Editor’s Note: The below interview contains major spoilers for The Umbrella Academy Season 4.

The Big Picture

Our visit to the set of
The Umbrella Academy
‘s final season offered sneak peeks, cast interviews, and a look at a climactic showdown scene.
Cast members shared insights on filming, including challenging scenes with monsters and humorous moments on set.
Season 4 featured memorable music choices, emotional sequences, and tributes to the show’s Toronto roots.

When Collider got the chance to visit the set of the fourth and final season of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy in May 2023, we weren’t exactly sure what to expect. With the trippy, apocalyptic series coming to an end, and with each subsequent season raising the stakes in terms of the end of the world, what did this mean for the final six episodes?

During the visit, Collider and journalists from three other outlets were shown around the series’ Toronto studio, including a stop by the wardrobe department to peek at some of the looks for the upcoming season — like Tom Hopper’s tearaway astronaut suit — and the production office, where we earned a close look at the exterior model of the city street where the season’s climactic showdown was set to take place. The highlight of the visit, however, was sitting down with the cast — Tom Hopper, David Castañeda, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Robert Sheehan, Aidan Gallagher, Elliot Page, and Ritu Arya — to talk about the upcoming season and saying goodbye to the series after four action-packed seasons. Later, we also watched the cast film a scene from the finale. The experience was light on context at the time, the reason for which became immediately clear as I sat down to watch the finished episode. (The events of the finale in question also explained Justin H. Min’s absence from the set that day.)

It’s a Final Showdown For ‘The Umbrella Academy’

The scene in question, from the finale, is set in an abandoned department store and sees the majority of the Umbrella Academy facing off against the monster that Ben (Min) has become after fusing with Jennifer (Victoria Sawal) and fast-tracking the apocalypse. When asked to give some context to the scene we watched them shoot — which we now know to be the moment right before the group rushes the monster — Castañeda explained, “We’re pretty much trying to save Ben,” with Sheehan jokingly adding that Ben’s “got a terrible skin rash.” Gallagher, when asked what the most difficult part of filming the season was, cited the scene at hand, saying:

“Well, we’re currently shooting the one with the big monster, and we have to pretend there’s a terrifying
The Thing
-like creature in front of us, so that comes to mind.”

Sheehan, who was all jokes, also added, “Basically, my task today was to fight a giant tennis ball. That’s the amount of brain power that’s required of me. That’s all that’s required of me. Anything extra would be superfluous and unnecessary.” Castañeda teased the circumstances that brought about this final apocalypse, saying, “We’re the positives because we have Marigold, there’s a negative out there, called Durango, and they mix. It causes sort of another apocalypse.”

Arya told us that the fourth season had been her favorite to film, citing both all the work she got to do with Gallagher that season, and also how much fun the cast have together, the day of our visit being no exception:

“I mean, we just had this moment where we’re doing the action stuff and we’re having to pretend that there’s this big monster there where we’re looking through nothing, we’re just looking at air. So we’re all like, “Oh my God,” and then … David [Castañeda] had to run through, they’re going to green screen him to do a flip, and then he’s gonna break a bench and then hop onto the escalator and run. As a superhero, it’s gonna look really cool after the VFX, but when you’re standing there watching it with no music, with no tension, he literally just does this kind of little hop, and a little yelp, and someone throws a little debris on his leg, and we were all just laughing so hard. Sorry, but it just looks so funny! We’re having a blast even today.”

So About That Tearjerker Needledrop…
Image via Netflix

Hooper and Sheehan told us it wasn’t possible to fit a “Footloose” or “I Think We’re Alone Now”-type musical number in the season, given the limitations of only having six episodes, though Castañeda made a point to say, “You never know,” with he and Hopper agreeing that the season had a lot of great songs. While there were many excellent song choices — and one unshakeable earworm in the form of “Baby Shark” — the season’s most memorable musical moment was actually teased by Arya: The Tragically Hip’s “Ahead By a Century.”

“I feel like it’s not just one song, because so much time passes. Probably the songs change throughout the time, but there’s a song that is used for the time passing while Lila and Five are together by The Tragically Hip called “Ahead by a Century.” … I just absolutely loved hearing that when I saw it in the script, and it really set a tone of what I felt like they were going through, building this closeness together, but also, sort of sad. It’s a bittersweetness of being away from home and sort of finding the joy in being lost.”

It’s fitting, perhaps, for a show so well known for its music, to dedicate one of the final season’s most emotional sequences — Lila and Five spend nearly seven years lost in a subway that runs across timelines — to paying tribute to the city and province where the series made its home for the past six years. Anyone who’s ever had to take transit anywhere in Toronto knows a TTC train when they see it. As for The Tragically Hip, they, of course, hail from Kingston, Ontario, and are so beloved nationwide that their final concert was watched live on TV by nearly a third of Canada’s population.

‘The Umbrella Academy’ Says Goodbye in Season 4
Image via Netflix

Since they couldn’t add much about the scene we had just watched, the cast instead reminisced about filming the final season in general. In retrospect, having seen the season, Page and Raver-Lampman’s comments about getting to work with their screen siblings so much — and Page’s added comment about working more with family patriarch Colm Feore — are much more recognizable as the high points they must have been. Meanwhile, Toronto’s winters are no joke, and the cast felt that too, with Sheehan sharing a memory of filming outside the studio, and more to the point, filming outside:

“It’s all been good fun, really. Lots of locations this season. When things started to warm up, that was nice because at the beginning we were in a backlot, sort of a fake town set, and that, in terms of the environment, was probably the hardest we ever endured after the whole season.”

Hopper then hit the nail on the head, saying it was the wind chill that made it particularly “brutal.” It’s bad enough having to fight The Keepers, but having to do it in -20c? Not for the faint of heart.

All four seasons of The Umbrella Academy are streaming now on Netflix.

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