Full spoilers follow for The Umbrella Academy season 4‘s final episode.
The Umbrella Academy‘s main cast were kept in the dark about the show’s tear-jerking final scene until just two days before they filmed it.
Speaking to TechRadar ahead of the Netflix series’ fourth and final season being release, some of its stars revealed that they only learned how it would end when they received the last few pages of the finale’s script. Those pages were purposefully held back by showrunner Steve Blackman, who wanted the group’s full emotions to play out in real time as they shot said sequence, which was also the very last scene that they filmed as a team.
“That was the final scene we shot as a group,” Tom Hopper, who played Luther Hargreeves, told me when I asked if they filmed that sequence at the beginning or the end of season 4’s shooting schedule. “We had pickup shots or little filler things to do a few days afterwards, but that was the last thing we filmed together. Steve did that on purpose because he wanted to those emotions to be real. He didn’t give us that scene’s pages until a couple of days before we shot it, so it was all quite fresh, emotionally for us.”
The scene in question, which you can read more about in my article explaining The Umbrella Academy season 4’s ending, sees the titular, dysfunctional superteam make the ultimate sacrifice to save the universe for the final time. Indeed, the Hargreeves siblings die to not only stop the monstrous, blob-like entity known as The Cleanse from destroying yet another alternate universe they time-travel to, but also to restore the original timeline. That’s the one that existed before they were born and was thrown into disarray upon their supernatural births on October 1, 1989.
Understandably, shooting the final scene was an incredibly poignant moment, with the show’s primary cast saying goodbye to each other, their characters, and the ‘Brellies’, i.e. the collective name for fans of the series. With little time to process how one of the best Netflix shows was going to end, The Umbrella Academy‘s stars all had different reactions when they discovered how it would. Indeed, David Castañeda, who plays Diego Hargreeves, even thought Blackman was playing a prank on them until the actor walked on set for the final time.
“We all found out when we were given those last few pages,” Castañeda revealed. “And then, you know, you call or message Steve and you’re like, ‘…But why?’. So, you have to be really good at memorizing your lines because you only have 48 hours to do so. Secretly, you’re hoping to get to the set and see that they’ve changed a scene like that. And they hadn’t – it was the same scene! So, yeah, we all die.”
“It was all a big surprise,” Ritu Arya, who plays Lila Pitts, added. “Steve’s very good at keeping things on lockdown, and he made us excited by keeping us in a constant state of suspense leading up to the final few days of filming. He left it really late to tell us how the series would end, which was fun but also very frustrating because we didn’t have much time to process the bittersweet nature of it. But I think it was the right thing to do, in the end, as it elevates the emotional stakes of that scene.”
Emotionally impactful as that sequence is, it isn’t the superpowered ending that I hoped for. You can learn more about why that’s the case in my spoiler-light review of The Umbrella Academy season 4, or see why Castañeda thought the fan-favorite show was “going to bomb” ahead of the first season’s February 2019 debut on the world’s best streaming service.