The Way Home: Chyler Leigh on the Shocking Season Finale and How the Hallmark Series is Breaking Boundaries [Interview]

Please note this interview contains spoilers for The Way Home Season 1 Episode 10.

Hallmark Channel’s The Way Home has been pushing boundaries since its first episode, and its shocking season finale leaves the audience with more questions than answers. Those elements, along with the deep emotional work of the beautifully written series are just part of why star Chyler Leigh is so proud to be a part of it.

I recently spoke with Leigh about the emotional stakes of The Way Home, how the series takes big risks, and that major cliffhanger at the end of the series finale. (If you haven’t watched it yet, please be sure to do that before reading any further!)

How Leigh first fell in love with the script

“I’m most proud of the way that we stretched the imagination of not just Hallmark, but also the audience that has come in to watch the show,” Leigh told me. “We were really given a lot of creative license to film it, with I think maybe a bit more depth, a bit more of that mystery, a bit more of those authentic, raw, real emotions. And we were so grateful for that because originally it was a Netflix show.”

“It was developed by Lisa Hamilton Daly, and when she moved over to Hallmark, she brought the show with her. And once everybody there read it, I don’t think it was too hard of a sell because of how beautiful the story is,” she continued.

“They obviously had to tone it down, but at the same time, they still gave us a lot of runway. So that being the case, I’m so proud of us for taking risks, big risks, and really going there.”

Leigh said everyone who has been a part of the series, both in front of the camera and behind it, was “equally excited and passionate” about what they were doing. “Even if you’re not on camera, everybody’s still going to be there and give 110% because we wanted it to be the best that it could possibly be,” she said.

She noted that many members of the cast and crew were hesitant at first because of it being a Hallmark series, but they were ultimately all struck by the quality of the script and how special this story seemed. Leigh admitted that was true for her as well. 

“I had been auditioning for things after coming off of two series, very long-running series, and it was in the pandemic time and everything is Zoom,” Leigh recalled. “And my manager calls and the very first thing she says is, ‘Hear me out.'” 

Leigh’s manager told her there was an offer on the table, and started by telling Leigh how beautiful the series was.  “And then she says, ‘It’s Hallmark.’ And I was like, “…Okay.” And she’s like, ‘Hear me out.’ And then she started talking about the depth of it, and she’s like, ‘Let me send you the script. I don’t even want to go more into it. I want you to read it because I want you to have an open mind.'”

Leigh agreed, and as soon as she read the script, she was in. “I was like, ‘Holy expletive,'” she said.

“Then I spoke with Heather [Conkie] and Alex [Clarke], our showrunners,” Leigh continued. “They were the ones that said it first about making it the anti-Hallmark Hallmark show, just so that we could really go there, and we did.”

“And a lot of it, from a Hallmark standpoint, was that they wanted to broaden the audience. They wanted to bring in and see if we could capture a different even age demographic. And we’ve been bringing in so many walks of life, if you will, and people that are watching it with their families,” she said.

“It’s been so cool to see the variety of people that have fallen in love with this show as deeply as we have,” she added. “I feel like this was an opportunity that Hallmark wanted to take.”

Leigh explained that the goal was the have the series rival any other cable or streaming show.

“We were almost like a little bit of an experiment in that sense, but to give a bit more of a launching pad to be able to have people come to Hallmark for a new experience, and to have them come for something that they didn’t expect. And I think that we delivered that pretty darn well.”

The “White Witch,” time travel, and that final shocking scene:

The season finale of The Way Home ends with the reveal that the woman from the 1800s we saw being chased at the beginning of the series is, in fact, Kat. With that reveal, it’s clear that the rules of the pond are even more complicated than we thought. On top of that, we also learn that the pond has something to do with Jacob’s disappearance years ago.

Leigh confirmed that we’ll definitely find out more about how the pond works and how “intricate the pond rules might actually be.” She added that being outside of the framework of everything Elliot experienced also means there is more to discover, including how the pond can take someone to the 1800s and what that might look like.

“And if that’s exactly where Jacob is, then how old is he? What is his story like at this point? What did happen? But where is he now? And what kind of life has he had to make over there if the pond didn’t bring him back to where you need to be?” Leigh pondered.

“And does Kat always need to go back to the 1800s? And what does that spark? Does that help us discover how the pond came to be at all? Which is, I think, definitely something that we are exploring in Season 2,” she said. “We need to know the origin story of one of the biggest characters in the show, which is the pond.”

Leigh also pointed out that there have been clues all along that her character was the woman in white, and she thinks as viewers go back and re-watch the season, they’ll pick up on things they didn’t notice before.

“There was a scene in particular with Jacob and Danny, when they’re little, and Kat is being a creeper and she’s wearing a white shirt, I was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt. And so it was intentional and because I was like, ‘Hold up. Why would anybody jump into the water in a white shirt?'” Leigh laughed.

“But it was intentional because he says, ‘The white witch,’ and then runs away.”  

On jumping into that cold pond and filming the underwater sequence:

Speaking of the pond, Leigh also discussed what it was like filming those scenes — and how very cold that pond is.

