‘Virgin River’: Alexandra Breckenridge On Mel’s Miscarriage That Almost Didn’t Happen & How A Painful, Personal Experience Helped With Her Portrayal

Nellie Andreeva
·14 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

Season 5 Part 1 of Virgin River featured more heartbreak for Mel (Alexandra Breckenridge) as she suffered a miscarriage while expecting her first child with Jack (Martin Henderson) having previously lost her baby with her late husband Mark in a stillbirth. The plot development, which happened in Episode 5 — the first in a two-episode arc about a massive wildfire threatening Virgin River that also featured Brie’s rape trial — has divided fans.

Due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, Breckenridge had not had a chance to weigh in on the polarizing storyline — and Season 5 as a whole. In an interview with Deadline, she reveals that Mel originally was not supposed to lose her baby, which changed when Patrick Sean Smith came in as Virgin River‘s new showrunner for Season 5. Breckenridge and Smith both explain why they think having Mel miscarry was the right decision for the character, and Breckenridge speaks about the painful personal experience of coming close to losing her own child that helped her bring authenticity to her portrayal. She also brings up previous storyline and scene changes that she had helped bring about.

More from Deadline

Additionally, Breckenridge shares insights into Mel and Jack’s fateful hike where they have one last post-miscarriage fight in the rain before she accepts his vision of a family that does not have to be biological.

Breckeridge and Smith also address the big Part 1 cliffhanger that Mel’s biological father is a man from Virgin River, whom her mother had had an affair, and she also teases Mel’s search for him in the upcoming Christmas episodes, coming out Nov. 30. After you watch the holiday special, check back for Deadline’s coverage, which includes Smith dissecting the finale’s biggest shockers and dropping Season 6 teasers as well as more insight from Breckenridge.

What was Breckenridge’s reaction when she heard the storyline of Mel’s pregnancy ending in a miscarriage?

ALEXANDRA BRECKENRIDGE: Our new showrunner Sean and I talked at length about it before they started writing, and he and I felt that it may come as a shock to a lot of fans who are not happy with the outcome but we both felt that telling the story of a woman who had the miracle baby is very… I feel like we go there a lot in television, especially in shows that are based in the format of escapism, and that’s what our show is to some extent.

But we felt like we were doing a disservice to the women who have had trouble conceiving and have fertility issues — which are so many women — and this storyline felt very real and very powerful for those women. So we both agreed that it was the right direction to go in for the character and to be able to tell that story.

I know that there are a lot of fans who are not happy, and I sympathize and I get it, I really get it. But I felt a responsibility to women who experience infertility especially, to be as grounded as humanly possible.

I hope that we told the story in an appropriate way, and I hope that those people that experienced it came with us and hopefully stayed for the rest of the storyline.

This was the second miscarriage on Virgin River within the span of just two seasons after Brie suffered one in Season 3. Why did new showrunner Smith and his writing team decide to put Mel and Jack through the traumatic experience?

PATRICK SEAN SMITH: I think for me, it just felt like the natural direction for it to go. I wanted to ground the show a little bit more, I think, this season more than the previous seasons. It had been such a part of her character’s experience that it was interesting to me for Jack to then experience it in the way that in Season 4 when he was dealing with his self medicating and alcohol that that was his way to cope with his trauma.

I thought that this would be a season that Jack would get a sense of what Mel had gone through so they could go through it together. And it felt like there was also an opportunity to show a couple going through a miscarriage differently than we had seen before.

Was successful pregnancy for Mel considered?

BRECKENRIDGE: We changed showrunners, and we have a lot of new writers. I think the original plan with our previous showrunner was to keep the pregnancy. But things in television change constantly. We did consider it, i think we all just felt that it was an important place to take [Mel and Jack]. I think that they’re going to start a family in the future in a different way. I think that that speaks to a lot of families, and I think that’s really heartwarming and beautiful, to understand that family is what you what you create around you, your family are your friends and adoptive family and it’s much bigger than biological. So I think that’s a powerful story point.

This is not the first time the storyline involving Mel’s pregnancy had been changed.

BRECKENRIDGE: In Season 4 originally the writers were going to have it be Mark’s baby. I was pretty upset about that. I was like, this is terrible, you can’t have Jack having twins with Charmaine and then Mel is having Mark’s baby. I was very vocal about it, I said if it is his, she should probably have a miscarriage.

