Rachel Boston is no stranger to the regal lifestyle. The Hallmark actor played royalty in the 2020 holiday TV movie, “A Christmas Carousel.” Her character, Lila, and her father are hired to refurbish a carousel in the wintery kingdom of Ancadia — after all, her great-grandfather was the one who first built the Ancadian Christmas carousel. As you can predict, like most of the favorite Hallmark clichés, Lila falls in love with a prince, played by Neal Bledsoe. Eventually, their happy ending is the Christmas miracle that wraps Ancadia’s holiday season into a giant satin bow.

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Boston’s natural fit into royal society is likely due to her reported ancestral relation to the real-life Catherine, Princess of Wales (and surprisingly, she’s not the only star related to Kate Middleton). “I’m distantly, distantly related to Kate Middleton. Like second cousin eight times removed or something like that,” Boston told Southern Living (via Yahoo!) in 2020. According to the “SEAL Team” actor, her mom’s knowledge of their family tree led her to discover the unlikely kin. “My mother is fascinated with family history,” Boston continued. “So, she traced back. She knew that Kate Middleton’s dad, I think it was, his mom had the same last name as my grandmother’s maiden name. So, she traced everything back. And we are, indeed, very distantly related.”

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It doesn’t matter how far removed Rachel Boston is from Catherine, Princess of Wales’ family, because according to Facebook, their likeness is difficult to tell apart. In a 2020 interview on Hallmark’s “Home & Family,” Boston revealed that the social media platform’s facial recognition software mistook her for the royal. While shooting a film in Canada at the same time Kate Middleton and William, Prince of Wales were visiting, the actor said her mom woke up extra early to see them arrive. “She takes a picture of Kate and William,” Boston recalled, adding, “She puts it on Facebook and it tagged me in face recognition, and so my mom was like, ‘See? We’re related!'”

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It sounds like Boston was born to play royalty, but “A Christmas Carousel” was her first time acting opposite a prince — and her fellow Hallmark stars were not going to miss celebrating that milestone with her. “It was the cutest call,” Boston recalled of her chat with Danica McKellar about her role, per an interview with TV Fanatic in 2020. “She’s like, ‘Is this your first royal?’ It’s like a rite of Hallmark passage when you’ve become a princess, but it was nice to have.” (The close friendships are something Boston loves most about Hallmark.)

It might be fun to act out a high-society romance on-screen, but Boston and her co-star, Neal Bledsoe, figure that the reality of royal courting is much more complicated. “It’s something that is so different than what most of us experience in life that you get into the humanity of who somebody is and seeing him struggle to make that choice of following his heart,” Boston said. “That was really interesting to see.”

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