Warning: Some light spoilers ahead for the books Every Summer After, which Every Year After is based on, and its sequel One Golden Summer.
In the summer of 2020, Canadian writer Carley Fortune quietly penned a novel inspired by her own upbringing in Barry’s Bay, an Ontario lake town of just over 1,000 residents. What began as a personal escape from the pandemic soon evolved into a commercial juggernaut. When Every Summer After hit shelves two years later, the book spent 16 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, crowning Fortune the new Canadian queen of summer romance.
Now, Fortune’s debut has been faithfully adapted into a new eight-episode series—retitled Every Year After—which will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 8 and then debut a couple days later on Prime Video. (Teen Vogue can exclusively reveal the show’s trailer below.)
A sweeping tale about the emotional potency of first loves and fantasy of second chances, the story follows Persephone “Percy” Fraser (Sadie Soverall), who spends every summer of her teens at her family’s cottage in Barry’s Bay, where she befriends her next-door neighbors Sam (Matt Cornett) and Charlie Florek (Michael Bradway). With each passing summer, Percy and Sam’s best friendship gradually blossoms into an exhilarating—albeit fleeting—romance. Years later, Percy returns to attend the funeral of Sam and Charlie’s mother, Sue (Elisha Cuthbert), forcing the exes to finally confront the cause of their decade-long estrangement.
Early last year, Amy B. Harris—a seasoned showrunner and executive producer best known for her work on Sex and the City, Gossip Girl, and The Wilds—was approached by executives at Amazon MGM Studios, where she has an overall deal, about taking the reins of an already-ordered adaptation of Every Summer After. She received the book on a Thursday and voraciously consumed it within 24 hours. By Saturday, she was all in.
“I was so immersed in the world that Carley had built and Sam and Percy’s love story, and the feeling of optimism and second chances,” Harris tells Teen Vogue. As a fan first and foremost, she knew it was her job “to honor the book and the characters and then expand it, so it could be a series that could go on for years to come.”
During their first meeting, Harris pitched Fortune, who is also an executive producer, her vision for the show’s very first scene, in which Percy delivers a heartfelt speech at her best friend Chantal’s (Aurora Perrineau) engagement party. That description alone left the author with goosebumps. “I knew, in that moment, it was in the right hands,” Fortune says, adding that many of her favorite scenes in the show were not taken from her novel.
Finding Percy, Sam and Charlie
Once she got Fortune’s seal of approval, Harris knew that she needed “to chase the essence” of her beloved characters. Fortune, however, did not sit in on any Zoom chemistry reads, nor did she have final say in casting. “I think it’s better for the author not to be in those rooms and see everything,” Fortune says. “I was shown the chemistry tapes, which were unreal, and there was no point at which I felt like, ‘No, not this person.’ The fact that we have a Percy, a Sam and a Charlie that look somewhat like their characters—that’s not something that was important to me, [but] it’s cool that they’re quite alike.”
Given that chemistry can be difficult to gauge through a computer screen, the producers gave each pairing of actors 10 minutes to get to know each other in a separate breakout room before testing together on camera. Feeling equal parts “nervous” and “excited,” Cornett recalls zeroing in on a trivial detail during his one-on-one time with Soverall, who had already been selected as Percy.
“This is the first thing I’ve done with a British actor, so I was so excited to work with someone that was doing an American accent as a British actor,” Cornett says with a laugh. “I remember being like, ‘Oh my gosh, your American accent is so incredible, and I love your natural accent. It’s so cool.’ The second that Sadie started reading the scenes, I was like, ‘Oh, this girl’s good. I need to make sure I step my game up.’”
Soverall herself was immediately charmed. “He’s got the most incredible quality of being so playful and so warm and funny, and then also being able to break your heart at the same time,” she says of Cornett. “I just love him.”
For Harris, Percy and Sam’s love story is rooted in a close friendship between two people who will always care for each other. “What I love so much about those characters is they’re both intellectual, bright people trying to find their way in the world,” Harris says. When Soverall and Cornett began talking, she sensed "a level of smart, witty, charming back and forth between the two of them that had a slight flirtation to it, but it also felt really grounded.”
What sealed the deal was Soverall and Cornett’s read of the famous anatomy textbook scene. Even via Zoom, “I was like, ‘Oh, good lord,’” Harris recalls. “There is so much chemistry between them. It’s unbelievable. It makes your breath catch a little.”
Once Cornett was cast, he read with three or four actors in the running to play Charlie, including Bradway. Despite not having any prior knowledge of Fortune’s Every Summer After universe, Bradway was struck by the many physical attributes he shared with Charlie—his green eyes, his hairstyle, his strapping build—minus the summer tan. It certainly helped Bradway’s case that he had more than just a passing resemblance to Cornett, with whom he immediately bonded over being L.A. transplants and staunch football fans. (Florida native Bradway is a Miami Dolphins fan; Cornett loves the Pittsburgh Steelers.)
Cornett and Bradway made it a point to see each other every day during the four-month shoot in Vancouver, regardless of whether they were actually working together. Back home in Los Angeles, they live eight minutes away from each other, so they can often be found golfing and hanging out together. Together with Bradway’s fiancée, fellow actor Veronica St. Clair, the guys even binged every episode of Every Year After together.