And then by the end of the season, they changed it to Jack’s baby. This was still at a point where we didn’t think she was going to end up having a miscarriage. So the idea was that she would continue with the pregnancy, and that it would be the miracle baby, and I said, you can’t have her miracle baby be with her dead husband, I just can’t, sorry, I can’t.

I’m very opinionated, and, over the years, I’ve helped to reshape themes, Martin and I have worked on rewriting scenes together. That scene where I tell him that I love him was very different when I first got that draft. I started talking about Mark in the middle of it. And I was like, I can’t talk about my dead husband when I’m telling this man I love him. It doesn’t make sense, you’re going backwards. So, we worked on that a lot, it was stressful but I felt like the final product was sweet and endearing.

There’s been a lot of that over the years. Luckily we have a team of writers that are really honing in on trying to make things cohesive and smooth and more realistic, which I appreciate, so I feel like I’m doing a lot less of that now than I was.

In a Deadline interview, Martin Wood, director of Episode 5, which features Mel’s miscarriage, spoke of Breckenridge’s performance, praising her delivering a “beautifully emotional moment” with a reaction that was “so contained.” How did the subtle reaction come about, how did Breckenridge approach the scene and how did she prepare for it?

BRECKENRIDGE: I think it was just human instinct and empathy. I approached it as sort of a shock, I think she was in a little bit in shock. And I guess that’s where the subtlety came from, she doesn’t want to believe it. But she knows and then she goes into the office and uses the ultrasound to confirm it.

I’ve had personal experience; one of my children was very, very sick when he was young and could have died so I have a personal connection and understanding of the emotional loss of a child. When you’re a parent and you come so close to that edge of not having them anymore, I already experienced that in a different way, so I came into that scene reliving that experience. That’s how I approached it, because that’s what I know.

And that was the most real to me, just let myself go back to that emotional point, and how that felt, and being there with it. But then, having to pick yourself up and do something which is also kind of weirdly within the circumstances of what I had to go through at the time. I haven’t talked about that yet publicly, I will eventually. Yeah, I didn’t have to do a lot of quote unquote, acting, so to speak. In that moment, it was all just very real to me.

SMITH: I thought Alex played it beautifully, she and Martin both, I was so proud of their performances. I’ve received a lot of comments from women on social media who have been grateful for it; the representation of it is something that they’ve gone through, and it felt very real.

Martin Henderson as Jack Sheridan, Alexandra Breckenridge as Mel Monroe in episode 509 of Virgin River.
Martin Henderson and Alexandra Breckenridge in Episode 509.

Mel kept the miscarriage a secret through the wildfire crisis until her scene with Jack after the danger had passed where she finally got to share the burden with him. Here is Breckenridge’s take on the emotional scene.

BRECKENRIDGE: The part of the character that I love is when she goes into work mode and she is able to put her own emotions aside in such a brilliant manner. I’ve known doctors, and I’ve known nurses, and I know that that is their operating basis. We’ve always given Mel that strength, so carrying that on through this episode was really important even though she had undergone such a trauma in the middle of all of this trauma.

But that moment when she sees Jack is the moment when she releases her emotions because that’s her best friend. She feels like she let him down, and she feels so guilty for it because she knew that, having a high risk pregnancy, her chances of carrying were not that high and she knows how much he wanted a family and how much he was invested in it. And she just crumbled into him.

But also in that moment, she knows that, however devastated he’s going to be, he also is going to be there for her to pick her up. and I think that speaks to how strong their relationship is.

What followed was an emotional rollercoaster, with Mel shutting Jack out and pulling away as she grieves until their heart-to-heart during the hike and Jack’s impersonate speech at the peak brought her back.

SMITH: The one thing I knew that I wanted to see was Jack never leaving her side, which I thought was an important message to show that, for his character, he was going through it emotionally as well but he was showing up for her the whole time, which I thought was beautiful.

BRECKENRIDGE: The hike for me was interesting because I think Mel was feeling very, very resolute, very I can’t do this, I’m very broken right now and I asked to do what’s best for me. She felt like he was pushing her, and she really didn’t like that, she’s like, you need to give me space and understand where I’m coming from as nicely as she could. Sometimes not as nice. I mean she snapped at him in the middle of it, saying, you don’t know what I’m going through, you couldn’t possibly. But I felt like Jack was truly trying to understand what she was going through, and he hadn’t given up on having a family. He knew that it has been a theme for Mel, she’s always wanted a family from the very beginning, that’s why she was so broken when we met her, because her family was completely torn apart and ripped from her.

