The Way Home Cast On Time Traveling To The '20s and Saying Goodbye In The Final Season
Season 4 of The Way Home takes the Landry family through one final jump in the pond. While Alice is graduating and Kat and Elliot take next steps in their relationship, there are still mysteries to uncover in Port Haven’s past. Speaking with Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado, Chyler Leigh, Sadie LaFlamme-Snow, and Evan Williams about time traveling to the 1920s, mother-child relationships, and saying goodbye to a series that became far more than just a job.
Right off the bat, the premiere feels different. This is the first time we've started an episode that flashes to the future. “How awesome, right? I think that it's very indicative of how fantastic the final season is. We have a lot of rabbits to pull out of the hat. So, oh yeah, Alice in Wonderland. God, I'm good,” laugh Leigh. “What I love is that it really does create such a mystery. Even the things like, ‘I wish he was here…’ Who? I didn't know initially when we got the scripts. I was like, ‘Wait, no, who isn't here?’ and I was like, ‘I had no idea.’ […] They don't like to tell us too much. For me, it's because I'll take it in and then that's all I can think about and then I'll spill the beans so it's better to not tell me. I love that we got to change it up a bit and I think the fans are going to really appreciate it when it pays off. But y'all are going to have to wait. [You’ll] have to wait a minute before it pays off.”
While we’re not going into the future just yet, we are going back to the past. “I'm always so grateful to go into a new era because [of] everybody involved from the creative standpoint, be it the directing, even the lenses that they use on the cameras are different for each era. It's like either a slight change in the lighting, the color, the tone,” explained Leigh. “There are no leaves unturned. I love that. We created another absolutely gorgeous world.”
This season brings viewers to 1925 where Kat meets a young version of Grandma Fern. “When everybody meets young Fern, you're going to fall in love with her. Bianca Melchior, I love that little teeny tiny enigma so much,” said Leigh. “She is an absolute star and I cannot wait for everybody to see her performance. It's phenomenal. But I love that Kat got to go back and have a little fun too. You know, be a little mischievous.”
Elliot is known for being “the keeper of the timeline,” but this season things get personal. His own mother becomes central to the mystery. “It's easy to tell other people that they shouldn't take a risk with the past and with the pond when you're standing outside of it like Elliot has been for all of these seasons. You can see from the global angle, you can see from outside the box. Now that it's personal and he discovers that his mom might be somewhere in the past, all of a sudden maybe some of those rules start to break down a little bit. Like his personal rules about what is worth it and what is responsible and things like that,” explained Williams. “It's interesting to have the shoe on the other foot a little bit. There's some parts of Elliot that are waiting for him there and some growth and some learning, especially when it is to do with something as sacred as the bond between a mother and child. I think Elliot's been operating his whole life with a story about who his mom was and what that meant and what that meant about what he was worth. To have some of that stuff revisited is I think going to be very deep and potentially challenging, but ultimately hopefully some rewarding growth as well.”
History often repeats itself in The Way Home, especially when it comes to its love triangles. Just like Kat, Elliot, and Brady or Del, Colton, and Evelyn, perhaps Alice, Max, and Noah are the next great love story. “At the end of season 3, there was some tension with Alice and Max because of a kiss that no one wanted to talk about,” said LaFlamme-Snow. “Things were not going well with Noah near the end. We don't really know where they landed, but there was the existing tension with Max. It’s a fun place to pick up from”
“Both of the actors, Alexander Eling and Dale Whibley, are so lovely and so talented and so much fun,” she continued. “When the showrunners were telling us where we were going with the season, I was just so happy to know that they were both coming back and that we got to be in scenes together again. I'm not going to say where that goes. It's fun because Alice is not boy crazy, but she is absolutely an emotional person. She's really open to love and romance, so I think it's just another thing that complicates her life as a time traveling teenager. It's a lot of fun to play and I feel like our showrunners do a really good job of balancing those themes for her. Most of her life is about this time travel adventure and this healing mission that she's on for her family, but, at the same time, they do a really good job of peppering in a little romance here and there.”
“We knew early on into the season,” revealed Leigh about how far in advance they knew this was the last season of The Way Home. “Television is so hard. There are so many aspects of it and to it that we as the actors often don't get to see. Decisions like that I'm sure are always very, very difficult so we don't take that lightly. Would we have loved a million more seasons? Absolutely. So was it heartbreaking? Yes. But it is also the nature of the business. I do feel like everybody worked so hard to put together this story and give great answers, but also leave a little bit left to the imagination that say there's a reunion episode or there's something like that. You know what I mean? Like how cool would that be?”
