Entertainment
Whatever Happened to the Cast From ‘A Christmas Story’? See What Peter and His Costars Are Up to Now
It’s been over 35 years since A Christmas Story came out and we’re still not over that movie! Who can forget the time Ralphie Parker wanted a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas and then he almost shot his eye out once he got it? This film will always be nostalgic and will remain a holiday classic for years to come.
“People keep watching it over and over,” Peter Billingsley, who played Ralphie in the film, previously told BuzzFeed. “It just doesn’t go away.” He’s got that right and his costar Scott Schwartz agrees. “It’s a family movie that’s about a relationship between a father and a son,” he previously said to Closer Weekly. “It’s also a multigenerational film; if you’re 6 or you’re 78, it doesn’t matter.”
When Director Bob Clark was making the movie, he wanted the audience to experience everything that Ralphie felt around Christmastime: The joys of being a kid and the desperate need to get something that you really want.
“Bob cut out parts of the set’s floor so that the camera could get low enough to give a true child’s perspective,” Zack Ward, who played Skut, admitted to Closer. By doing that, he made the Christmas flick even more interesting to watch.
One scene that Zack will never forget is when he got into a fight with Ralphie in freezing cold weather. “Ralphie’s mittens slapped the bejeezus out of me,” he jokingly recalled. “They were frozen solid so it was like being slapped with a frozen pork chop! The blood [in the scene] is fake but the bright red cheeks are mine!”
At the time, the boys had to keep warm heat packs in their mittens because they were shooting in Canada in the winter. “It looked terrific, but it was really cold — like 25 [degrees] below [zero] with the wind chill,” Scott remembered. However, he and his costars will always be grateful to be a part of the Christmas Story cast.
“My favorite memory was seeing the exterior of the house on Cleveland Street in Ohio. Every other house on the street had brown, dead grass, but one was covered in fake snow and fake icicles,” Zack said. “It was really breathtaking — the beautiful, perfect, snow-covered house and glistening icicles. You realize that’s all made magic.”
Scroll below to see what the cast of A Christmas Story is doing now!
