Robbie Amell and Andy Allo Talk Upload Season 4, Matching Tattoos, and Finale Spoilers
Prime Video’s Upload may be logging off for good, but not before one more high-stakes virtual adventure. The four-part season 4 finale finds Nathan, Nora, and their friends facing off against rogue AI and greedy executives, while finally tying up the show’s biggest mysteries. From matching tattoos to shocking twists, stars Andy Allo and Robbie Amell told Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado that saying goodbye to the world of Upload was “bittersweet.”
The cast got the final three scripts only a few weeks before filming to keep the direction “secretive” and didn’t get the fourth episode until they were already well into the filming process. “I was just an emotional wreck the entire season. I think too because Nora is going through so much,” said Allo about the experience, “but I tried to just be really present and and soak it all up. This is the last time I'm going to be in this room or on this set or work with this person. I just had to keep reminding myself like, okay, just remember these moments, as opposed to being like, oh, I have to just get the work done, you know? It felt different this time.”
In a time where shows are cancelled left and right and often completely removed from streaming platforms, the cast was grateful to get a chance to wrap up this story. “We were very happy to get to do a final season,” said Amell. “A lot of shows get cancelled in between seasons, so good on Amazon letting us come back and give fans a real ending. It would have been rough to end on that season 3 cliffhanger. There's a lot of unanswered questions.”
“We had a beautiful table read of all four episodes and everybody got pretty emotional,” Amell continued. “Then when we were shooting it was like we were really cramming so much into every shoot day that, other than Allegra who was emotional every day, most of us were keeping it together until the final few days. By then, Allegra was so emotionally cried out at that point that she was the toughest one at the end of the show.”
Season 3 ended on a cliffhanger that found one of the versions of Nathan destroyed — or so we thought. Instead the back up copy went back to the virtual afterlife of Lakeview, while original Nathan, who had downloaded into a clone body, was taken to be experimented on. “I think the next logical question with that is how many times can you upload and download? Upload is still kind of flawed and and all of our digital after lives are a little funky, but if we could just keep — you know like the star-bellied sneetches, anybody? — just keep recycling our old body and then upload for a little bit and then new body… I mean, could we download into pigeons if we want to?” theorized Allegra Edwards in a Pop Culture Planet interview for Upload season 3. “How many do you get before your soul expires, or does it? That's what I want to know next.” Little did Edwards know, her theories were spot on, as that’s what original Nathan deals with in this season.
After seven years and four seasons of Upload, the cast has truly become family. The show was so important to them that Allo, Amell, Edwards, and Zainab Johnson all got matching five star tattoos after they wrapped filming. “A big part of it is seven years of my life and a big part of my career and a show that I'm incredibly proud of. The other thing was I didn't know what to get everybody for wrap gifts, so I just said, ‘Look, I'm going to go get a tattoo. I've decided to get five stars for the show and, no pressure, but if any of you want one it's my treat as a wrap gift,’” shared Amell. “I got this great tattoo artist in Vancouver named Miki who did an incredible job and she stayed open for us. We literally went the night after we wrapped because a lot of people were leaving the next day.
“Kevin [Bigley] was grateful, but said he doesn't have a tattoo so he wasn't going to start,” continued Amell. “At one point it was just going to be Andy and I because her and I both have tattoos. Then Allegra was like, ‘You know what? I think I'm going to do it,’ and Zainab was like, ‘All right, I'm going to do it.’ The four of us just crowded into this tattoo parlor and got them done. I only have tattoos that mean something to me and this one was pretty cool. […] I only have a tattoo with my dad and a tattoo with my wife. This was the first one that's been associated with anything work-wise.”
“It's really special. I mean, we've become actual friends,” said Allo about getting matching tattoos. “We've actually stayed in touch and grown closer. I mean, it's been seven years of our lives and it's really, really beautiful. And now we are branded together, so there's no escaping the connection at all. I just love them. I love them so much. I think that's the magical part, is finding co-workers that you get along with and that you genuinely enjoy being around. Then the sad part [is] that we don't get to keep doing it.”
