The Christmas special is a great tradition, taking intellectual properties and characters we all know and love and sending them on a festive adventure. Some have entered infamy, while others have become bona fide classics in the holiday canon. The latest character to get the Christmas special treatment is Chuck E. Cheese, who in A Chuck E. Cheese Christmas must save Christmas by throwing a surprise party for none other than St. Nick himself.

We at FandomWire spoke with actor Nathan Kress (iCarly), who voices this Christmas special’s new version of the iconic mascot, about stepping into the legacy of the iconic character and how A Chuck E. Cheese Christmas perfectly captures both childhood nostalgia and the Christmas spirit.

A Chuck E. Cheese Christmas Interview

A Chuck E. Cheese Christmas follows your character as he tries to raise Santa’s Christmas spirit. So I want to know… how do you raise your own Christmas spirit?

It’s kind of a one-two punch. As soon as the lights come on — the very yellow, old school, twinkly lights, I know it’s coming, and that is an instant reduction in cortisol levels in my blood. And the other thing is, I’m obviously in the film industry… I need some good Christmas movies, too. So I have a pretty specific roster of “Christmas is not complete if I have not watched all of them.” And now my kids are getting to the age where I can watch them with them too, which is making things a lot easier, so I don’t have to sneak them in at night.

What are some of the ones on that roster?

So we’ve got Home Alone(s), obviously — all of them. Jingle All the Way with Arnold and Sinbad. The big one is on Christmas, we watch White Christmas. We’ve got Bing, we’ve got Danny, we’ve got Rosemary, we’ve got Vera. It’s a whole thing. That’s my four-year-old’s favorite movie, if you can believe it. I was stunned by that. Christmas Chronicles, the Kurt Russell one, that’s a really big one. And that just scratches the surface. It’s a whole process, and it’s just my excuse to watch movies all day long because there’s nothing else to do.

So when it comes to this character, a lot of children and adults alike have nostalgia. How did you approach the legacy of Charles Entertainment Cheese?

Carefully. Also, thank you for letting me know that the E stands for Entertainment. There’s been some confusion about that, and I’m going to now be locking that in. I thought it was Eduardovan. I wasn’t sure. Now, it’s Entertainment, which makes a whole lot more sense.

So, I had to handle it very carefully because you want to be respectful to my generation and those who came in the years before who have a massive memory set of just indelible, etched, core memories from this. But also I wanted to make sure not to do a caricature or an impression of past voices, past versions of the character, where I was going back and trying to do a vocal match because this is a totally new universe.

This is not the Chuck E. Cheese of the entertainment center; this is Chuck E. Cheese in the Chuck E. Cheese Expanded Universe — I’ll just coin that right now. It’s about how he handles his life and his human interactions with the people around him and his friends, his bandmates, in a completely different way.

So, it needed to be respectful of what you know to not be such a far departure, but also be something that can exist within the energy changing to the point where it’s not just, “Hey guys, I’m the party animal!” It’s a narrative which gives space and opportunity as an actor to inject some real emotional punch and some heart, and those things are so important for holiday movies. Because you want to get it right there. And I think that this movie is chock-full of that. 

I think they hit a really great level of honoring our memories as kids. I didn’t feel like it was anything but dead-on and respectful, but also bringing in something new and not just feeling like a rehash. This is a completely fresh start for this character in this universe and the people he’s with.

Some people, at first glance, might think a Chuck E. Cheese Christmas special is just a way to sell pizzas and arcade tokens, but I think there’s a lot more to this than that. Why do you think this is more than just a piece of marketing?

Well, because I think at this point, it’s the memory. It’s the feeling. It just happens to be that it’s attached to a company, sure, but what they did was create in all of us a core memory. I will never forget my fifth birthday. When I think of Chuck E. Cheese, I get happy. When I think of Christmas, I get happy. What fool would not want to put them together?

It’s almost a “Why didn’t this happen sooner?” And I’m hoping that it’s just the serendipitous reason that because now I had a chance to do it, and I would have been so sad if it had happened 10 years ago and I never got my chance to have a shot at it.

I think the people who created Chuck E. Cheese stumbled upon something about this character and this intellectual property that just makes people happy, and good for them. It’s just a slam dunk to say, “What would make people even happier than that?” and putting him in a Christmas context, making him throw a surprise party for a quasi-omniscient character like Santa Claus… who else is going to be able to do that but Chuck E. Cheese? I challenge you to think of anybody else who could; I’m pretty sure he’s the only one. So it’s pretty much the only story that fits for a character like that.

Something like this not only has to appeal to today’s children but also to their parents, like yourself, who went to Chuck E. Cheese as kids. What do you think this special has for audiences of all ages?

There’s a lot of levels, and I know this by the fact that I was able to see my own sneak preview of the special. My kids are seven, four, and two. The fact that we watched it, and my two-year-old watched the entire thing — he does not sit still for anything. He won’t sit still for 20 minutes of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. He’s on the move. He sat and watched that whole thing. So, that checks off the two-year-old.

The seven- and four-year-olds, there’s a bit in it — I won’t say what it is, because I don’t know if anybody else is going to react this way or not — but there’s a bit in it that they cackled for about 10 minutes, and they made me replay it six or seven times, and they laughed the exact same way every time. They were running around doing the bit and saying it to themselves. It extended multiple days. That’s now just permanently in their memory. They loved it.

When the song hits at the end — which is this awesome, absolute ear worm Christmas banger theme song that I think is going to be a Christmas classic for generations to come — when that band is up there playing, my wife got highly emotional because she’s like, “Oh, there they are. They’re doing it. They’re doing the band thing.” So it got her right in the nostalgia.

We’ve got Nolan North literally rattling off one-liners every 45 seconds that little kids are not going to understand at all, but that’s for the adults in the room. And you hit the nostalgia, but you also hit the heart, which is what parents want. They don’t just want to see “Ooh! Ah! Cartoon! Animated! Stimulating! Whatever!” It’s a Christmas movie; you want to feel it right here.

So, I think it hits on every level. And then my four-year-old, at the end, as the credits were rolling, she turned around and grabbed me by the face and started getting emotional like, “Daddy, that’s the best thing you’ve ever done.” And she’s seen iCarly. So if she says that this beats iCarly, that’s saying something because she’s a savage when it comes to what she likes and doesn’t.

So it literally hit young, not as young, medium, adult. They hit it. And I’m not just saying that — I focus grouped with my absolute savage children.

A Chuck E. Cheese Christmas streams on YouTube and Prime Video beginning November 27.

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