If you’ve heard of Mark Acheson, you probably can’t quite place where you know him from. That’s the thing about him. He’s been in Elf. He’s been in Fargo. He’s shown up in Chronicles of Riddick, Brand New Cherry Flavor, and about forty years’ worth of film and television that most of us have watched without registering his name.
He’s one of those actors who makes everything better just by being in it, and a lot of the time you don’t even realize it.
We had the chance to sit down with him for a bonus episode, and what came out of it was genuinely one of the most fun conversations we’ve had.
Meaghan and Arthur covered a lot of ground: his role in the recent Silent Night, Deadly Night (2025) reboot, the strange and genuinely unique way that film was made, and a career’s worth of stories that would take more than one episode to get through properly.
Charlie: A Villain You Actually Root For
The whole reason we reached out to Mark in the first place was Silent Night Deadly Night (the new one, which dropped in December). We did a full series ranking leading up to it and gave the film a lot of love when it came out. And a big part of why it works as well as it does is Charlie, the voice in Billy’s head, played by Mark.
Here’s the thing about Charlie. On paper, he’s a killer in a Santa suit from the original film’s lore. In this version, though, he becomes something else entirely: a moral compass, of all things. As Meaghan put it during the interview, “maybe the person who’s doing this in a Santa suit is not the crazy person in the mix here.” And Mark, to his credit, understood that from the moment he read the script.
“Mike Nelson had designed and written a vehicle that was sort of outside the box of where it sort of had been before,” Mark told us, “which I kind of thought was cool.” He wasn’t wrong. The addition of Charlie shifts the whole film.
Billy goes from being your standard horror movie slasher to someone you actually sympathize with, and that’s largely because Charlie gives him a reason. The killings have an ethic to them. That’s a wild sentence to type about a Silent Night Deadly Night movie, but here we are.
The best compliment Mark received came from Mike P. Nelson’s wife, who wrote him a note after seeing the film. She told him, “You gave him an ethic. You gave him a moral compass.” And Mark said that was the best feedback he could have gotten, because usually (his words), “I just get killed and I leave.”
A Recording Studio Showed Up at His House
Here’s where the behind-the-scenes stuff gets interesting. Charlie is predominantly a voice role. Mark was on set for some of the principal photography (yes, that’s him in the Santa suit in the opening scene, yes, that’s him getting stabbed in the neck), but the majority of his work was recorded separately, after filming had already wrapped.
Three months after principal photography, Mike P. Nelson brought a full recording studio to Mark’s house. “For a whole day, I had my own recording studio outside my house,” Mark told us. “I had never had that before.”
He went through the entire script in a single session, not knowing how much would make the final cut. That kind of uncertainty is just part of the job, apparently, but what came out of it was something that felt completely connected to the on-camera work already done by Rowan Campbell.
And that’s the part that genuinely impressed us. Rowan Campbell, who plays Billy, filmed all of his scenes before Mark had even recorded a single line. He was essentially acting alongside a voice that didn’t exist yet. The result?
It felt like they were in the same room. “He acted like he had me in his head already, and that’s spooky,” Mark said. Arthur compared it to watching two actors bounce off each other in real time. It really did feel that way.
We also floated the idea of Mark doing audiobook work, because his voice is the kind you could listen to for hours. He’s been approached a couple of times but found it daunting. “I think you have to be a harder worker or more intelligent person than me,” he laughed. We disagree, but we appreciate the honesty.
Forty Years of Lucky Breaks (His Words, Not Ours)
Mark has a funny way of describing his career. He calls himself lucky, repeatedly, like a guy who keeps buying scratch tickets and somehow keeps winning. The self-deprecation is charming, but also a little underselling of what is genuinely a remarkable body of work.
He started acting at twelve, got into theater school at fifteen, and spent fifteen years doing stage work before film and TV came along. Then voice work.
Then a combination of all three, which he’d never had until Silent Night Deadly Night came along and gave it to him all at once. “I wanted it so bad,” he said about getting to do both the physical and voice work on the same project.
The career highlight he keeps coming back to is Elf. He didn’t audition for the part. He was asked to come in and do one line with Will Ferrell, and then it just kept going: extra lines, improvisation, an entire unplanned sequence involving a burst water main and Mark sitting in a chair singing a Christmas carol while being absolutely soaked.
(That scene didn’t make it into the film, for the record.) “It changed my whole career,” he told us. “The doors were knocked down for me.“
He’s also quietly proud of his work in Fargo (“we won three Emmys and I thought my work was really solid“), and he lights up talking about being in Chronicles of Riddick and working alongside Zack Snyder. Not bad for a guy who keeps insisting he’s just lucky.
The Rapid Fire Round (Which Was Not Rapid)
We always love a good rapid-fire round, and Mark delivered. Some highlights:
On favorite horror films: The Exorcist and Poltergeist are his go-tos. He also described his time on Brand New Cherry Flavor, where he played a zombie and had to, in his words, eat another actor’s head.
“There’s an etiquette to how you eat in the head,” he explained, completely straight-faced. We did not follow up on what that etiquette entails.
On props he’s kept from set: A pair of John Flubbah shoes from a Robert Altman film. A big jacket from something called Samurai Cowboy. And a belt buckle sent to him by Tom Selleck as an apology after Tom beat him up during a scene (the stunt was more intense than Mark had anticipated). “An apology buckle,” Mark said. “They just still haven’t beaten me up.” Fair enough.
On the character he’d least want to meet in real life: A vampire he played in a sci-fi series, who ate a horse and then got his head blown off. “There’s no talking to him,” Mark said. “It’s all eat, eat, eat, kill, kill, kill.” He also mentioned Sabretooth from Marvel, noting that the truly hateful villains are the ones you really don’t want to run into anywhere, fictional or otherwise.
What’s Next (Mostly: Enjoying Life)
Mark is approaching his 69th birthday and is, by his own account, happily semi-retired. He’s newly married (his wife, it turns out, helped him run lines for the Silent Night, Deadly Night audition right from the start, so she may have had something to do with him getting the part).
He’s not chasing the physical roles anymore. No horses, no motorcycles, no quasi-stunts. “If I didn’t kill myself, my wife would kill me,” he said.
What he is open to is voice work. Narration. Anything where someone hears his voice and thinks: Yes, I want that in my project. That’s the kind of work he’s looking for at this stage, and honestly, after hearing him in Silent Night, Deadly Night, it’s hard to argue with the approach.
As for a sequel to Silent Night, Deadly Night? He doesn’t think Charlie is coming back. “It won’t involve me, that’s for sure.” But as Meaghan pointed out, horror movies have a way of reconning things and pulling people back in. You never really know.