Eric Mabius has portrayed Oliver O’Toole in more than 10 Signed, Sealed, Delivered movies — but he’s seeing a new side of his character now that he’s said “I do.”
“Oliver is a wordsmith and he’s anachronistic and, you know, he’s a stickler for rules,” Mabius, 53, exclusively told Us Weekly of his character.
He noted, however, that despite Oliver being “too uptight” at times, fans will see a different side of him in the upcoming Signed, Sealed, Delivered: A Tale of Three Letters, premiering on Friday, July 12.
“He’s also evolving in such a wonderful way and … putting Oliver and Shane together as a married couple, it sort of rewrites all the rules,” Mabius revealed.
When viewers last saw The Postables — a.k.a. the members of Denver’s Dead Letter Postal Office which includes Oliver, Shane McInerney (Kristin Booth), Rita Haywith (Crystal Lowe) and Norman Dorman (Geoff Gustafson) — Oliver and Shane were having their wedding. The last movie, The Vows We Have Made, aired in 2021.
In the next Hallmark Mystery installment, Oliver and Shane are officially husband and wife and have just returned from a honeymoon in the U.K.
Mabius told Us that “just as in life” fans will see “successful, interesting, remarkable human beings as individuals” beginning to morph into something different as a married person.
“You [get] them together with someone else and there’s all kinds of strange side [effects], evolution and regression in the character,” he explained, revealing, “You shift roles constantly in a relationship.”
While Oliver and Shane will face a few hurdles adapting to marriage — including grips over Shane leaving her shoes everywhere, and Oliver meddling with an ancient house clock — Mabius insisted that his character is willing to evolve.
“The real work begins when you get married, right? The honeymoon period is over. What do we do when you share not just a roof with someone, but a life with someone?” he asked. “We find ourselves acting in ways we could never have imagined. That’s what we see.”
Mabius noted that viewers won’t “tune in and see a bunch [of] nasty fighting,” but they will uncover “characters that we think we know behaving in ways we hadn’t expected.”
Booth, 49, exclusively told Us that the reason Shane and Oliver work despite their opposite personalities is because “they challenge each other.”
She continued: “They don’t just challenge each other intellectually, but they also challenge each other emotionally. They push one another to grow as people.”
Booth added that the characters are continuing to “discover” new things about one another, some good and some bad.
Those ups and downs will be a major story line in A Tale of Three Letters, which also follows the Postables as they get back to work “identifying the intended recipients of a trio of dead letters which have a surprising, personal impact on all of them,” according to Hallmark.
Mabius, meanwhile, hinted that one of the biggest lessons from the film is pegged to Oliver and Shane’s initial inability of “not being in control” now that they are hitched.
“I think we spend a lot of time creating our own misery and I think that’s what we see each, Shane and Oliver coming to terms with,” he shared. “We create our own obstacles being unbending or having our set of rules and then we spend all this time trying to dig ourselves out of the hole that we create for ourselves, rather than just trusting the [that] thing that brought Shane and Oliver together [is] the thing that’s gonna get them through this.”
Signed, Sealed, Delivered: A Tale of Three Letters premieres on Hallmark Mystery Friday, July 12, at 9 p.m. ET.
