Sarah Carter and Drew Roy on ‘Falling Skies’ and Relationship Drama

Drew Roy and Sarah Carter Interview
Sarah Carter in ‘Falling Skies’ season 4 (Photo by James Dittiger/TNT)

Our favorite alien invasion survivors have been split up for the first part of season four of TNT’s Falling Skies, which has meant couple Hal (Drew Roy) and Maggie (Sarah Carter) haven’t had a chance to work on their relationship. That changed with the July 27, 2014 episode and at the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con, Roy and Carter discussed how they’ve approached the season and what they hope is in the future for Hal and Maggie.

Sarah Carter and Drew Roy Falling Skies Interview

So far this season, you’ve been separated. How volatile will the reunion be?

Drew Roy: “This is the part that I’m most excited about out of the show, you can call me selfish, but it is kind of for a selfish reason, just to see how this whole thing’s going to play out. We’ve got this triangle going on and it really is any man’s game as to who you root for, who you don’t root for. It can change throughout the episodes, within the episodes. To me it’s like a little experiment that we throw everything on it, see what happens and then walk away and go, ‘Huh, that’s what happened.'”

Maggie and Ben are getting quite close…

Sarah Carter: “Well, that’s circumstances. I think everybody’s been split up and for Maggie not to have Hal, it’s pretty lonely. And also Ben is thrown into this pretty surreal world where his younger sister is all of a sudden this beautiful blonde young woman and ruling this cult-like environment. So the two of us bond over a reality check, basically. It’s only when Hal and Maggie come together things really pick up for the love triangle starting [on July 27].

It’s certainly justified like Drew was saying. All kinds of valid questions that will come up for fans, and people are going to like it, people are going to not like it. It was uncomfortable, I’ll just speak for myself. It’s a very uncomfortable season for me. Physically, too, actually. I don’t know, I’m excited. I’m really excited to see how people respond.”

Drew Roy:: “I really am.”

Sarah Carter: “It’s really sweet how much people love Maggie and Hal. You just feel the fans rooting for Maggie and Hal to make it.”

It’s seeing you apart after you were so close, after Hal’s infection with alien bugs, meeting Karen in the middle of the night and you finding out. To see you guys apart after that is like, “What?!”

Drew Roy: “Especially having left on such not good terms. We really only saw each other in the first episode of this season, and things weren’t smooth between us. So now all this time has gone by and how do they feel about each other? What will that first moment be like when we see each other? Will it be a happy moment? Will it be, ‘Oh, here we go again.’ Now a can of worms is back open. So there’s all of that that’s been building this whole time.”

Sarah Carter: “It’s been really cool for me, Sarah, not Maggie, to watch this season and be able to watch Drew play Hal in a completely different context. I’ve been excited about how much growth there’s been in his character in terms of his leadership and interacting with Colin. I love the Pope and Hal stuff. So I hope it’s been great for the fans to see both of us in different worlds and out of our little romance.”

When it came to the escape from the ghetto, how was filming that sequence?

Drew Roy: “We don’t really have soundstages but we shoot at […]this part of this outdoor studio that’d actually been several things. It’s where Pope and Weaver go down and the people confront them thinking there’s food there, and a couple other different things. So they had turned it into this long tunnel-looking things. We’re all packed in there super tight but there’s a ton of room on the outside where the cameras are moving, but we were all in there pretty tight. One of the most fun things I’ve had this season with this whole leadership aspect of Hal is that a lot of times I’m working with a large number of extras, which can either be very intimidating or very inspiring, because if you look at them as, ‘Okay, I’ve got to get them to do what I need them to do,’ it really does make you have to be a leader just in and of itself. So that was a really interesting thing I got to do, but that particular day, we got to run around, kill skitters, I always love killing skitters. I found this little pole, stabbed him a few times. Sometimes imaginary skitter, sometimes it’s a real guy in a suit and you’ve got to make sure you don’t actually kill him.”

What do you hope for the fifth season?

Drew Roy: “The way this season ends, it’s really hard to know which direction they’ll take it in. It really has a pretty culminating end. It doesn’t just end, but we’ve been building toward this one thing that you’re really about to start seeing in the next two or three episodes. We build towards it, build towards it, and then it sort of all happens. So depending on what they decide to do with it will really dictate a lot about next season, but I think we all have ideas of what we’d like our character to do and where to go and how to go.”

Sarah Carter: “The writers are great. They call us in every year before a new season and they totally listen to our ideas. Obviously they give us theirs. But I think we do have a good storyline, and actually the fans do too. We kind of feel the fan response, especially to this love triangle…I think knowing that people are rooting for Hal and Maggie is something the writers have to consider. So keep putting your ideas out there because it’s definitely evolving as we go.”