What To Know
- Eric Lloyd, who played Charlie Calvin in The Santa Clause films, shared the one condition that has fans recognizing him three decades later.
- Lloyd fondly recalls his experiences filming the original movie.
- While Lloyd currently has no acting projects lined up, fans can watch him in all three Santa Clause movies on Disney+ and his recent appearance on Celebrity Weakest Link on Hulu.
With every Christmas season comes a rewatch of The Santa Clause films. Eric Lloyd, who played Tim Allen‘s son Charlie Calvin in the franchise, shared that he still gets recognized from the movie 30+ years after it was released.
Lloyd appeared in all three films alongside Allen. Despite an eight-year gap between the first and second film, Lloyd returned all grown up. There was only a four-year gap between the second and the third, so his appearance hadn’t changed much.
Although the third film was nearly 20 years ago, Lloyd still gets recognized for the film. He shared his memories with TV Insider and recounted a heart-warming story about a fan encounter while discussing his appearance on Celebrity Weakest Link.
“If I shave my beard, I still get recognized,” he laughed. “I was working on a production in Kentucky recently, and we had a final dinner for all the crew involved. And there’s this couple sitting across at another table, and they kept looking over, and I just thought, ‘We’re a film crew in Kentucky, and so we kind of stuff stuck out already,’ so I thought that was maybe what they were looking at.”
“And then they finished their dinner and came over and were like, ‘Excuse me, not to intrude, but were you the kid in The Santa Clause? Is your name Eric?’ I said I was. I hadn’t told anyone in the production that I had been an actor as a kid. I was there doing sound and helping with some of the production of it and whatnot. And so I hadn’t told anyone on the crew, either. So they all kind of looked at me like, ‘What, wait, what?’ That was me when I was younger, and they were huge fans of the film. And so they said that once they kind of saw me and started talking and everything, they were just like, ‘That’s him.’ And so they recognized me. So it does still happen.”
©Buena Vista Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection
Lloyd said that the first film was his favorite and that it “gets better with age.” He has a lot of fond memories from the first film, including exploring Santa’s workshop and the set.
“The toy shop in the first one was so much fun to experience as a kid,” Lloyd shared about his favorite on-set memory. “It was a two-story set, and so they really only show parts of it in the film, but you don’t really get the whole depth of how big the space was. There was a whole downstairs area, and the downstairs had different stalls all the way around it, and each stall had a different type of toy in the middle, with a two-story high Erector Set of the Eiffel Tower. And there were just so many cool things all over the place in there.”
Greg Gayne/Fox
“Downstairs, in one of the stalls, one of the special effects guys who was working on The Santa Clause, or someone on the production, had been attached to the Gremlins movie. So there were a bunch of animatronic arms hanging from the Gremlins 2. So when I was a kid, I had watched that film and went down there and saw them like, ‘Oh, that’s from this other movie.’ So I think the toy shop was definitely one of the things that kind of blew my mind as a seven-year-old.”
Although Lloyd doesn’t have any acting projects in the pipeline, fans can see him in all three Santa Clause movies and Celebrity Weakest Link on Hulu.
The Santa Clause 1, 2, and 3, streaming, Disney+
Celebrity Weakest Link, Mondays, 9/8c, Fox, stream next day on Hulu