Mel’s Miscarriage and the Difficulty of Birthing Scenes

It was just as I had anticipated. It was really cute, very small town, just a Christmas bonanza. Everything was decorated, and I was secretly in the corner on my phone buying Christmas ornaments (laughs). I think we were shooting at the end of October; I was so inspired by our Christmas. We have been talking about it for years, how it made sense to do a Virgin River Christmas. However, the problem always became how slowly the show moves, and so unless we were going to jump ahead at some point, it just wasn’t feasible to do. But, here it was.
After everything that happened this season, do you have a favorite episode or scene you filmed?

You know, as hard as mid-season was for me, I loved those episodes. I love when Brie’s character takes the stand. I thought that was extremely powerful, and what she said on the stand was incredibly powerful. It felt like something we hadn’t done before on the show. So I was really proud the writers chose to go there, and I cried when I read the script and I cried when I watched it. The fire — I think it was episodes five, six and seven. They were hard, but I thought it was some of our best work.

One of the big storylines was Mel’s preliminary. How did you prepare emotionally to take on those scenes?

It was really difficult. It was very draining. You know, if you look back at season one, coming into Virgin River, Mel was very deeply in loss and trauma, and as an actress that was something I was looking forward to getting out of. Because when I do that kind of work, it takes me there personally. So I really wasn’t looking forward to it, to be honest with you, because it took me through the trauma. I have my own trauma, just as everyone does, and for me, it feels close to home and something that I can relate to as a mother. And so I just used my own experience in that area, and I’m not going to lie to you, there was a weekend where I was just a total disaster on the couch after filming all of that. Those episodes were really hard. I was just watching TV all day and I had to call Martin [Henderson], and I was texting him and he was like, “Are you OK?” And I was like, “I don’t think so (crying voice).” But he was extremely kind and talked me down from my heightened emotional state.

It’s hard. As much as we want to say, “I can go into this character and come out of it on the other side,” I think you always bring a piece of you in and you take a piece of them away with you, and your body , your cells remember that. And then you do the scene over and over again, and so you’re just basically living trauma just constantly. I remember watching actresses when I was younger playing these roles where the entire movie, they’d just be crying. I don’t know what it was, [but] there was some Naomi Watts movie that I was watching, and she was just sobbing the whole time. I was like, “Gosh, how does she do that?” But I feel ultimately that it was such an incredibly important story to tell for women who had immunodeficiency and have not been able to conceive themselves, but look forward to having a family just the same.
It sounds like immersing yourself in those emotions for days, even weeks, for filming took a toll on you.

You shoot two episodes at once, about 14 to 15 days usually. So it was about 14 to 15 days of me just going in and living with this workshop, and fighting through these fires and trying to save Ava and the baby and all of that. It was just, it was wild.

Was Mel having a successful pregnancy considered at all ahead of this season?

Yes, before they even started writing, Sean and I had conversations about telling an alternative story and taking the characters in this direction. I have friends who have struggled through getting pregnant and they always tell me how they don’t feel like women who don’t get their miracle baby are not represented enough [on screen]. So that feels like a very real, very important piece. A story that we can tell with Mel’s past and through this character. This is a comfort show, however we do touch into very real and important storylines. And I think when we do delve into them, we try to be as honest and grounded as we can, even throughout the template of being a comfort show.