Last January, after it was announced that Sarah was pregnant, your colleague, Paul Scheuring, assured fans that he had no intention of killing off her character. What changed?
Matt Olmstead: What changed is that our initial pitch to the network was [rejected], so we had to go back to the drawing board. I remember we were sitting in the room thinking, “How do we unlock Season 3, motivation-wise?” Since we’re not a procedural, we have to keep everyone moving forward. We have to evolve. And given what Michael’s been through, how do you keep him going? And then it was tossed out, “What happens if Sara gets killed as an extension of what we already had planned for Season 3?” We knew that would work. But clearly it was a big conversation. And when we pitched the network, they wanted to know if there was any way we could avoid that, because everyone loved Sarah’s work. But in order to make the season work, we really didn’t have any other motivation for Michael. We determined that this was the right thing to do in order to really jolt the series.

Did you ever stop to consider that this might be a slap in the face to fans who had invested two years in the Michael-Sara relationship?
Olmstead: We took everything into consideration. Our initial idea was to have [Sarah/Sara appear in] the first 13 episodes, so she and Michael could have a proper goodbye. There were going to be some really emotional scenes where he tried to save her from dying, but she ultimately passed. So then we whittled it down to 11 episodes, then 10 episodes, then nine episodes, then four episodes. Then we suggested flying to her she was pregnant [at the time] and living in a remote part of Canada and bringing a camera crew to her house, but that wasn’t accepted. We then whittled it down to just a phone conversation, and that was turned down, too. We were really looking forward to paying off that relationship. But [when] it became evident that that wasn’t going to happen, we made lemonade out of a lemon.

So, as a result, you were forced to kill her off sooner than you had planned?
Olmstead: Much sooner. We used the story to our advantage in that she was being held hostage. [Sarah] was gracious enough to let us use her image, which really helped. I totally get it, personally. She was, at the time, pregnant and living in a remote part of Canada and nesting; [she] kind of looked at the options and didn’t want to go forward. No hard feelings whatsoever. The show is an ensemble. The show moves forward. There are very few untouchable actors on the show.

Check the rest of the interview here…