Spencer Macpherson On Joining The Way Home As Adult Jacob and That Shocking School Spirits Reveal!
The mystery of what happened to Kat’s missing younger brother Jacob has been a huge focus over the course of Hallmark Channel’s The Way Home. This second season kicks off with Kat somehow time traveling back to 1814, teasing that the pond brought Jacob there and he’s been living in that time period for the last 25 years. In episode four, we got our first teaser of what Jacob would look like as an adult in a sketch. Eagle-eyed fans will have recognized the actor from projects like Degrassi and School Spirits. Now at the end of episode five, Spencer Macpherson makes his official debut as adult Jacob. Kat returns to the past to wait for his homecoming by boat. Not only does he not seem to recognize her, but he’s immediately arrested for treason before she can even speak with him. Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado spoke with Spencer Macpherson about joining the cast of The Way Home in this much-anticipated role.
We haven’t gotten a chance to see Jacob since 1999, so fans have been eagerly waiting to learn more about what happened to him. “There's an audience expectation that we're going to get this cheeky eight-year-old version of Jacob that we've gotten to know. It's been played really well by Remy Smith,” Macpherson told me. “But it's been 25 years and he's a man of the 1800s and there's a lot that's changed in those years.”
While Alice time traveled to 1999 and got to meet her immediate family in the past, Jacob’s experience was scarier. “The way that I thought about it was the pond, in my mind at least, it's different for every person that enters. I think for an eight-year-old that's a really horrifying and traumatic thing to happen to someone. [Getting] swallowed by this pond Into the depths and spat back out and you know no one. I think Jacob was really quiet for a long time and had to grow up and repress his old life in a lot of ways. This new version of him, there's elements of him I think that retain the 90s, but he's been forced to repress his old life,” he revealed. “I mean, especially at the age he was at. With Sadie [LaFlamme-Snow]'s character, she found some sort of connection to her old life when she came out. It's super horrifying and I think he was forced to accept his new reality.”
Macpherson called his experience on set “really cool.” “The first day that I got there I went into the hair and makeup trailer and Chyler [Leigh] was sitting there getting ready. I was like, ‘Okay, I'm excited to meet my sister!” She was really emotional,” he shared. “There's so much anticipation and buildup towards this character that I had to assume the role of Jacob almost immediately because of all the anticipation going on. Chyler’s such a good actress and it was really, really cool to build a new dynamic between adult Jacob and Kat.”
While Kat has finally found Jacob, that doesn’t mean it will be as easy as it seems to move forward as a perfect happy family. “It’s definitely gonna dredge up some old memories for Jacob that maybe he doesn't even want to dredge up. I think moving forward it's interesting because the audience is really connected to Kat. We have a lot of expectations as to how this will go and the nice neat little bow that'll be put on it […] but it's a lot more complicated than that once we're actually there,” Macpherson shared. “It's been 25 years, so I'm not sure that it's going to be as easy to to get young Jacob back as we thought.”
Macpherson isn’t a stranger to period pieces as he previously played Charles XI in Reign. “I think so, yeah!” he said about if that role helped him when it came to tackling the 1800s in The Way Home. “There's a lot of crew actually from Reign that works on The Way Home as well so that was cool. Right away I had some old family there. There's a lot of physicality I think with these. You can have a little bit more fun with like gestures and physicality in a period piece. […] There were definitely moments where I would be like, wow, I think my physicality is informed a bit from that time I did on Reign in this show as well.”
He also made his acting debut on Degrassi, which fellow The Way Home actor Evan Williams, who plays Elliot, also starred in. “I mentioned it to Evan once. I was like, ‘Oh, we're both Degrassi alum.’ It's so funny though because I think being in Toronto as an actor, it's a write a passage, right? On every job, you run into someone that's walked the halls of Degrassi,” Macpherson laughed. “But, yeah, we chatted about it for a minute. Evan's a really cool dude.”
Most recently, Macpherson has been starring in Paramount+’s hit series School Spirits. The show has been so important to him that he and several of his co-stars got matching ghost tattoos. “I really just was hooked by School Spirits and all the twists and turns that the scripts take with Xavier. I really liked the duality in him. You only get to see the real him in the flashbacks, which I thought was really cool,” he said. “I think he's very tough to love. I've always liked characters like that where it's like you got to look a little deeper and that's not just readily available.”
The first season of School Spirits ended in a shocking reveal that even the cast was surprised about. “We all had bets actually as we were doing it. You know, ‘I got 20 bucks that it’s Simon.’ They're like, ‘No, no, no. There's no way. No, it's all in his head.’ Everyone was theorizing. We all got the scripts as we did it and no one guessed it. No one saw it coming and we were all thrilled,” shared Macpherson. “I'm really, really excited to see what they cook up for the next season because they're so talented.”
Catch new episodes of The Way Home airing Sundays on Hallmark Channel.
