"You know Vivica likes to break the fourth wall," Fox tells USA TODAY with a laugh before looking directly at the camera in our Times Square studio with a message for the audience. "Happy blessed holidays. And here's to a fabulous 2026. Stay blessed."
Vivaca A Fox

NEW YORK – Vivica A. Fox is ready for the holidays, and she knows exactly when the Christmas tree is going up in her Los Angeles house.

"December 8th, I already have it planned," Fox, 61, tells USA TODAY of when the halls will be decked in her household. But the veteran actress isn't the DIY type, and hired a decorator because she's "not getting all that stuff all over me," she jokes.

"I do it really big," she continues. "I do the staircase, I do picture Christmas pictures with my godchildren. We've already picked out the colors we're wearing this year for our Christmas pictures.

"For me it's the time of year that I can finally relax and catch up on sleep."

But before Fox turns on the "out of office" and relaxes, she's returning to your TV. The actress stars in and executive produces Lifetime's "The Christmas Campaign" (Saturday, 10 ET/PT).

'A good Christmas film is a film where you wanna put on your onesie, get some hot chocolate and watch," she says. I'm just so glad to be a part of "It's a Wonderful Lifetime."

Fox's film kicks off a slate of 12 new movies this holiday season for Lifetime, with fresh films premiering every Friday and Saturday through Christmas.

"Lifetime turned me into a filmmaker," Fox explains. "Lifetime affords me the opportunity to play roles that Hollywood normally doesn't give me the opportunity to play. And they trust me now as a filmmaker and also as an executive producer."

Fox's roles outside of acting include writing, casting and even at times wardrobe. Casting new actors, and then working alongside them, gives Fox the greatest satisfaction. She takes pride in breaking the ice on set — running lines, asking if they need anything — so the new players know they're with "Viv" and not "Vivica A. Fox" and can "get over the movie star thing," she says.

"Once they find that I'm down to earth and that I want us to do good work together, it goes right out the door," she says.

'The Christmas Campaign' taught Vivica A. Fox about social media

In "The Christmas Campaign," Fox plays Monique, a no-nonsense boss at an ad agency. Monique pits two colleagues, Kayleigh (Chelsea Ross Cook) and Darren (Austen Jaye) against each other to promote the product Santa's Pajamas. As the competition between the two advertising execs brews, a romance also grows.

In one scene, Monique explains that Darren's modern approach of using influencers and social media aggregators will help the product sell, even if she doesn't know what a "social media aggregator" is. Fox had never used the term in real life either, even though her comments have, in fact, been aggregated many times. A number of online outlets and social media accounts ran with comments Fox made at the Ultimate Women’s Expo in Edison, NJ on Nov. 8. When an audience member asked Fox about chasing dreams, the actress replied, "Don't date 50 Cent and don't date no damn rappers."

Fox and the hip hop artist dated in the early 2000s. The rapper, born Curtis Jackson, responded on Instagram with an AI-generated image that portrayed him as Morpheus from "The Matrix," holding out red and blue pills. The caption read, "Either way I’m a have that ass in the matrix."

Fox laughed about it on Sherri Sheppard's talk show, even going as far as to say she'd still take the blue pill and that the orgasms she had with Jackson were "fabulous." But Fox tells USA TODAY that she doesn't enjoy being aggregated.

"I can't stand when someone takes a part of my interview and then runs with it," Fox says. "But I get [that] it's clickbait more than anything else."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Vivica A. Fox slams 50 Cent clickbait, talks outsourcing for Christmas

Reporting by Ralphie Aversa, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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