Chase Stokes made sure there was no Pogue left behind on the Outer Banks set, including his co-star Madison Bailey.
As the duo—who reprise their roles as John B. Routledge and Kiara "Kie" Carrera, respectively, in the fifth and final season of the Netflix series—looked back at filming the show’s underwater sequences, Stokes detailing the moment he once saved Bailey from drowning.
“We were in Barbados and there’s a scene when JJ [Rudy Pankow] gets knocked off of a boat,” Stokes told Entertainment Weekly in a joint interview with Bailey published Aug. 20, “and he’s unconscious in the water and Kiara’s holding him up.”
It was then Stokes “realized that I couldn’t see Bails’ face anymore.”
Bailey noted that she and Pankow had already been treading water “for like a minute” before the director called action.
“It was really hard to communicate,” Stokes continued. “I was like, ‘Oh no, Bails has been under there for a while.’ So I jumped off the boat and I realized that she was not able to breathe underwater.”
While Bailey was struggling—noting that she couldn’t swim closer to the boat—people on set wrongly believed she and Stokes were just “really committed” to the scene.
“Everyone thought it was like, ‘Oh, wow, they’re in the scene. This is great,’” Stokes explained. “I was like, ‘No, she’s drowning.’ I was like, ‘Hey, that’s not acting!’”
Bailey chimed in, joking that, “Everyone’s like, ‘Wow, she’s really good!’”
And although the 27-year-old admitted that shooting OBX’s underwater scenes were the “hardest” for her to film, she emphasized that was not the case for Stokes, whom she called a “fish.”
“You actually make a bad day worse,” Bailey quipped to her costar. “When I’m struggling to barely swim, Chase is like [fake swims]. I swear he’s breathing under there just to make me look bad.”
As the pair reminisce on on-set memories, fans are saying goodbye to Outer Banks after five jam-packed seasons. (To see how the show ended, click here.)
But although some Pogues may be sad that OBX is coming to a close, Stokes praised the show for ending “on the right note.”
“There’s just so much gratitude,” he told People after filming wrapped in December 2025. “I've checked so many boxes that I thought it would span the course of the next 40 years of my career.”
For more behind-the-scenes secrets from Outer Banks, read on.
During the first season of Outer Banks, the cast lived together in the same apartment complex in Charleston, S.C, according to Chase Stokes, who plays John B Routledge. Stokes told Nylon in 2020 that he lived with Rudy Pankow (Jackson “JJ” Maybank), while Jonathan Daviss (Pope Heyward) and Austin North (Topper Thornton) were a “couple doors down” and Madelyn Cline (Sarah Cameron) resided on the floor below. As for Madison Bailey (Kiara “Kie” Carrera), she “lived five minutes away.”
“On the weekends everybody would come over, play games, blast music, eat food,” Stokes told the magazine. “It was kind of this natural organic thing for everybody.”
While Stokes’ role as John B ultimately kickstarted his acting career, he’s admitted it almost didn’t happen. Indeed, the actor shared that he initially turned down the role."I was like, 'That's The Goonies. That's for sure The Goonies. I don't want to destroy that,'” Stokes explained during a 2021 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. “So I passed on it. And I was like, 'Nope. Not doing that.'”He went on to read for Topper, admitting that he “bombed” the audition. Fortunately, Stokes got a second chance at John B two weeks later after he read the script once again.“I immediately was sitting in my borderline-evicted apartment and I was like, 'I made a giant mistake. It's not The Goonies. It's literally not The Goonies,'" he recalled. “And I had fully convinced myself for a month-and-a-half at this point that it's The Goonies.”
A Hurricane Caused the Outer Banks Set to Evacuate Mid-Filming
While OBX features more than one vicious hurricane in the show, life reflected art when the cast and crew were forced to evacuate the Charleston set because of Hurricane Dorian during shooting for the first season in 2019.But according to Bailey, the moment ultimately brought the cast together.“We dipped,” she told Elite Daily in 2020, “and went to Asheville, North Carolina.”