“Luckily we had incredible stunt doubles to be able to do a lot of that jumping, [because] that pond is freezing. I mean breathtakingly cold. And so, poor Sadie [LaFlamme-Snow]… she had to do it a couple more times than I did. And also David [Webster], who plays the young Elliot, had his time in there as well. It is green, very green, and there are things that are swimming in there. So the less people had to get in there, I think the better,” Leigh laughed.

“Our underwater sequence, when you see what’s happening to Alice and Kat, and how they’re being dragged down even by that fern that’s in the water, to be able to film that, we actually did it in our director of photography’s pool at home,” she continued.

“They tented out the entire pool and tented everything because we’re filming in the day, so you had to black out everything. And it was kind of the only way that we could be underwater. You could see it clearly, but it was warm,” Leigh recalled.

“So we could spend more time. Sadie and I had, I don’t know, eight hours in that pool that day. It was a Saturday. And so we had a skeleton crew of people that were there, and it was fantastic. We had scuba divers that were down there too, obviously for safety reasons.”

Filming Kat and Elliot’s first kiss:

Leigh said that day in the pool, as well as the scene where Kat and Elliot finally kiss, were just two examples of moments where it felt like they were making an indie film at times. 

“That first kiss, we had 10 minutes to be able to do it because we were legitimately at sundown, the sunset, and we had to capture it. And so we had, I don’t know, like three takes to be able to do the entire thing,” she said.

“It was epic because there was so much kind of pressure behind it to get it done and to capture it. So it’s like, if you have to capture something as epic as that in that amount of time, you better damn well go for it. And we did. We really did.”

“This is again, another experience for the audience to see a super big kiss like that, even an open mouth kind of kiss, where you go, ‘Whoa, that’s racy,'” she added.

On that heartbreaking car crash scene:

One of the most emotional moments of the first season is when Kat realizes she’s the one who caused her father’s car crash, and as she holds him in her arms, he recognizes her to be his daughter. Leigh described the challenges of filming that scene and how much work went into it.

“That night was just wild. It was another night where there was so much to get done,” she said.

“It’s challenging because we’re out in an environment that’s just challenging to film anyway, in and of itself. We had all the stunts and whatnot. So it was heavy and we really wanted to do it justice, again, of those authentic emotions and that heightened sense of — I don’t know, just the urgency behind it and that heartbreak.”

“That moment, which I thought was so creatively fantastic, where they drop out the sound when Kat first sees that car crash… I mean, I was screaming and they dropped that sound out and I thought that was such a great moment,” she continued.

“It was to not scare the audience and save that emotional moment, the high emotional moment, for when Kat pulls him out of the car, which was very difficult to do because we were on a slant and he’s a man. And so even that, it was physically exhausting too.”

Leigh also explained that there was a risky decision that was made in terms of how bloody that scene would be — and they almost didn’t take that risk.

“When we filmed it from a technical makeup standpoint, they didn’t want to show too much blood or bruising or any of that kind of stuff. There was a bit more reservation on that because again, you don’t really want to scare an audience that’s not entirely used to seeing stuff like that, which is I think a bit more edgy,” she said. “They actually added all that in post.”

That decision was made because the scene was “a huge emotional crux” but also because without the blood and bruising, it didn’t seem realistic that Colton would have died so quickly from the impact of the crash. “We had to make it a bit more boundary-breaking, I guess in that sense, to make it more believable that that would’ve been something that killed him.”

On the emotional work of the series:

Leigh said filming the car-crash was emotionally exhausting as well.

“After all those scenes that night when we wrapped, I was exhausted. You pull all that stuff. That’s guttural work. And someone [from the crew] came up to me and was walking me back to our van to go to our trailers and everything, and he looked at me and he put his arm around my shoulder and he goes, ‘So you released some demons there, huh?’ I was like, ‘I think I did, man. I think I let a few of those suckers out.'”  

Of course, Leigh is no stranger to filming those kinds of emotional scenes, from her work on Grey’s Anatomy as well as on Supergirl. But the emotional work she’s doing on The Way Home is on another level.

“From an emotional standpoint it is very taxing and a lot more than I’ve done before. But because of the integrity of the show and what we wanted to bring to it, it’s kind of like an all-or-nothing,” Leigh said.

“Everybody across the board, their emotional capacity and delivery has just been beautiful. And so we pushed each other. There was never not 110% from anybody, like I mentioned. So to be able to do that came naturally in a lot of ways because of the support that I got from everybody.”

Another deeply emotional scene is the one that follows, as Alice pulls her mother from the pond and Kat has a panic attack. Leigh said she was determined, from a stunt perspective, to do that scene justice as well.

“I mean, I just did a comic book show so I know what stunts [take]. It’s easy to get injured, it’s easy for things to not be as easy to do because you have so many logistics going into it. I was very adamant about working that part out of it, the physicality, so that we could just do the emotional stuff,” she said.

“I was like, ‘I’m going to go there, guys.’ And our director came up to me afterward and she kind of clasped her hands together and said, ‘Well, that’s not Hallmark.’ I was like, ‘Sweet!'”

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The Way Home Season 1 is currently streaming on Hallmark TV, PrimeVideo, and more.

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