The Way Home debuted back in 2023 as Hallmark’s first new TV drama in years, with network vet Andie McDowell, Grey’s Anatomy alum Chyler Leigh, and relative newcomer Sadie Laflamme-Snow as the three women of the Landry family. There was already drama to be found just when it seemed like Kat (Leigh) and daughter Alice (Laflamme-Snow) would have to readjust to living with Kat’s mom Del (McDowell), but add a time travel twist, and Hallmark has a hit show now guaranteed a third season. Speaking with CinemaBlend as Season 2 aired in the 2024 TV schedule, the stars opened up about filming time travel via a pond!
Teenage Alice accidentally discovered time travel in the first season when she went back to the ’90s, and the show had to find a way to balance time travel and family drama very early on… and Sadie Laflamme-Snow had to be dunked in water. Chyler Leigh would later do the same. When I spoke with the cast at SCAD TVfest in Atlanta, I noted that the time travel scenes are filmed above and below the surface of the water, and the actresses shed some light on how the show pulls it off. Chyler Leigh shared:
They’re both a separate process. The pond is a manmade pond. So we’ve got frogs, tadpoles, dirt, grime, grunge, the whole thing, the rocks. Everything that you see is absolutely real.
In case you were watching The Way Home and thought that the griminess and dirt were just TV magic that the actresses didn’t actually have to dunk themselves in, that is definitely not the case! That’s also not the extent of the complications of filming in a manmade outdoors pond, as Sadie Laflamme-Snow shared that “it’s in Canada, outside in the fall.” Who else just felt a sympathy chill for the stars? Chyler Leigh elaborated:
Those days have to be very, very well organized and calculated. So it took some time to kind of get a more streamlined process, and it’s still a learning experience, because circumstances and conditions dictate a whole lot for what we are able to do in the pond. But we try to truncate those days as much as we can just so that when we do go in, if we’re doing multiple scenes, and we have to be dry, we’ll do all the scenes dry and then we’ll do all the jumps and all that stuff afterwards that we get wet. Because this one [Sadie Laflamme-Snow] with her glorious curly hair has to be straightened and blown dry.
There are tricks to get around filming a time travel scene completely sequentially, which is good news for the hair and makeup teams of the show. Laflamme-Snow in particular faces some extra hair time, if her curls need to be straightened and dried! On the plus side, the other half of time travel scenes don’t have to be filmed outdoors in a Canadian pond. The Alice actress agreed with Leigh that “it’s quite a process,” then continued:
And then we have the underwater portion, which is filmed in a swimming pool really. That’s just because it’s too nasty in the pond to see under there with a camera so we did it in a pool that’s dressed like a pond. It’s really something I never thought I would do, the whole acting underwater thing. Because not just swimming, but like actually doing a scene fully submerged? The first time we shot a scene in there, I go under and then I come up like, ‘How’d I do?’ They’re like, ‘Can you open your eyes?’ I was like, ‘Oh, yeah!’
There are different challenges in acting in the pool, namely that the stars’ performances are clearly visible in ways that they wouldn’t be in the grimy pond. Unlike her TV mom with Grey’s Anatomy and Supergirl to her name, Laflamme-Snow didn’t have many TV credits prior to The Way Home, and it sounds like this show has been a pretty unconventional learning experience. The experience was kept under control, though, as Chyler Leigh explained:
We actually have a SCUBA-certified camera department that’s in the water with us every time, and so we will literally be at the point where you know you’re going to be grabbed and yanked backwards, but you don’t really know when.
The stars may not be able to wear SCUBA gear themselves for Kat and Alice’s time travel adventures, but the camera department does, and that evidently helps make for some extra authentic performances in the pool. What easier way to sell being surprised by time travel in the water than being surprised by camera-operating SCUBA divers in a pool?
Evan Williams, who plays the enigmatic Elliot on The Way Home, chimed in to praise his co-stars… and paint a pretty funny picture of how they film the pond scenes:
We also shoot very close to the winter up in Canada, and so these two are real troopers. It gets really cold and I’ve seen a number of times when they get pulled out of the pond. They’re dressed up like baked potatoes, wrapped in blankets.
All in all, it’s safe to say that how time travel works on The Way Home is pretty different from other time travel shows and films, and fans can presumably count on that continuing into a third season. The mysteries have certainly not all been solved, and the wait for Season 3 in 2025 could feel very long depending on the Season 2 finale. For now, take a look at one of Sadie Laflamme-Snow’s experiences in the grimy pond:
The Season 2 finale of The Way Home airs on Sunday, March 31 at 9 p.m. ET on Hallmark, so be sure to tune in to see the final adventure of the Landry women in 2024. You can also find every episode that has aired so far streaming with a Peacock Premium subscription now.
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