exclusive Ralphie from ‘A Christmas Story’ was invited to Playboy Mansion at 18 to watch holiday classic
Peter Billingsley, the blonde-haired actor who famously played wide-eyed 9-year-old Ralphie Parker in A Christmas Story, has his own mischievous holiday tale — one set not in a snowy neighborhood, but at the Playboy Mansion.
“I was invited up there for a screening one time, which was actually very cool,” Billingsley told The Post, recalling watching his movie alongside Hugh Hefner and his Bunnies. The Playboy founder had a yearly tradition of playing the beloved holiday film for his party guests, and when Billingsley — who, ironically, wore a bunny suit in the movie — came of age, he joined the festive fun.
“I was 18. It was very fun,” said the 54-year-old actor.
Billingsley, however, kept the evening’s events under wraps. “No more great story to that other than Hef being a very gracious host,” he said during a Times Square event on Wednesday, where he teamed up with chicken finger chain Raising Cane’s to give 500 bicycles to children from the Boys & Girls Club of Harlem.
An Upper East Side native, Billingsley grew up in a one-bedroom apartment on East 82nd Street between Park and Lexington Avenues with his parents and four siblings until he was 10. At age 12, he auditioned for A Christmas Story, emerging as the first of 8,000 boys to try out for the iconic role in the 1983 holiday classic.
“I never heard anything. About three months later, I get a callback. I had assumed I hadn’t gotten it,” he recalled. In a fun tie to the past, the bunny suit he wore in the film is now on display at Raising Cane’s Times Square flagship for the month of December.
Director Bob Clark, who spent 12 years bringing the movie to life, knew instantly that Billingsley was his Ralphie.
“I happened to be the very first boy to ever audition … and he said, ‘Oh, that’s the guy.’ But obviously you’re not going to hire the first guy. So he went around for three months … they went across the country. It was a massive search,” Billingsley said.
Now based in Idaho, Billingsley works as a director and producer and revealed that two deleted scenes from the film, both fantasy sequences, were never recovered. One featured Flash Gordon, and the other had villain Black Bart’s gang attempting to steal Santa’s toys — only for Ralphie to save the day.
“Unfortunately, because this movie came out in ’83 before DVDs and behind-the-scenes content, it was shot on film, so they threw it all out. We moved through the Warner Brothers stage trying to find it, and we couldn’t,” he explained.
A dad of two who has also appeared in other holiday favorites like Elf and Four Christmases, Billingsley said fans often stop him to reminisce about A Christmas Story — and quote the movie’s most famous line about his character’s wish for a BB gun.
“I get a lot of ‘Don’t shoot your eye out,’ but the biggest thing that’s interesting to me is how much the movie resonates with people. They want to say, ‘That’s my family,’ because they see themselves in these characters,” he said. “We know the dad who’s tough but loving. We know the caring mom. The kids are all lying to each other and to their teachers. But it feels real … and there’s so much love in that house.”
About Post Author
