The Way Home’s Chyler Leigh, Evan Williams Talk Steamy Kat/Elliot Love Scene: ‘We’re Pushing the Envelope’
Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Way Home Season 3, Episode 4. Proceed at your own risk!
Forget the potentially damaged floors. It was all about what was happening on the kitchen countertop when Kat and Elliot got hot and heavy during last Friday’s The Way Home.
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Kat spent much of the episode fretting that she and Elliot were doomed to become just roommates, like she and her ex-husband Brady had, now that they were living together. The tedium of day-to-day, real-life differences started to take some of the passion out of their relationship, with Elliot asking Kat to tidy up her clothes and showing more concern for the drenched wood floors than Kat’s big time-travel news.
But Kat needn’t have worried: When Semisonic’s “Closing Time” started to play as the couple prepared dinner, the mood completely changed. Recalling the song from their past, Elliot began to sing along, then grabbed Kat to dance. The heat suddenly ratcheted up as Elliot lifted Kat up onto the kitchen counter, and the two began making out. Even spilt milk on his precious floors couldn’t tear Elliot away from Kat.
“Leave it. I don’t care about the mess. I don’t care about anything else,” Elliot declared, before going in for another passionate kiss.
It was a surprisingly steamy love scene for a Hallmark series. Evan Williams, who plays Elliot, tells TVLine that while it’s not the norm for the channel, it’s also just a realistic depiction of a romantic relationship.
“We’re pushing the envelope all over the place on this show,” Williams says in the above video. “That’s our M.O. from the beginning is that we’re trying to tell a story that has all of the depth and breadth of the human experience all wrapped inside this mystical, candy coating of time travel. And so, I don’t think that it’s so far out of the scope of the show that we could show the passionate side of love, as well.”
When it came time to shoot Kat and Elliot’s sexy times, no direction was needed from the production team.
“They just said, ‘You guys just do what you do,'” star Chyler Leigh (aka Kat) shares, as Williams adds with a laugh, “They had to cut us.”
Williams credits the trust that’s built up between himself and Leigh over the past two seasons with their ability to dive into a more intimate scene.
“Chyler and I have always had amazing chemistry,” Williams says, “and it’s one of the joys of this show for me is that we don’t actually have to work at the connection. We can just mine the connection, and find all these jewels and nuggets that are there. I feel so safe with Chyler as a scene partner. And by the third season, we’ve developed that bond of trust, and I know she’s got my back, implicitly, and I’ve got hers. And so, something like this [scene], we’re just really trying to tell the story as deeply and as honestly as we can.”
The heated kitchen moment also proves to Kat that there are some very positive upsides to her and Elliot shacking up.
At first, there are the challenges “of just having to learn how to live with somebody, in general, whether it’s physically live with them, or just live and grow and breathe with this person,” Leigh describes. “Kat is a very untidy person, and it poses some issues with Elliot, who is very type-A and likes to keep things in the order that they should be. We poke fun at that a little bit… That’s also one of the things that’s so redeeming and so lovely about when Elliot finally does say, ‘Forget the floors.’ It’s such a surprising, sexy thing for her to just go, like, ‘All right. Oh, I see you. OK.'”
Press PLAY to watch Leigh and Williams banter about their characters’ sexy counter encounter.
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