comes to the new Aurora, though Candace played her originally, for us it was really important that the new Aurora was a reimagining of that character so that she was still very much her own," Samuels said, noting how much care was taken to introduce elements from the original films while also bringing viewers a fresh, new experience. "It was our goal to make something that felt familiar but also exciting to the old audience," she added.

That said, Samuels also admitted that while the role offered a huge opportunity, it didn't come without a certain degree of trepidation. "I was excited because I love a challenge," she told Us Weekly, "but I also was a little nervous because I understood that there was this longstanding fan base."

In April 2024, Skyler Samuels announced that she'd partnered with Charles & Colvard as brand ambassador, promoting the company's assortment of lab-grown jewelry. "Everyone deserves a little sparkle in their life, and I love that Charles & Colvard delivers that in a sustainable way with their lab-grown moissanite, diamonds and colored gemstones," she proclaimed in a press release.

That wasn't the only announcement she made; in a video for Charles & Colvard she appeared alongside her newborn daughter. Discussing the revelation that she'd become a first-time mom, she gushed about the elation she was experiencing. "It's by far the best job I've ever had — and the most important I ever will have. It's a truly joyous experience. It's beautiful, it's messy and often quite comical," she said of motherhood in an interview with OK! magazine.

She also admitted that she, like all new parents, was facing a steep learning curve. "I try to take things one day at a time and utilize my support system — it definitely takes a village," she added.

"Aurora Teagarden Mysteries: Something New" isn't the only project that Skyler Samuels has starred in for Hallmark Channel. In August 2024, the channel debuted "My Dreams of You," a standalone romance film in which Samuels plays a woman who's been having recurring dreams about a handsome stranger (played by Kapil Talwalkar) — only to wind up meeting him in real life. "My hope is that fans who watch 'My Dreams of You' — anyone who's maybe in a little bit of a creative rut, feels inspired to take another crack at it," she told Us Weekly of the film's empowering theme. "And also feel like they don't maybe have to explain why they love doing what they do to the people in their life. Like just do it."

As her relationship with Hallmark Channel continued to blossom, Samuels was hopeful there would be further opportunities beyond acting. As she told OK! magazine in 2024, she envisioned herself eventually branching out to work behind the camera as a writer and director. "I really enjoy the process of helping to shape the story. Next, I'd love to add directing to my résumé," she said.