‘Firefly Lane’ star Sarah Chalke on Kate and Tully’s fight and that devastating finale

Warning: This post contains spoilers from Firefly Lane season 2, part 1.

Kate (Sarah Chalke) and Tully (Katherine Heigl) have been through a lot. Their unbreakable bond formed when the girls were only teens, and since then, they’ve seen each other through various stages of life, from first loves to first heartbreaks to marriages, divorces, children, career victories and losses, and so much more. So what could possibly have torn them apart?

That was the question that Firefly Lane posed in its first season, as the finale revealed that the two women weren’t talking. Season 2 then unraveled that mystery, revealing that Tully got into a drunk driving accident with Kate’s daughter in the car. And yet, by the end of season 2, Kate was once again knocking on Tully’s door … but it wasn’t because she had good news. Kate had just found out that she has cancer, and Tully wasn’t home.

EW spoke with Chalke about the rollercoaster season, Kate’s diagnosis, and what to expect from the show’s final episodes.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: I want to start with a technical question: With all the timelines on this show, do you all only ever shoot one timeline a day?

SARAH CHALKE: No.

You go back and forth?!

Yeah. The goal is not to be mixing decades within a day, but it absolutely had to happen like sometimes for a location purpose or for, you know, COVID reasons or whatever that somebody couldn’t come in and then all of a sudden the scenes get shifted around for the whole episode. So you’re putting on a wig for the ’80s stuff and then taking your own hair out after for the 2000s and trying to act 20 years younger and have more of a bounce in your step and then feel a little bit older again. [Laughs] But the clothes help. Like the second you put on those ’80s clothes and the hair and the boots, it definitely gets you in that mode.

I know this is a complicated question because you play her across so many years, but how do you feel like Kate is different in season 2?

I love watching second seasons of shows and certainly I love coming back to a show because the whole dynamic is just so different. Everybody knows each other and you just fall back into it so quickly. But for Kate, her big journey and arc is, at the beginning, she was so uncomfortable in her own skin and such a pleaser and wanted to make everything okay for everyone else in the room. And then, meeting Johnny [Ben Lawson], even, she was shy and felt like he was out of her league. And so it was really fun this season to show them falling in love and she kind of is coming into her own. She gets so much more confident and that was really fun to play and it was so fun to play that love story through the ’80s and then obviously getting to see her becoming a mom and in the ’90s and prioritizing that over work and then obviously at the end of part 1, where it leaves us is, I guess, the most significant part of her journey.

Yes and we’ll get to that, but before we do, I want to talk about the Tully-Kate fight. In season 1, as you all were filming scenes where they were fighting, did you know what had happened?

No. We knew it was something big and unforgivable and I was so curious what it was gonna be. Because I felt like, “What could break up this unbreakable friendship?” And what I loved about it was that you really see both sides. You see Kate’s side and you really see it from Tully’s perspective and so I think you walk away feeling for both of them.

I do think it was very smart to tie in Tully’s past trauma, because you understand why she acted so quickly.

100 percent. I think the context of everything she went through in season 1, it makes you really believe that. Oh yeah, of course she hears Marah’s [Yael Yurman] voice and forgets everything else and says, “I have to go.”

I was proud of Kate for standing her ground when Tully showed up though, because Tully was trying very hard not to apologize.

Yeah. I felt the same way when I read it. I was like, “Okay, good for Kate.” And I also love that scene because nothing is straightforward. You understand where Tully’s coming from, but Kate can’t because it was Marah. Maybe if it was Kate it would be different, but it was Marah, it was her baby. She can’t forgive her, but you see how much she wants to and that she wishes she could. And how through the season, every time she reaches for the phone she wants to call her but she just can’t.

Until the end…

Right, at the end, for Kate, everything falls away and that’s the first person she thinks of and the only person that she wants to go to and who she wants to see and who she wants to talk to about it and who she wants comfort from.

I imagine you knew the cancer twist was coming, right?

Yeah, I had read the book and loved the book, so I knew it was coming but I still cried when I read the script.

Well that image of her outside Tully’s door alone is so sad!

It’s the saddest image! It’s how much she needs Tully and the fact that this was gonna be the moment that they were going to reconnect and then the elevator doors…

My most important question for you is: Approximately how many boxes of tissues do I need for the rest of the episodes?

You need some. I’m excited for everyone to see it. Season 1 created a lot of questions and then season 2, part 1 answered those, and now there’s a lot more questions and all of those will be answered in the second half. But there’s also lots of levity. One thing I love about the show is that there’s a balance between the heavy stuff and then there’s some humor woven in there, which I think is what you need so that you can actually exhale.

This story was intimidating. I didn’t know what that was going feel like to play her journey. I can’t tell you obviously how it ends, you’ll have to watch and see, but everybody’s lives have been touched by cancer. My aunt and my grandmother, we lost to cancer and lots of the crew members opened up to me about their stories and shared their stories with me. So playing that scene and other ones to come, you are looking into the eyes of all these people you’ve gotten to know quite well and, and know what they’ve been through. So there was definitely some emotional days on the set.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Firefly Lane season 2, part 1 is out on Netflix now.

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