Faith’s a major role for me
ACTOR CANDACE CAMERON BURE, OF FULL HOUSE AND AURORA TEAGARDEN FAME, REFLECTS ON THE PART GOD PLAYS IN HER LIFE AND HER COMMITMENT TO FAMILY-FRIENDLY TV
Without fear or favour, actor Candace Cameron Bure is determined to only work on family friendly content. The former child star, most famous for playing DJ Tanner on Full House and Fuller House, has stood her ground despite facing criticism for her strong Christian and political beliefs.
“My commitment is to family-friendly television, to know that everybody can sit down and watch together and you’re going to watch something entertaining, but also positive and uplifting and safe for everyone to watch,” the 44-yearold says. “Those have been really intentional decisions in my career — I’ve been adamant and strong about them and I think that is why I’ve had such a loyal following for a very long time.”
Cameron Bure, sister to Kirk Cameron of Growing Pains fame, is mother to three young children. She is outspoken on politics as a conservative Republican and admits it would have been easy to falter under the pressure of fame and excess of Hollywood.
“There have certainly been opportunities where you’re offered something you’re like, ‘Oh, this could be amazing’,” she says. “Maybe the money is really great or maybe the role is a great character, but yet not something that is a positive influence or the project in general. I would 100
per cent play a character that is not positive as long as there’s something redemptive about the character. But there have been those opportunities, but I’m a very strong willed person. So it’s my determination to stay true to who I am and the types of roles I want. It’s just far outweighed the offers that have come in to really stray from that. I just have always kept my eyes focused on family programming throughout my career.”
Cameron Bure speaks to Hibernation on the phone from Vancouver, where she has just wrapped shooting the 14th Aurora Teagarden Mystery and has started filming a Christmas movie.
She sounds just like her characters on TV — friendly, upbeat, jovial and open. There is nothing awkward despite this scribe probing her about her personal beliefs and values that have been highly scrutinised in the media over the years.
“My Christian faith is the foundation of who I am,” Cameron Bure says. “While it is important to know that my focus is bringing families together, it is not about doing projects that are faith-based, although I certainly have done projects that are faith-based, but I love sharing my faith and my personal life. As long as in my professional life, it’s family-friendly. I haven’t wanted to only focus on faithbased for my career because I just think there’s a lot more opportunities … I haven’t wanted to limit myself. Certainly on a personal level, if you talk to me or get to know me through social media, I’ll be the first one to share my faith with people, but I don’t have to do that always through my work.”
In 2017, Cameron Bure defended herself after being labelled homophobic by RuPaul’s Drag Race star
Bianca Del Rio. Asked about the accusations, she says it confuses her.
“It deeply grieves my heart when people say that about me and it’s just simply untrue,” she says. “So God tells us love God with all of our heart and our soul and our mind. And then the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbour as yourself. It doesn’t say to love the people that are like you the most or only love your friends who think the same way as you the most. Your neighbour is anyone, it’s anyone that’s around you, with anyone that you interact with, whether you personally know them or not. So God’s instruction is to love one another and that’s what I do.”
The first six episodes of The Aurora Teagarden Mysteries were released to streaming platform Acorn TV this week.
Cameron Bure has made 14 of the Hallmark movies over the past five years. In them, she plays protagonist Teagarden, a professional librarian who likes to solve crimes and is the president of Real Murders Club in the same vein as Nancy Drew or Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote.
“Aurora is just this really spunky, courageous, fearless, intelligent woman,” she says. “It is never too scary or too gruesome, you can have your seven- or eight-year-old watching these mysteries and they’re just really fun. They are fun to figure it out. You think it’s one person, but it might be another and it’s been such an important part of my life to sit down with my own family, as well as when I was a kid sitting down with my mum and dad and being able to find television shows and movies that we can watch together as a family. And that’s why that’s been my commitment and intentional choices for all of the projects that I have led for the last 40 years in my career.”
Playing a strong female character is important to Cameron Bure, who got her start in the business in TV medical drama St Elsewhere in 1982 at age five.
DJ Tanner in Full House is her biggest career role with the cult-following show still screened around the world. “These are two very different women,” she says of Aurora Teagarden and DJ Tanner. “I have so much fun as DJ Tanner … she’s kind of a goofball and silly and this perfectionist type personality, but Aurora, she’s really smart, very determined and fearless, and she’s a very strong, independent woman. I like the choices I get to make with her. I’m physically a small person. I’m only five foot two (157cm). I’m like stronger than the biggest guy in the room because of my determination and my fearlessness.”