Jill Wagner on Trading Hollywood for a Tennessee Farm Town of 800 as 'A Very Arctic Christmas' Debuts

Actress Jill Wagner is juggling two very different screen worlds this fall: the CIA action drama “Lioness” and a new holiday movie, “A Very Arctic Christmas.” Off camera, she says she has swapped Hollywood’s pace for a quiet farm life in a small Tennessee town, and she opened up about that choice in an interview with Fox News Digital published Oct. 29, the day her Christmas film premiered.

Why did Jill Wagner move from Hollywood to Tennessee?

Wagner told Fox News Digital she is raising her two daughters on a farm in a Tennessee town of about 800 people, where horses and buggies are still a familiar sight.

“First of all, I love Tennessee … I’m from the South. I’m from North Carolina,” she said. “I love the people here but especially love the small-town mentality.”

In an earlier Fox News Digital interview in August, Wagner explained that she and her family first looked for property in and around North Carolina to be close to relatives but couldn’t find the right place, so they settled on Tennessee.

“I wanted to get married, and I wanted to have my babies in a place that I thought was magical and, since I was born and raised in the country, that was my idea of what was magical. So, we live there,” she said then.

She described a recent moment at the local post office: “One of the Mennonites was in front of me … I got to look at their horse and buggy.”

What is farm life like for her family?

Wagner, who left home at 17 to pursue entertainment, said she values the slower pace more as she gets older and hopes her daughters will too, even if they eventually leave for bigger cities.

“I hope what it does is bring them back to the simple-ness of life and what it can be … That’s a gift that my husband and I gave them, and they probably don’t even know it yet,” she said.

Asked whether her girls are becoming the farm girls she imagined, she laughed. “They love outdoors. They don’t necessarily like doing farm work. So, we’re trying to still work on that,” she said, adding that they love running barefoot in the dirt and playing outside all day.

The family hopes to add chickens and goats when her schedule allows. “Maybe one day we’ll get a horse or a pony for them,” she said.

In August, she offered a more comic picture of a typical day: out on the front porch at 6:30 a.m., tending her flowers, then listening to her husband “complain about the tractor being broken and the fence falling down, and the barn roof flew off last night, and then we just repair everything that’s been broken.”

Who is Jill Wagner’s family?

According to Fox News, Wagner married David Lemanowicz, a former professional hockey player and U.S. Army Reserve officer, in 2017. The couple has two daughters, Army Gray, born in 2020, and Daisy Roberta, born in 2021, and they also help raise Lemanowicz’s daughter from a previous relationship.

The family owns Scott Mansion Farms, where they host charity events benefiting the Special Operations Warrior Foundation and Dolly Parton’s Children’s Hospital. Wagner said the community’s support has stood out.

“The fact that people just show up at the gate and say, ‘What can we do to help?’ I think it just reminds me of how amazing humanity is … and how very special it is to have good neighbors,” she said.

What is “A Very Arctic Christmas” about?

In the new holiday film, Wagner reunites with Cameron Mathison. She plays Jane, a wildlife conservationist who helps a father and daughter through an unexpected Arctic adventure after their holiday cruise goes off course.

“There’s never any dull moment when you have Cameron Mathison and I on set together,” she said, joking that director Robin Dunne is often trying to rein in their laughter.

The movie premiered Oct. 29 on Great American Pure Flix and is set to air on Great American Family and GFAM+ on Oct. 31 at 8 p.m. ET.

Wagner has also made Christmas movies a family affair. When her daughters were younger, she included them as extras in one of her films, giving them a turn on Santa’s lap, and she hopes watching it becomes a lasting holiday tradition.

What is Jill Wagner’s role in “Lioness”?

On Taylor Sheridan’s Paramount+ series “Lioness,” Wagner plays Bobby, the tough leader of the Lioness program’s Quick Reaction Force. The show also stars Nicole Kidman, Zoe Saldaña, Morgan Freeman and Michael Kelly. Its third season premiered Aug. 2 on Paramount+.

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