It’s such a huge overall theme for her, and Jack knows that. He wants to help her understand that they’ll have that family they want to have together, he won’t back down much to her annoyance. I think the irony of the rain is, it sort of broke her irritation and that certainty of it all just hit her at once, and she was like, yeah, this was silly, and all of it is just ridiculous.

And then at the peak, he really starts to open up and share more with her which I think has happened, but maybe not so deeply yet with Jack. I think the direction the character is going in, he’s becoming more in tune with his emotions and being able to share them, which obviously is classically difficult for men. He is no different, and I think they’ve both come a long way and they’ve grown a lot and they will continue to.

I guess it was a little surprising that it only took a few hours for her to be like well, okay, I didn’t want to adopt but it’s fine; we can go ahead and get adoption. But you only have so many hours, so many minutes in a television show.

After Mel and Cameron’s falling out at the end of Season 4, which contributed to Mel’s decision to leave the clinic, he rebounded this season with Muriel. How does Breckenridge feel about Cameron and Mel learning to coexist and Cameron and Muriel finding love?

BRECKENRIDGE: I think all the actors thought it would be a great storyline and obviously the writers did too because they went went with it. I mean, somebody comes along, they have a crush on you and then call your boyfriend a drunk, I wouldn’t want to work with him either. [Mel and Cameron] barely knew each other, they were friendly, they got along but it wasn’t like they had really bonded, and it made perfect sense why Mel would tell him, you absolutely stepped over the line.

But it wasn’t just she left the practice because of him but also because of the pregnancy. I didn’t want to send the message that oh, if you’re pregnant, you should leave work or, oh, if you’re pregnant, you should not leave work. It was a very fine line of I don’t want to say within my character what I think a woman should be doing because it’s all personal. But I felt that the high-risk nature of her pregnancy made it pretty obvious that she should step back.

Mel’s paternity bombshell dropped in the Part 1 finale came seemingly out of nowhere. In the series premiere, Mel saw an ad, and Virgin River was a random place she picked so her having a biological father in the small town seems a little farfetched.

SMITH: I think in my mind, there was something magical about what this place represented to her mom, and Mel somehow inherited the idea as a young girl and it just lived in her subconscious. Sometimes we have a strong reaction to things that are new to us, and we can’t explain why it is. I think in my mind, when she was looking through the ads and happened upon the place, there was something that pulled her to that place over the other town that was looking for nurse practitioners, so it was playing with the mythology a little bit and the origins but in the spirit of trying to deepen it and find a little more opportunity to explore other parts of Mel’s life.

Did Breckenridge have any objections to the father twist when she first heard about it?

BRECKENRIDGE: Not necessarily, I wouldn’t say I had objections to it. I thought it seemed awfully convenient for her father to be living in Virgin River, it felt a little bit television.

But, I think, within the parameters of television, it’s nice for Mel, who has no other family besides her sister, to be able to have the opportunity to potentially reconnect with a parent. Also, I think it’s such a bomb for her to understand that her mother was having an affair.

It’s a huge deal. But I think that because we were doing a Christmas episode, we really wanted it to be a lot lighter; it was important to give that to the audience, to have a little reprieve from the Mel and Jack season that they had.

Also, there’s all of the stuff with Brie and her trial, that was very heavy as well. I was very proud of our team for putting her in that situation and I cried when I read that scene of her in the courtroom at the end of Episode 5. I cried when I read it, when I watched it, and I cry when I remember it because of the powerful statements that Brie makes and watching all of the characters of Virgin River fight that fire. Five, I thought, was our strongest episode to date.

Speaking of the Virgin River Christmas episodes, which drop Nov. 30, here is what Breckenridge teases about what to expect.

BRECKENRIDGE: We’ve been waiting to do a Virgin River Christmas since we started the show because it felt like such a natural place to have a Christmas special. I mean, how could you not do Christmas In Virgin River. I mean, it’s the most Hallmark-esque of the shows on Netflix.

And I like the the twist of Mel trying or thinking about finding her biological father and grappling with, do I, don’t I. What would this relationship mean? Would he even want to talk to me? Do I even want to talk to him? There’s a lot of big questions in there, but I think we kept it really light and Christmassy throughout all of those serious questions. It was like filming a romcom more than it was Virgin River. Martin was so light and airy, he was not like himself.

Best of Deadline

Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.