Wynonna Earp showrunner Emily Andras says she has known since the first time she saw actresses Katherine Barrell and Dominique Provost-Chalkley onscreen together that the romance between Barrell’s Sheriff Nicole Haught and Provost-Chalkley’s Waverly Earp would be a success — and that there are more depths to be explored in the show’s third season.
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The Season Two finale airs tonight, and while just about everything else is awful in Purgatory right now, things have finally settled down between Waverly and Nicole, the fan-favorite ship known as “Wayhaught,” after the pair had been on the rocks for a few weeks. That conflict drove a lot of drama, and during a recent interview, we asked Andras when she realized that a romance not involving the lead had enough behind it to hang a multi-episode subplot on.
“I don’t want to be glib about it, but honestly the first minute Sheriff Haught walks into Shorty’s [in Season One] and hits on Waverly, and [Waverly] gets all flustered and takes off her shirt,” Andras told ComicBook.com. “I read it on the page, but then when we saw Kat in that scene, it was like, the chemistry between these two is off the charts. There’s so much going on there, and they’re playing so many emotions in a minute and thirty seconds, that I was like ‘I think these two are going to be great together.’ So we just gave them more and more to do and the audience just ate it up and fell in love with them. I like the idea that the canon romance of the show isn’t necessarily the lead, especially a lead that isn’t necessarily defined by romance. I think Wynonna Earp certainly has romantic interests and desires, but she’s not going to be an easy woman to pin down, to say the least.”
That is evidenced by the fact that both of the two major male leads in Wynonna Earp have been potential suitors for the title lead, but she has not settled down with either of them as yet. Earp will give birth in the season finale to a child which might be Doc Holliday’s — or a half-demon child spawned during a one-night stand Wynonna had with a Revenant bartender.
Waverly and Nicole have been the most consistent relationship on the series and, as Andras noted, have become the romance fans talk about, with #Wayhaught often getting as much mileage on social media as the show’s official hashtag during the show’s airtime.
“Dom and Kat really deserve all the cedit in the world for the humanity and complexity and strength that they have given those characters and that romance, and I’m confident in saying we’re just getting started in terms of seeing what they can do,” Andras said.
The finale, which airs on tonight at 10 p.m. ET/PT on SYFY, will pit Wynonna and her team against a demon freed from over a century in captivity…just as Wynonna’s water broke.
