Chyler Leigh’s 18-year-old daughter Taelyn is not one to mince words. So when she had to rewind her mom’s Hallmark show, The Way Home, and watch a scene again because she was crying so much, it meant a lot to her actress mom.
“I promise you, this is my favorite television show of all time,” Taelyn told Leigh, who has been starring in the hit series as Kat Landry since 2023.
Leigh was so taken aback by the compliment that she joked it off at first. But Taelyn insisted. “No, genuinely, Mom, I just love the show and I’m so grateful.”
When Leigh, alongside her onscreen daughter Sadie Laflamme-Snow, spoke to SheKnows over Zoom about that moment a day later, she reflected on how validating the interaction was for her — not just as an actress, but as a mom.
Even before The Way Home, Leigh was steadily appearing on the small screen, starring in hits like Grey’s Anatomy and Supergirl while raising three kids — Taelyn, 21-year-old son Noah, and 15-year-old daughter Anniston — with her husband of over 22 years, Nathan West.
“It makes me feel really good about what I do and about the time I spend away from my family when I’m working,” Leigh says. “And I love to know that it has an impact on the people closest to me.”
In the multigenerational family drama, Leigh plays a mom of one navigating a new normal after she and her teen daughter move back in with her estranged mom Del, played by Andie MacDowell, after decades away. Things get even more complicated when Kat discovers that the pond in the family’s backyard lets her travel in time.
Time travel aside, The Way Home is essentially a story about a broken family trying to piece themselves back together.
Chyler – Shirt & Pants: Alice+Olivia, Shoes: Larroude.
“It’s exciting to do scenes where the complexity of mother-daughter relationships is the point of interest in the show,” says Laflamme-Snow, who plays Kat’s teenage daughter, Alice.
She and Leigh first met over Thai food in 2022, shortly before they started filming season 1 in Canada, and they’ve been cultivating a mother-daughter bond that radiates onscreen ever since.
“We get to do really exciting work together,” she adds, “and explore those relationships that are so complicated, beautiful, and essential for all of us.”
A Healing Moment
With rocky mother-daughter relationships at the heart of the show, it’s no surprise that some scenes have hit home for the stars. Similarly to her character, Leigh had her first daughter at age 21 and hasn’t spoken to her own mom in over two decades. She says her character’s life feels “eerily similar” to her own.
“Kat has taught me so much about valuing who I am and right where I am in my life,” Leigh explains. “It’s been about 21 years since I last saw or spoke to my mother and it is something that gets to me. Not as much anymore, as far as the terrible heartstrings that are being pulled or anything like that, but it just makes you realize how important it is to become the better version of yourself.”
Not long after Leigh and Laflamme-Snow’s January photoshoot with SheKnows, Leigh elaborated further during a panel in New York City. In it, she talked about how MacDowell’s character Del helped heal some of those old wounds, particularly during a season 1 scene in which Kat and Del reconcile.
“These are all the things, honestly, that I wish I had heard from my own mother,” Leigh said, tearing up. “So with Andie saying those words to me, all of that was real,” she explained. “I needed to hear that through the mouth of somebody that I know genuinely meant it.”
To Leigh, it’s all about making those experiences teachable moments. As she summed up in our conversation, “How can we find an opportunity here to learn how to grow from this and be better tomorrow?”
Teen Transformations
While family drama is core to The Way Home, (and Laflamme-Snow’s Alice even experiences some bumps in her own relationship with Del in season 3), it isn’t just the intricate depiction of mother-daughter bonds that the show nails. In all three seasons, Alice and her time-traveling adventures show that teenagers are much more than the stereotypical moody teens we so often see on TV.
“Something that really drew me to this show in the first place was the depth and the complexity and the vulnerability that the character of Alice has,” she says. “[The teenage characters] are really profound, smart, adventurous, passionate, loving, family-oriented people and that’s the sort of motivation for everything that they do.”
That’s especially true for her character, a high school student who started season 1 rebelling against the move from Minneapolis to the fictional Canadian town of Port Haven. “We see Alice going through some really difficult stuff, but it’s pretty quickly revealed as sort of a mask for this really sweet, vulnerable, loving person,” Laflamme-Snow says.
Leigh, who obviously knows a thing or two about raising teens, agrees. “On our show, you don’t have that bratty teenager that you just want to put in their room,” she says.
