Heavy/Getty Chyler Leigh at a press event for "The Way Home" season 2
Playing the character of Kat Landry on Hallmark‘s hit series “The Way Home” has been particularly emotional and therapeutic for actress Chyler Leigh, who has said her personal life eerily mirrors Kat’s in many ways, from raising teenage daughters to dealing with mental health challenges.
But the detail that really jumped off the page for Leigh when she first read “The Way Home” script was that her character was estranged from her mother for two decades. At an advance screening event for the new season, which premieres on January 21, 2024, Leigh revealed that’s another huge reason she relates to Kat so much.
“I have a very similar story in my own life now, not having spoken to my mother in 20 years,” Leigh said, per KGET.
Here’s what you need to know:
Chyler Leigh Says She Turned to Drugs & Alcohol After a Challenging Childhood
GettyNathan West and Chyler Leigh in 2017
While growing up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Leigh’s childhood was fraught with challenges. Her parents, who ran a local weight-loss business, declared bankruptcy when she was eight, according to a 2008 profile of Leigh by People. Her parents later split and when Leigh was 12, her mom reunited with her first husband and took Leigh to live in Miami. Leigh didn’t talk to her dad for six years, People reported.
In 1999, she and her mom moved to Los Angeles because Leigh wanted to try her hand at acting. But, she told People, “I was quickly over it. Someone could tell me I wasn’t pretty enough or good enough? I hated it. I used to cry on the way to auditions.”
However, when she was 16, Leigh met fellow actor Nathan West at an audition for the short-lived series “Saving Graces,” and they fell in love while on the show. They moved in together and, she told People, and said they “went through a teenage fascination with drugs and drinking” and did “everything but LSD and shooting up.”
“We were both so broken,” she said, but the couple got clean together in 2001, married the following year, and are now parents to three teens — two daughters and a son.
“By the time we got married, we had been through so much,” she said. “We got it all out of the way.”
Though Leigh has often spoken about how much she loves the life she’s built with her husband and kids, her relationship with her mom has been nonexistent for a long time. In 2008, Leigh told People they hadn’t talked in four years but that she didn’t feel ready to reach out and mend fences at that time.
In 2019, Leigh told HealthDay that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her late 20s and that her mom was also diagnosed with the condition later in life. Without treatment, according to the Mayo Clinic, the condition causes “extreme mood swings” between manic highs and deep depression.
In addition to navigating ongoing depression, Leigh said that before her diagnosis, her manic episodes caused her “extreme irritability” and that she felt “disconnected from reality, almost like I was high.” The condition, it turned out, ran in the family. But that made navigating it harder, not easier.
“When I would try to talk about how I was feeling, I don’t think my parents were in a position to really listen,” she told HealthDay. “My mom wasn’t diagnosed until later in life, and didn’t know how to get herself the right kind of help.”
Chyler Leigh Says Portraying a ‘Broken’ Mother-Daughter Relationship Has Been ‘Cathartic’
Getty“The Way Home” co-stars Chyler Leigh, Andie MacDowell and Sadie Laflamme-Snow attend the series’ premiere in January 2023In the first episode of “The Way Home,” which premiered in January 2023, Kat returned to the Landry family farm and reunited with her mom, played by Andie MacDowell, after being away for two decades.
“When I read this (script), it was eerie a little bit but very cathartic,” Leigh told KGET. “I see a lot of myself in the character and also the storyline. I definitely think that is one of the things that drew me to it so much. That is why I love it so much.”
“We are tackling big issues, and we are hoping that the audience connects to,” Leigh continued. “We know we have an incredible opportunity to flip this on its head and open a bigger door for different genres and different demographics. What we have been hearing is that people feel included. People feel represented in each of the characters or the relationships.”
In March 2023, Leigh told The List that she appreciates having the chance to address “broken” mother-daughter relationships in “The Way Home,” playing both sides of the coin as the mother of Laflamme-Snow’s character Alice and the daughter of MacDowell’s character Del.
Kat’s reunion with her mom, Del Landry, and her decision to stay on the farm — with her teenage daughter Alice in tow, played by Sadie Laflamme-Snow — is fraught with challenges as she tries to figure out and process family traumas from the past, including the disappearance of her younger brother.
As Leigh draws from her own experiences while playing Kat, she said she hopes the series effectively portrays the “evolution of how people learn and grow and become better versions of themselves, as they figure out how to work together as a family when you’re in the midst of tragedy and banding together.”
Leigh told Southern Living that viewers are already responding with gratitude for all the complex relationships and perspectives on the show.
“To address these super real life and raw emotions, I think it’s just been something that people have been able to find themselves in each one of these characters and each one of these scenarios,” she said. “And that’s what’s making it so relatable… That is something that was so appealing about this and just the ability to share it on a network like Hallmark. They gave us an amazing amount of runway to be able to explore and to take risks. And it’s been really paying off.”