The cast truly became a family over these past four seasons. “I just love the people that I have been surrounded by for these past four years. I love Toronto. I am addicted to that place. I would go in a heartbeat. I love it there. The cast and creators have become family and they live there so it's weird to think that dynamic is no longer. It's hard. It's a lot of shifting,” Leigh continued. “I know the fans were disappointed, but I hope that everybody will be as satisfied as possible by the end of the season to see these writers know what they are doing and they did a phenomenal job.”
Saying goodbye hit at different moments for each of them while filming. “I think that as we started to wrap out sets that to me was when it really became clear,” said Williams. “Television is so full on and you're firing with all guns especially on a show like this where you're keeping track of multiple timelines. It's like a real puzzle just to try to keep track of it. The sets were not like any normal set on a show because each one of our sets are seen in multiple eras. It's almost like each set becomes its own character and you become so attached to the locations. When we started to wrap those out for me, the emotion caught up to me. You can't understate how important an experience doing a show for four years is as an artist, as a creator. You can't help but put yourself into it. We put a lot of our blood and sweat, maybe not blood but our sweat and tears certainly, into this project. You leave a little bit of yourself there, but hopefully you gain more tham you take with you.”
For LaFlamme-Snow, that final script read through hit the hardest. “The last read through was probably the hardest one for me. Even though we knew before the last read through that it was the final season, there was still, for us, things to find out. There was still scenes that we hadn't shot yet. There was still things to do. That felt really hard to see the end of the story. I absolutely could barely get through that read through. I was a disaster. It took way longer than the episode actually will take on TV, just because everyone was super emotional. What is so great is that the leaders of the show, like our showrunners, creators, they always just leave a lot of space for for us and our emotions as artists because it is really personal to to be in a story like this and especially when it's a group of people that um are so connected and love each other so much,” she shared. “They had us all over after the read through for pizza and champagne. We just got to talk about the show and talk about how we felt about the finale and how we feel moving forward and how excited we are about each other's work. It's something that I'm really grateful for that they leave space for us to be the emotional people that we are. We do care so much so we do want to talk about it and get through it together.”
“It's emotional for them. Like it's a mother-daughter team making a show about mothers and daughters,” continued Williams. “The whole thing was such a holistic, empathetic zone where people were allowed to be felt and heard and seen. We would play a game during our read throughs where we would see how long it would take our showrunner Alex [Clarke] to start crying because she reads the stage. And our final script, I think she got three words out.”
LaFlamme-Snow jumped in: “I think it was maybe like, ‘Episode 10…’ then she started crying.”
“That's just part and parcel with what this whole project has been like. It's been truly special,” added Williams. “I know everybody says that about the projects they're working on, but this one definitely is is rare.”
“Everyone keeps telling me it's not always like this. And I'm like, ‘Okay, the bar’s set really high. I know that,’” agreed LaFlamme-Snow. “We're really lucky.”
The lessons the characters learn haven’t been lost on the actors, especially Leigh whose journey as Kat has taught her so much about love and motherhood. “I come from where I haven't had a relationship with my mother in 22 years. So it's like to see that with Kat and to see how difficult that is and what it does to you and how it does affect you initially for your relationship with your daughters… I was always terrified I was going to hurt my daughters the way that I was. Over the years and as I've grown as a mother and as I have learned so much from Kat and from the stories that we've been telling, I took it on as like, ‘No, the buck stops here.’ This is a level of love that I didn't know I was capable of giving and/or receiving,” shared Leigh. “[That] in and of itself, if I take nothing away from this show, it's that I have grown to be a better mother and my daughters know how loved they are. That for me is worth every second of it. I'm trying not to cry. You know, I've actually held myself pretty well together today.”
After being so deeply impacted by the show, it’s no surprise that a few sentimental items from the set made it into their own homes. “I got the original ‘My Katherine’ poster in the frame. That story line, to me, is still one of my favorite story lines of the series, so I took that home,” revealed Leigh. “It's funny because Evan and Sadie were laughing at me when I said this: It's literally above my fireplace. I mean, it was like that in Lingermore, so come on! When I see it, I see Kat. I don't see Chyler. So for me, there's such a special connection to that. […] I also got one of the original Landry family almanacs, so I have that in my bookcase.”
New episodes of The Way Home season 4 air Sundays on Hallmark Channel and stream the next day on Hallmark+.
