What was it like to film your last scene together after 5 years on the show?
Katie: When you get down the end of filming on Merlin it tends to be a bit of a scramble because we have a lot to do and not very much time to do it so we tend to have more than one unit filming at any given time. And on my last day, I happened to be filming not on the main unit, on the second unit, which had crew dailies that hadn’t been there for the final year. So I was looking at spending my last day and my last scene with a lot of people I didn’t know. I was feeling not great about it but my last scene was with Colin and with a director we really liked so I was like, “At least we’ll have that.” We’re doing the scene, and halfway through, the AD comes up to me and says, “Katie, we’re so up against it. Colin needs to be in 2 places at once, we’re gonna have to pull him off your scene. He’s gonna do his close-up, he’s gonna do the wide, and then we’re just gonna have someone else read in his lines for you.” So I’m like, I have no actor, I have no nothing, I’m with all these people I don’t know, it’s my last day of 5 years, and I start to get really upset. I don’t realize that Colin is on the other set and has– we had talked about it earlier on in the day, he was gonna come over and do my clapper board– and he discovers that he is not going to be allowed to come over to do my final scene with me, not even read in for me. So he organizes with the AD to give him the nod, and what we did was, on the second unit we would wait for Colin to do a take on the main unit, Colin would run over, he’d do my lines, then he’d run back. So he’s running back and forth between the two. Second unit’s standing down and waiting for him. He comes to my last take, and he does the clapper board and I’m waiting for the golden wrap, which is where everybody goes around and gives you a goodbye and a well done, and nothing happens. Colin’s just standing there. What I don’t realize is that Colin has refused to go back to the main unit until everyone from that unit comes over, everybody comes down from production, about 150 people, came down, waited 5 minutes– he refused to go back!– ‘til I got my proper golden wrap. I wouldn’t have gotten that had he not been so stubborn. So my final day, instead of being me with a load of people I didn’t know who didn’t really care, I got the entire crew and Colin Morgan– giving me a round of applause. The man’s a legend, is my short story.
