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

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
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 admitted actor 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 is 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 patients 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.