Now that you’ve seen the show, is there anything you would’ve done differently or prepared in another way?

Oh, I don’t know. I mean, no. I’m trying to work out how I feel about regrets and things. Even if I do have any, I don’t know how useful it is to think about. Obviously I always think I could do everything a lot better. The dream would be that you do something and then you get to do it for real again, but with all of the knowledge that you have having done it. But that’s just not how life works at all. I was very grateful to have the opportunity to progress Kate anyway. The fact that she becomes more vulnerable [as the season goes on] was a pleasure to do. It was hard to make her so sort of mean all the time.

We interviewed showrunner Sera Gamble ahead of the first half of the season, and she said that out of any of Joe’s previous love interests, she felt the closest to Kate. Did you know that? And what your conversations like with her about the character?

That’s interesting. I think she’s doing herself a disservice there, but only because of the first Kate that we meet. No one wants to be just like her at the beginning. But I mean, that’s quite cool. It must be nice in some ways to write a character that feels close to you because there’s a depth of knowledge there. Kate definitely feels like a fully rounded person, in my head at least. By the end you really get a sense of her being…I actually feel we haven’t really seen the real depth of her because she’s so closed off, so unable to express emotion.

The bit for me that’s the most moving, or the most insightful, is when she tells Joe that she was told to hide all of her feelings. That is the ultimate tool for kids to be repressed—to tell them, “Don’t feel anything.” I mean, what do you do with that? How do you calibrate any of your feelings if you’re not allowed to have any of them? She’s completely unable to express them. So even in that scene in the final episode, when she’s in the hospital, anyone else would be like, broken. There’s a tiny—she’s stoic, basically. I do admire that, but I don’t admire her choices in a romantic partner for sure. I don’t think Sera has that in common with her.

She said specifically, “I don’t have a secret very wealthy family that I know of, but I like the idea that [Kate is] a little offended by the notion that she has to be nice all the time, that she’s more interested in getting things done than in constantly assuaging the egos of everyone around her. It felt like we had earned getting to explore a woman who is more like Peach in season one, someone who would’ve been dead at midseason.”

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