The fifth and final season of the Freeform series will premiere May 26.
The stars of The Bold Type are getting ready to say goodbye. ET's Leanne Aguilera spoke with Katie Stevens, Meghann Fahy and Aisha Dee ahead of the premiere of the fifth and final season of the Freeform series, and the women shared what lessons they've learned, what storylines they would change, and what fans can expect from the last six episodes.
During her five seasons of playing Kat Edison, the seemingly fearless social media manager turned political candidate turned activist, Dee said she's "felt Kat's bravery and confidence" at every turn.
"Even if her confidence comes from not knowing that she's supposed to be afraid of people like her bosses and stuff, whether it's naive or not, I think her bravery, I'll take that with me," Dee said. "It's already really become a part of me in a way that I think is good."
Fahy, who plays stylist and designer Sutton Brady, learned something similar from her own outspoken character.
"I think that Sutton has really taught me a lot about, like, asserting yourself," she said. "I think that's something that I'll continue to remember as I move through my own life."
Stevens, meanwhile, said she learned lessons thanks to, not only her character, the column-writing Jane Sloan, but also her co-stars and their characters as well.
"I think that [I learned about] embracing your vulnerability and allowing people to see the parts of you that are messy," she said. "And to know that, at the end of the day, you are still worthy and lovable, and you can still have everything in life that you want to by being authentically who you are and allowing people in to see that mess."
While their characters provided an abundance of important takeaways for their real lives, the actresses didn't agree with every thing that happened onscreen over the show's five seasons.
"I've been waiting for one of the girls to get their periods and it's been four seasons," Dee said of the thing she'd change about the show. "... I really think it's an important issue. I think its a taboo topic and it's a biological function... It actually keeps women in developing countries from achieving all of the things that they should really be able to achieve."
Both Stevens and Fahy's main complaints had to do with their characters' love lives.
"I wish that the Jane and Pinstripe storyline had been different," Stevens said of one of Jane's main beaus. "I didn't like that it was just like, oh, he just cheated on her worse than we thought. It just didn't feel something authentic to his character or the way that Dan [Jeannotte] played him."
"I wish that, if they needed to break up, maybe the break would have been, like, we're at Sutton and Richard's wedding and he doesn't ever want to get married and doesn't believe in marriage," she added.
Fahy, meanwhile, called Sutton's relationship with the older and one-time Scarlet lawyer Richard Hunter (Sam Page) "really tricky."
"I'm still really proud of that story and the way that we chose to tell it and everything -- and we got even deeper into that in season 5, which was awesome -- but I was shocked when they first told me that in the span of five episodes, I was getting married, having a miscarriage and then getting a divorce," she admitted. "I sort of thought we were going to live in the happily ever after for a little bit longer, but it's TV, baby. People like drama."
That drama will continue into season 5, which had its six episodes shot after the previous season was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We were in a really tricky spot because we lost two episodes at the end of season 4 because of COVID. And then we got picked up for season 5, [and] we only had six to wrap it all up," Fahy explained. "So the writers had a really hard job -- harder than normal, which is already pretty hard -- to figure out a way to get everybody to a place that felt really good in that amount of time."
Still, Fahy, who noted that she "always felt very clear about what I saw for Sutton and what I wanted for her," said that she was "pretty happy with where she ends up." Stevens, likewise, celebrated the "collaborative experience" of figuring out Jane's ending with the show's writers and producers.
"It's very hard to wrap up five seasons in six episodes. I think that the writers did a great job of tying up loose ends and also kind of giving some openness at the end to allow fans to kind of come up with their own conclusions of what could happen afterwards," Stevens said. "I feel like we all are pretty happy with where our characters end up."
Overall, Fahy said, The Bold Type's last season is "going to be a great time and it's definitely worth tuning in for."
The fifth and final season of The Bold Type will premiere Wednesday, May 26 on Freeform.
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