On the contrary, she thinks The Way Home shows just how much parents and adults can learn from teens. “You really get to understand that we all have a lot to learn from one another if we would just sit down, be quiet for a minute and just hear another perspective,” she says. “Sometimes it really is beneficial and powerful to look through the eyes of someone who is a bit younger in the world today.”
The Way Home’s Nail-Biting Season 3
Viewers of the show know that The Way Home’s season 3 has been filled with twists and turns. One big one: is Landry family patriarch Colton (Jefferson Brown) actually a time traveler? Then there is Elliot’s (Evan Williams) former marriage and Alice’s potential connection with Max Goodwin (Dale Whibley). Safe to say, a lot is going on this season.
For Leigh, now that Kat’s relationship with Del has finally calmed down, her time-defying love life has become one of her favorite aspects of the show.
“Relationships, in general, can be very complicated,” she says. “Whether they’re relationships that we’re currently in, like long-standing ones, ones that have just started, ones that haven’t started yet, or ones that go way into our past, wink wink, they’re always going to teach you something.”
That’s exactly what Leigh wants for Kat. While The Way Home fans might be rooting for her romance with Elliot, Leigh is keeping an open mind. No matter if she’s with Elliot, Thomas (Chris Holden Reid), or Susanna (Watson Rose), she’s Team Kat all the way.
“One thing that I love so much about Kat is her capacity to love and to be able to find love in any situation,” she says. “And so it just so happens that we have these incredible actors that come in. You’ve got Evan Williams, and you’ve got Chris Holden Reid, and you’ve got Watson Rose, and A) I mean, how could you choose? But also B) They represent such different areas of herself.”
But is a Susanna-Kat love story actually happening? To Leigh, they absolutely love each other, no matter how that presents itself.
“[Susanna] did things differently in a time where doing things differently could get you killed, and so this is a woman that was unapologetically herself, and I think that’s one of the things that Kat just fell in love with,” she says. “To find a kindred spirit despite the centuries between them.”
“I love that love story for Kat regardless of how it presents itself or how the audience may take it. It is a love story, for sure,” she adds. “We’ve always tried to toe the line there just to show that female relationships do kind of cross invisible lines.”
As for Alice’s storyline, she has a clear love interest this year — Alexander Eling’s character Noah — but her new theory about his best friend Max might jeopardize it all.
“I’ve always wanted for Alice to get a taste of her own medicine,” Laflamme-Snow says, comparing her character’s season 3 storyline to the moment in season 1 when she told teenage Elliot his future.
“The possibility that Max might have something to do with her future is really going to send her for a loop,” she says. “Because I think she was really enjoying just being able to lean on Noah.”
Mother-Daughter Connections
At 25 years old, Laflamme-Snow is just a few years older than Leigh’s eldest child, so understandably, the maternal connection between the two is strong. At our SheKnows cover shoot, Leigh helped her co-star by fixing her hair, making sure she was comfortable in her heels, and checking in on her throughout.
According to Laflamme-Snow, Leigh’s care extends to just about everyone on set, too. “I feel like I really see the seeds of love for everyone and everything about the show that Chyler planted right from the minute she stepped on set,” she says.
“You work so hard to make the set a loving place to be and it just has multiplied and expanded in so many ways,” she tells her co-star. “People are overjoyed to work on the show on every level, and I feel like it starts with everyone, but in particular Chyler.”
To Leigh, doing so comes naturally, especially when she has viewed Laflamme-Snow almost like one of her own kids after working with her during such pivotal years of her life.
“I look at her with those little heart eyeballs,” Leigh says. “I’ve watched Sadie grow tremendously, not just as an artist — though that just fills my little bones with pride when I see her evolving as an artist — but in so many different ways.”
“She’s a multi-talented young woman, and I am fiercely protective and proud of her,” she continues. “As a human being who is growing up and in an industry that can be absolutely awful, especially to young women, I’m seeing strength [and] courage in her. I’ll protect her until the end of time, but this girl can take care of herself.”
It’s a sentiment that Laflamme-Snow echoes right back. “It’s also so easy to fall into a family dynamic, in particular with Chyler and Andie in the show,” she adds. “We got along instantly — and we continue to act like a family.”
Photography: George Chinsee, Design Director: Marie Raton, Editor: Alice Kelly, Chyler’s Stylist: Gabriel Langenbrunner, Chyler’s Makeup Artist: Gita Bass, Chyler’s Hair Stylist: Harley Beman, Sadie’s Stylist: Sarah Slutsky Tooley, Sadie’s Makeup Artist: Meredith Baraff, Sadie’s Hair Stylist: Kendall Williams
