‘Virgin River’ team addresses the Brie-Brady-Mike love triangle

Warning: This article contains spoilers about Virgin River season 6.

What’s a girl to do when she’s won the affection of two of the hunkiest guys in town?

That’s the dilemma facing Virgin River’s Brie Sheridan (Zibby Allen), who found herself in a tortured love triangle in the Netflix series’ sixth season. Though she broke up with Brady (Benjamin Hollingsworth) because of her trust issues, Brie’s feelings for the local bad boy still burn quite hot — and the two even hooked up on top of a pool table to prove it.

But Brie is technically dating Mike (Marco Grazzini), the detective who made Brady turn informant, and Brady’s old frenemy from the army. As the wine and good feelings flow at Mel (Alexandra Breckenridge) and Jack’s (Martin Henderson) wedding, Mike makes an impromptu proposal with a water bottle ring cap. But Brie and Brady have already confessed to each other that they still have feelings for one another.

So, who will Brie choose? Does she even know? “It is definitely a battle of head versus heart,” Allen tells Entertainment Weekly. “We know that Brie is working hard to trust herself and her inner compass and to feel worthy of a love that she can trust. Brady has been untrustworthy in the past, but there’s such a genuine deep love there. Not only do they have incredible chemistry — and that just doesn’t go away overnight — but there is a love that doesn’t necessarily make sense on paper, and that is what she’s grappling with.”

“Mike makes sense on paper and he is a genuinely good guy,” she continues. “That’s also universally relatable. We see it everywhere. We see it on Love is Blind; we see it in the the search for love — what are the things that I need in order to feel fulfilled and what can I live without in order to have stability? That’s a very, very real and honest debate inside of Brie.”

Showrunner Patrick Sean Smith echoes this sense of a war between passion and stability fueling Brie’s indecisiveness over the two men. “Her character was introduced into the series after her sexual assault and her journey of healing from that experience as a survivor,” Smith notes. “There’s a lot of doubt in her committing to men, given the betrayal of what happened with her attacker. With Mike, there’s safety, security, and transparency. With Brady, there’s passion, fire, and danger. That’s pulling her in either direction.”

However, Hollingsworth would like to point out that the main thing that Brie broke up with Brady over was his withholding his role as an informant. Something Mike explicitly advised him to do before swooping in to date Brie.

“Brady feels betrayed by Mike because Mike was telling him all along not to tell Brie that he was working as an informant,” Hollingsworth says. “That’s what Brie ended up breaking up with Brady over. Mike never brings that up. He says that I was working as an informant and that I was a hero, but he doesn’t mention like, ‘Hey, the reason why he was keeping secrets from you is because I told him he had to because he was trying to protect you.’ And kudos for Brady for not making it a thing and being like, ‘Well, Mike told me to.’ But instead, listening to the reason why she was upset about that and owning the fact that he made a mistake. No matter what, he just wants to be the man that Brie wants him to be.”

One thing is clear — neither Brady nor Brie are over each other, a fact they confess in a hurried conversation in the run-up to the wedding. Both Allen and Hollingsworth think that if either of them had gone one step further and suggested they run away together, they would’ve done it without a second thought.

“He would cut her off and say, ‘Yes, let’s go wherever you want to go,'” Hollingsworth muses. “She was his first love, and it’s really hard to move past that for him. There’s this magnetism to each of them. When you get them close enough, at some point you can’t hold them back. They’re built for each other in a way that’s undeniable.”

Adds Allen: “Someone professing their love so unequivocally, so clear, so boldly is what we all want. Watching it back, you even wonder, for a moment, whether they might just take off. That shows us that they’re really both chained up by the practicalities of their circumstances at the moment.”

Though Mike isn’t privy to this moment, perhaps he senses the energy between the two exes, since he decides to propose later that night. “Marco, who plays Mike, had to really sit with why his character would propose,” Allen says. “I’m really impressed with the way he, as an actor, threaded that needle because I do think he genuinely loves Brie. But it’s that feeling of when you’re grasping onto the idea of something and you’re loving someone more than they might love you back. But you can’t help it and you’re pushing. I do think that’s probably an element here.”

The proposal catches Brie off guard, particularly because she’s planning to confess her dalliance with Brady. “She only catches on in real time,” Allen says of Brie’s reaction to the proposal. “She’s been harboring so much guilt. Only hours earlier did Brady profess his love to her. It’s thrown her into this state of utter confusion. The one thing she knows after talking with Mel and Kaia is that she needs to come clean and do the right thing. Going into that proposal scene, Brie very much thinks that she’s going to confess or try to start to make things right. Instead, she gets a proposal.”

To make things doubly shocking, Brie does end up confessing after being blindsided by the proposal, only for Mike to turn around and say that he knows she slept with Brady (and he proposed anyway!). “The intent was to plant seeds of Mike being good at his job when he picks up on Brie and Jack’s parents reconciling physically,” says Smith, explaining how Mike knew about the secret. “It’s the idea of crumbs that he’s picked up along the way that have led him to this inevitable conclusion.”

However, Allen reveals that they shot two potential scenes. “That’s one of my favorite twists that the show has ever come up with,” she says. “There were two ending options. One was that he didn’t know and she was simply confessing, and then we leave it at that. Then, the second option was that Mike would say, ‘I know.'”

“Now, he’s a detective,” she continues. “There are moments throughout the season where he says things along the lines of, ‘Nothing gets past me’. What I like about the fact that he does know is that it really gives Mike an awareness and intelligence and some real dimension that he would both know that and still propose. I’m so glad that they went with it because it makes for far more interesting television. In real life, people aren’t perfect. Couples aren’t perfect. The question of what are you willing to live with in order to love somebody is a really interesting one.” 

The show leaves Brie’s response open-ended, and Smith promises, “We’ll unpack the proposal and everything in season 7. It’s a complicated situation.”

However, neither Allen nor Smith see Brie as someone who is in a place where she’s ready to commit to an engagement. “I don’t want to disparage her,” reflects Allen. “She can be very misunderstood by audiences who are so gunning for the romance of Brie and Brady. It’s sometimes hard to stop and remember that she’s fresh off the heels of a big trauma. She has her own healing to do. The characters of Virgin River come to Virgin River to heal and let their nervous system settle and find themselves again. She’s really in that process. Until she can settle in and get there, I don’t think she’s ready for marriage to anybody.”

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For those who would argue that Brady is bad for Brie, Hollingsworth has a rebuttal. “Until he met Brie, he was in a very bad, bad place,” he says. “It was through their love that he discovered a new side of himself, and this want to be good and to connect with the person that was inside of him the whole time, which is his best self.”

“I read some of the comments online about how people think Brady’s toxic for Brie,” he adds. “I don’t think that’s true. There’s a reason why they’re drawn to each other and life’s not always clear cut. Sometimes two people who are exactly opposite compliment each other. It’s the yin and yang. It’s why opposites attract.”

So, Hollingsworth is definitely #TeamBrady (naturally), but what about Allen? “I really love how much abandon there is with Brie and Brady,” she reflects. “It’s a beautiful and rare thing, and I really want that for her and him. But as Zibby playing this character, I have to really look at it all. I care about Brie a lot, and she cannot afford to be continually hurt and be with someone who is ultimately a liability to everything she’s built — her career and whatever vestiges of stability she has left. I want Brady to be it, but I’m proud of her for trying to do the right thing because I do think Mike is an incredible dude.”

Virgin River season 6 is now streaming on Netflix.