Upload has also been scarily accurate when it comes to the technology and predictions in the show that made it into our real world. “We got a lot of stuff right that was super weird. A lot of it would happen in-between when we shot it and when it came out, but it was always shot before it came out in real life,” said Amell, with Allo calling out the wildest event they got right. “I think that Kamala Harris being VP was pretty insane, predicting that. It also was paired with Oprah being president, which that would have been so epic.”
Both actors agreed that the memory parlor tech would be awesome to experience someday. “I always thought the memory parlor was such a great idea,” said Amell. “Being able to relive your memories and see them in a movie POV. I always just loved that that concept.”
A character Amell would return to through a memory parlor? Maybe not one you’d expect. “I only did two episodes of How I Met Your Mother. I played a character named Scooby. It was so much fun and that cast was so great and so welcoming to me as somebody who was coming in for such a small time there,” said Amell, reminiscing on how welcoming the cast was. “Jason Segel was just the nicest guy immediately. […] Not that I had heard anything bad about any of them, but you hear about people being stuck up or rude. I've been so lucky in this business. I've worked with such great people and they always stood out to me as people who were at the top of their game making such a huge hit show.”
Nathan and Nora’s final scene was just as touching to shoot as they were to watch. “Wow, that final episode was so heart-wrenching. Man, it was just an emotional shoot. That particular scene in the bedroom where they're talking and they VR to Montreal was just so… oh my gosh, it just was really a tough day because we were saying goodbye to each other,” explained a teary-eyed Allo. “It was one of the last things we shot. So as Nora was saying goodbye to Nathan, I was saying goodbye to the show. It just was like, okay, this is it. It actually hit me that this is the end. I felt like I'd kind of been avoiding it. This show has meant so much to me and it's been a tough one to say goodbye to, but I've been so grateful for it.”
But the last few moments of the series do leave a glimmer of hope. “If I had to write another ending, obviously it would be like we would just keep going clearly and get to tell more of their story,” laughed Allo. “What was so beautiful is that he gave her permission to live her life. She'd given so much of her time to saving him and for him to say like, ‘This is your time.’ So in my perfect world, what I would love for her to do is like just go, girl. Go to law school or go volunteer at The Innocent Project, like whatever. She has such a big heart and wants to help people. So I’d say go live your life, have a family, do all the things. Then I imagine later on she does bring him back and she gets to say like, ‘Look at all this cool stuff I did and I want to finish out my life now with you.’ That’s what I would hope for.”
After this four-part finale, the cast is confident fans will walk away with “closure.” “That's so hard to do on a show [like this] of tying up all the loose ends, but I feel like we did do that. Greg [Daniels] and the writers, I feel like they ended everyone's story in a way, at least to me, that feels complete,” Allo shared. “I wish Luke hadn't died. I wish that hadn't happened, but I think it's beautiful that he sacrificed himself as a character that has been mostly self-obsessed and obsessed about Nathan. For him to do something so selfless for others, I think was really a great character arc. But yeah I hope fans in the audience are just really at peace with it.”
Allo will always keep a piece of Nora with her… especially since she raided her closet! “Girl, I have two boxes full of stuff. I was like, I want that. I want this. I have two mugs from Horizon,” laughed Allo. “I got the wristwatch phone thing. A pair of goggles. I got a ring drive. A bunch of Nora's clothes. I just literally became an Upload hoarder. I was like, ‘Oh, this is nice. She just always wore comfy clothes so I was like, this is perfect.”
While Allo has closed the door on Lakeview, she’s opening another in the culinary world. Next up, she’s hosting a Pan-African Culinary pop-up dinner highlighting Cameroonian food with the James Beard Foundation on September 9 at Pier 57 in New York City.
The fourth and final season of Upload is streaming on Prime Video.
