Supergirl's Chyler Leigh on Alex and Maggie's next step

Maggie and Alex have reached an impasse.

During Monday’s episode of Supergirl, Maggie (Floriana Lima) was finally able to get some closure from her father (Carlos Bernard), who had kicked her out of the house when she was outed as a child. Though Alex (Chyler Leigh) had hoped this resolution might make Maggie change her mind about having kids, the latter is firm in her feelings — something Alex is once again agreeable to, despite it clearly bothering her. Suffice it to say, it won’t be long before Alex voices her true feelings on the subject.

“It affects their relationship,” Leigh told EW Friday night at the GLSEN Respect Awards. “It just raises a lot of questions in general. For these two in particular, in their line of work, at any moment they could die. So in a lot of ways you rush into something, and you’re going off of instinct, and you’re going off of feeling, and sometimes some of the bigger issues or even the finer details will sort of be left unsaid, so this is just a moment where they’re really going, ‘Okay, wait, let’s slow down for a second and think, Is this what I want? Is this not what I want? How do we make this work? Does it work? If it does, how do we do it so we’re not both having to compromise when we’re doing something together?‘ It sparks a lot of conversations and it’s challenging.”

The move comes as viewers know Lima will soon be exiting. As revealed shortly after the season 2 finale, the actress is only set to return for a handful of episodes in season 3, with producers Andrew Kreisberg and Greg Berlanti both previously citing Lima’s want to pursue other projects. “It strikes a chord very deep within me, and hits me very personally, because I love the story line, I love the relationship,” Leigh says. “There’s a lot of technicalities that come into play. There’s only so much you can do when it comes to people’s decisions, whosever it is.”

“For me, personally, celebrating where they’ve been, what they’ve done and what they’ve accomplished I think is incredibly important, because I know that it has changed a lot of lives — it’s changed my own life,” Leigh continues. “I’ve gotten so many personal accounts from people saying, ‘You’ve literally saved my sister’s life,’ ‘You’ve saved somebody’s life,’ because we’re giving people an opportunity to connect the dots and put the pieces together, and it starts to make a lot more sense, ‘Maybe I understand my family member a little bit more.’ So just being on that journey, for me, is so incredibly satisfying. Knowing that we are taking part in something that is very, very important means a tremendous amount to a lot of people.”

Despite Lima’s impending exit, Leigh stresses that Alex’s story of discovery is far from over. “That’s the thing: It is another chapter, it really is,” Leigh says. “Alex’s journey is really that she’s still in that moment of Who am I, what do I want, where am I going and how do I get there? Wherever the relationship goes, the biggest thing is understanding that no one is in control of absolutely everything all the time, and we all have to respond and react to whatever comes our way, so she’s in that mode of Where am I right now?”

Supergirl airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.

Additional reporting by Derek Lawrence.