‘The Resident’: Emily VanCamp to Return in the Season 5 Finale — and Help Conrad’s Love Life?
The Resident executive producer Andrew Chapman previously revealed that the Season 5 finale would feature “a returning character that will knock your socks off,” and now that we know who it is, we agree!
Emily VanCamp is set to return as nurse practitioner Nic Nevin for a guest spot in the May 17 episode, TV Insider has learned. She’ll be seen in new flashback scenes that will inform the journey her husband, Dr. Conrad Hawkins (Matt Czuchry), is on concerning moving forward after losing her. Nic was killed in an accident early in Season 5 — VanCamp couldn’t return to film the scenes due to “personal reasons” — after the actress expressed interest in leaving the medical drama to focus on her family.
“We have sort of set up both Billie Sutton [Jessica Lucas] and Cade Sullivan [Kaley Ronayne] as potential love interests for Conrad, in fairly subtle and sometimes less so ways, but he hasn’t figured out who, and there are complications on both sides,” executive producer Peter Elkoff tells TV Insider. “At the beginning of the last episode, he realizes, for a lot of reasons, that he has to figure out how to move forward with his life.”
That leads to a flashback to when their daughter Gigi was only a few months old, “a pretty happy time” for Nic and Conrad. “He is drawn back to a memory of a night with Nic shortly after Gigi’s born where they go out on a date, a rare date,” Elkoff continues. “We keep going back to that night with Conrad because he believes that there’s an answer or something that will free him from his being stuck in his past and not moving beyond Nic. He knows that if he keeps going back to that night, he’ll find the answer, and he’s right. In the last scene, we will understand that he’s ready to go and ready to move on.”
Guy D’Alema/FOX
Soon after Nic’s final episode, the series did a three-year time jump. She’d donated her organs, and Conrad even met the recipient of her heart. That time jump, as the EPs have said, came “because we didn’t want to have to see Conrad in the grips of so much grief for a lot of episodes,” Elkoff says. “We managed to do that and create fun new things and we brought the audience back and it was three years later and now we’re bringing Conrad to the end of his time in grief. We’re flipping the last switch.”
But even after departing the series, VanCamp never ruled out a return, saying she’d “absolutely” be up to come back. “There’s just so much love between all of us. And I would be absolutely open to going back in some form or another, but it really depends on what works best for the show and for them,” she said. “I would always love to go back and see everyone. I miss them terribly.” Looks like we’re getting that sooner rather than later!
The Resident, Tuesdays, 8/7c, Fox
