Virgin River: Lynda Boyd on Lilly’s Fate and What She Learned From Alex Trebek [Interview]

This article contains spoilers for Virgin River Season 3.

Virgin River is a sleepy town in Northern California where Mel Monroe (Alexandra Breckenridge) went on Season 1 of Netflix’s Virgin River to escape her grief. Little did she know, grief finds residents there, too. 

The town’s farmer, Lilly (Lynda Boyd) is a particularly tragic victim of her circumstances. In Virgin River Season 1, the widow suffers from a bout of postpartum depression so severe that Mel considers adopting her newborn daughter, Chloe.

Lilly seeks treatment for her condition and is able to raise Chloe with the help of her adult daughter Tara (Stacey Farber) only to be diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer on Virgin River Season 3. 

I got to talk to Boyd about her experience playing someone with a fatal diagnosis, the lessons she learned from Alex Trebek, and the moments of joy she found filming the last episodes that Lilly is alive. 

Virgin River creator Sue Tenney approached Boyd with the idea that Lilly would have stage 4 pancreatic cancer — a terminal diagnosis — in early 2020. The actor admitted she was reluctant to agree to the plan at first.

“As soon as she said the word ‘cancer’ I was kind of like frozen because I’ve lost two siblings to cancer,” Boyd admitted. “I just didn’t want to do it, really.” 

She had to reframe her thinking to agree to the storyline. Though Boyd frequently refers to her character in the first person throughout our interview, Lilly is a fictional character.

Boyd reminded herself that she’s an actor who would be pretending to have cancer. She wouldn’t actually have it and wouldn’t necessarily have to recreate any part of her lived experience of losing family members to the disease. So, she agreed to Lilly’s diagnosis. 

Lilly chooses not to treat her cancer at all. So, the Virgin River audience doesn’t watch her go through chemo or the heartwrenching side effects that come with it like hair loss.

On one hand, it’s confusing for fans to watch. We are used to watching people suffer on-screen when they have cancer because that’s usually what happens in real life. But it’s also very on-brand for Virgin River to focus on the emotions of the circumstances rather than the harsh reality of a tragedy. 

In Boyd’s opinion, Lilly’s lack of symptoms adds drama to her death.

“I think why it’s shocking is that [Lilly doesn’t] seem sick,” she said. “And then [she just goes] down and [takes] a nap and to me, that’s worse I think than watching someone go through treatment. It’s like, [Lilly’s] family and friends get ripped off in a way of spending more time [with her] because it’s such a sudden, shocking thing.” 

Lilly’s choice not to treat her cancer is easier to understand when we consider her history, even though she has daughters who need her.

Chloe, in particular, is very young. But Lilly’s husband is already dead and she already had the whole town worried about her in Virgin River Season 1 when she almost gave Chloe up for adoption. “[Lilly] just didn’t want to burden anyone again with [her] problem.” 

To prepare for the storyline, Boyd turned to a fellow Canadian for his wisdom. Former Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek died of stage 4 pancreatic cancer in November 2020. So, Boyd read the memoir he published months before his death to gain insight into what a pancreatic cancer patient might experience. 

“He chose to fight and fight and fight as much as he could. But he said he’d met other people who had reached out to him because he was so public about his disease. He said other people would say, ‘I’ve got the same thing and I don’t want treatment and I don’t want to feel guilty about it.'”

“You know, who knows what any of us would do in that position. Some people are going ‘No, I’m gonna fight, I’m gonna go bald and feel like crap for weeks but at least it will buy me some more time.’ And other people just go, ‘I don’t want that kind of time. I don’t want to drag my family down this road because we all know where it’s going to end.” 

Even though we don’t watch Lilly suffer on-screen, Boyd and her scene partners had to face some difficult emotions off-camera because of the character’s illness. The scene where Lilly tells her “stitch ‘n bitch” crew friends what they’ve meant to her was Boyd’s favorite to film, but it also hit close to home.

Just as Lilly cherishes her friends Muriel (Teryl Rothery), Connie (Nicola Cavendish), Jo Ellen (Gwynyth Walsh), and Lydie (Christina Jastrzembska) Boyd loves her co-stars and has known many of them for a very long time. 

“I’ve known Teryl since I was a teenager. We used to take tap dancing lessons together,” Boyd shared, adding that she recently did a play with Cavendish and has known her for many years.

“[The scene] was hard for them, because it felt real,” she said. “It felt like Lynda talking to my friends and going ‘I feel like I’ve had the best life and I’m so fortunate.’ Everybody was crying off-camera because we all know each other.”

Lilly goes down for a nap after her friends visit, and she never wakes up. Boyd said that while her character’s death scene provided the cast and crew the chance to bond because set was “a safe place to talk about grief and loss,” there are technical elements of playing dead that are challenging and a little bit funny. 

Gail Harvey, the director of Lilly’s final episode, Virgin River Season 3 Episode 8, “Life and Death,” kept seeing Boyd breathing. “That was hard, to hold my breath for what seemed like an eternity,” she laughed. “So, any time [Farber] would shake me and go ‘mom, mom’ I’d use that as a moment to exhale and suck some more air in.”

Farber and Boyd also had some, erm, memorable moments during a scene where they are talking about life and walking some horses.

“That horse stepped on my foot at one point, too. I thought I broke my toe because you know, you’ve got a 2500 pound animal standing on your foot and I couldn’t get my foot out from underneath its hoof.”

Boyd’s horse cracked her toe, but Farber’s left a more pungent impression.

“[Stacey’s] horse took the biggest poop I think I’ve ever seen. And she didn’t know what was going on. She was trying to act in the scene,” Boyd remembered. It added some levity to the moment when the director yelled “Cut!” for sure. 

Boyd said she usually plays more “glamorous” characters than Lilly. “But it was nice to play somebody who is super down to earth and just walk in her shoes for a while and see that it was simple things in life that made her happy like her horses and her children and her farm,” she said.

As for her own future, per IMDb, Boyd will appear on some episodes of the upcoming Canadian series Family Law. But she’s been enjoying coaching actors in casting workshops as Canada continues to reopen.

“What’s nice about it is I get to meet a whole bunch of new actors, I get to keep my brain thinking like an actor, and also I get to see my casting director people again.” Boyd also illustrated a children’s book her late sister wrote that she and her family are hoping to publish. 

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Virgin River is currently streaming on Netflix. 

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