One of the Outer Banks’ most memorable comedic lines came in season two when Cline’s Sarah tells Stokes’ John B that she “can’t drive stick.” However, at that point, Cline herself did already know how to drive manual transmission, with Netflix sharing in a behind-the-scenes fact sheet that she learned the skill for the show, per Elite Daily.
That Swoon-Worthy Kiss in the Rain Almost Didn't Happen
John B and Sarah’s first kiss in season one—which featured Stokes and Clines sharing a smooch in the rain while on a ferry—became an iconic show moment. But it almost didn’t happen. Cline shared that the director almost decided to wrap filming for the day due to the rain, before she and Stokes took matters into their own hands.“[We] looked at each other,” Cline recalled to Cosmopolitan in a May 2020 interview. “We were all like, ‘Let’s do it. We gotta do this. This is amazing, this is kismet right now, that is so romantic.’”After getting the all-clear from the camera crew, the actors went for it. “[The crew] was like, ‘Hell yes, we’re doing this, full Notebook vibes,’” Cline added. “So we just dedicated the entire day to making sure we did that scene justice.”
Chase Stokes Made a Pact with Madelyn Cline After Real-Life Breakup
Stokes and Cline took their island romance off-screen when they dated IRL. The couple, who star as on-screen couple John B and Sarah, met on the OBX set and began dating in June 2020. However, a little over a year later, Stokes and Cline called it quits, announcing their breakup in November 2021.Despite their breakup, the exes didn’t let it impact their work. In fact, Stokes revealed they made a pact from the beginning. "We made a promise to each other before we even started dating that the work was always going to come first," Stokes told Entertainment Weekly in a February 2023 interview. "No matter what happens in our personal lives, and the ways that life sometimes takes you in different directions, that we're always going to honor the work."
Cline experienced a surprising encounter with an animal on set that left her “freaking out,” detailing how she ended up with a real rat in her hair during shooting the film’s third season. “[Co-creator Jonas Pate] was like to our rat wrangler, 'Drop it on her head!'" Cline shared during an October 2024 appearance on The Tonight Show. "I was neck deep in water, so I was already freaking out. I looked like an island to the rat who's trying to save itself from drowning, as am I. The rat crawls up and it gets in my hair. I was screaming bloody murder!"
How the Outer Banks Cast Reacted to a Tearful Goodbye in Season 3
Cline’s on-screen dad Charles “Chip” Esten, who starred as Sarah’s father Ward Cameron, met his end in season three. Although some fans may not have been sad to see the character go, the Outer Banks cast mourned the loss as they were going to miss Esten, who had become a father figure to younger cast members. After shooting Ward’s death scene, Carlacia Grant, who plays Cleo, revealed the cast was in tears. “It was such a long ride back to the hotel, and Chip was just giving us all advice,” she told Netflix’s Tudum in 2023. “It was so sad.”
Poguelandia wasn’t all fun and games. Pankow faced some drama off set after his girlfriend Elaine Siemek, who worked on OBX, received “disrespect and harassment” from online trolls. The actor called out the haters in an August 2021 Instagram post, writing that “lies” were “being spread and accusations are being said that go beyond the normal ‘hate.’”“Accusing someone you don't know of being abusive and manipulative is not ok," Pankow added at the time. "Especially when you don't know the relationship personally."And despite navigating online hate, the couple were still going strong when the finale dropped in August 2026.
Fans speculated there was a rift between Pankow and Bailey after it appeared the costars—who played love interests onscreen—used body doubles to film a romantic moment in season four.During one scene in the 2024 finale, Kiara rested her head on JJ’s shoulder while the pair sat around a campfire with the Pogues. But every time the camera cut to the couple, only one of the stars was featured in the frame.After this prompted fans to believe there was tension between Pankow and Bailey, the actress proved that she has nothing but love for all of her co-stars. Indeed, following the finale, she shared a message of support for her castmates. Alongside a sweet behind-the-scenes Instagram photo of her male co-stars, including Pankow, Bailey wrote, "P4L,” nodding to group of Pogues being bonded for life.