It’s the most Bunny-ful time of the year.
The blonde-haired actor who played wide-eyed 9-year-old Ralphie Parker in “A Christmas Story” has his own naughty Christmas tale to tell — watching his movie at the Playboy Mansion alongside Hugh Hefner and his Bunnies.
“He was a huge fan of the movie … I was invited up there for a screening one time, which was actually very cool,” Peter Billingsley told The Post.
The Playboy founder had an annual tradition of playing the beloved holiday film at the famed Los Angeles party house for his Bunnies — and when Billingsley — who, ironically, wore a bunny suit in the movie — came of age, he joined in the Yuletide revelry.
“I was 18. It was very fun,” said Billingsley, 54.
However, he kept what went on that night as tightly wrapped up as a present under the tree.
“No more great story to that other than Hef being a very gracious host,” Billingsley told The Post on Wednesday during an event in Times Square, where he partnered 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 lived with his parents and four siblings in a one-bedroom apartment on East 82nd Street between Park and Lexington Avenues until he was 10.
When he was 12, he auditioned for “A Christmas Story,” the first out of 8,000 boys to try out for the now-iconic role in the 1983 classic.
“I never heard anything. About three months later, I get a callback. I had assumed I hadn’t gotten it,” said Billingsley, who lent the actual bunny suit he donned in the flick to Raising Cane’s, who has it on display in their Times Square flagship restaurant for the month of December.
Its director Bob Clark, who spent 12 years trying to get the movie made, knew he had found his Ralphie immediately upon meeting Billingsley.
“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,” he said.
Billingsley, who is based in Idaho and also works as a director and producer, also revealed there are two deleted scenes from the film, which airs annually on TBS and TNT for 24 hours starting on Christmas Eve, that were never found.
“They’re both fantasy sequences. One is a [comic book character] Flash Gordon sequence. And the other one was [villain] Black Bart’s gang trying to attack Santa and take the toys and Ralphie saved them,” he explained.
“Unfortunately, because this movie came out in ’83 before DVDs and before all the behind-the-scenes stuff, 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.”
The dad of two, who has also made appearances in other Christmas movies like “Elf” and “Four Christmases,” said fans from around the world stop him all the time to wax nostalgic about “A Christmas Story” — and quote the famous line from the film, which references his character’s wish for a BB gun.
“I get a lot of ‘Don’t shoot your eye out,’ but I think the biggest thing that’s been interesting to me is that people really want to communicate how much the movie means to them, and what they generally want to say is, ‘That’s my family,’ and they see their family in these characters.”
“We know that dad that’s tough, but very loving. We know that mom who cares. The kids are all lying to each other. They’re lying to their teachers. But it feels very real … and there’s a lot of love in that house.”
Read the full article here