But despite playing the elder of the Floreks, Bradway is actually younger than Cornett by two-and-half months. “[Michael’s] biceps are the only reason that he pulls that off,” Cornett deadpans. On set, they might fall into their roles as Sam and Charlie, but Bradway says there is no “older/younger brother dynamic” behind the scenes: “When we’re home, we’re best friends.”
Still, Cornett admits that their onscreen relationship has bled into their real-life dynamic. “Even though I am technically older than him, there were still times where I would go to him for advice for something, and he would give me just incredible advice. He became very quickly the guy that I could go to with personal things I was dealing with in my life,” Cornett says. “I love that man with every bit of me.”
The One That Got Away
Soverall, Cornett and Bradway all agree that the “core” of each of their characters has been carried over to this adaptation—Percy’s creativity and vitality, Sam’s silliness and goofiness, Charlie’s charisma—but all of those qualities have been dampened by the time they reunite in adulthood.
Shortly before dying of lymphoma, Sue asked Charlie to reach out to Percy. With Chantal in tow as moral support, Percy returns to Barry’s Bay seemingly to say goodbye not only to Sue, but also to the place that has been the root cause of her recurring panic attacks. But subconsciously, Soverall says, Percy still “wants to see if she can have some sort of relationship, no matter what that looks like, with Sam and her past.”
Following a similar structure to the source material, the first season will juxtapose the present-day events of the week leading up to Sue’s memorial with flashbacks to each of the six summers Percy and Sam spent together. Book readers will notice that several lines of dialogue were ripped directly from Every Summer After, including Sam’s line to Percy after she returns to Barry’s Bay: “You came home.”
Soverall and Cornett both felt the pressure to nail that reunion scene. “Percy says ‘Sam’ multiple times in that pilot episode, but this is the first time she’s actually saying it to him. And using his name—it gets me. It makes me a bit emotional,” Soverall says. As they embrace for the first time in a decade, Percy—whom Soverall describes as “a big yearner”—feels “all the excitement and rush that you feel with that first love rushing back instantly, but also the dread of what’s happened.”
“The second Percy walks in and says ‘Sam,’ he knows her voice. He’s heard that ‘Sam’ 1,000 times before,” Cornett adds. “You see this moment where he just pauses and takes in what’s happening. You don’t see his face, but in my head—and hopefully the audience takes this away—I feel like you can see every bit of everything rushing through him in the stillness that he holds for a second. And in that slow turn towards her, it’s him being like, ‘Did I really just hear what I think I heard?’ And the second he sees her, he’s like, ‘Oh my God, you’re actually here.’”
What Percy does not anticipate, however, is the fact that Sam, now a doctor, is dating a pediatric surgeon named Taylor. With Percy back in his vicinity, Sam is left to wrestle with the never-ending battle between his head and his heart, Cornett says. “His heart from the moment he met Percy has always said ‘Percy,’ but his brain is like, ‘No, you have this woman that you are very happy with, and you’ve moved on from Percy, and life has been good.’”
Soverall recalls being particularly taken aback by the number of scenes between adult Percy and Sam that harken back to their teenage romance. “There’s this kind of tragic element to a lot of great love stories, like not having the time to say what you need to say, or the time with someone that you want,” she says. “I was really looking forward to showing that and the tragedy of it, but also the good moments. There’s a [flashback] scene involving a sink. It was so fun, and showing those elements of play between them was really joyous.”
The series will also flesh out Percy’s relationships with Charlie and Sue with scenes that were not in Every Summer After. Sue, in particular, “surpassed a lot of relationships that she has in her life because it was this unconditional love,” Soverall says. But Percy must now live with the regret “that she didn’t have more contact with Sue” before her passing.
Sam and Charlie are no strangers to tragedy, having lost their father to a heart attack over 15 years ago, but the brothers are grieving their mother in vastly different ways. “Sam has a line where he says, ‘Charlie Florek, a man literally running from his emotions,’” Cornett notes. “Charlie is the type of guy who doesn’t want to feel, and Sam is the guy that’s like, ‘Let’s feel what we’re going to feel, and then we can move on.’ Especially when Sam realizes that [Charlie’s] the only family he has left, he wants that family to grieve with. But Charlie doesn’t want to do that.”
Bradway points out that Charlie “was always kind of the older presence” among his peer group who “wanted to get out of town, start working and start making money.” But as Sam learns over the course of the season, Charlie “had to grow up and be a second parent to Sam” after their dad died. That brotherly clash only intensifies once they must “deal with the family estate and [Sue’s] tavern, which they now own,” Bradway adds. “Charlie is very conflicted and thinks he’s doing the right thing by going in a certain direction, but he’s only making those decisions because he is just trying to bury the past.”
The Friend Group
In building out the rest of the ensemble, Harris wanted to assign the characters “different points of view” so that they would have both sources of conflict and support. “The fantasy of what I love to build is these friendships that make people better,” she says. For instance, by introducing her best friends both in childhood (Abigail Cowen’s Delilah) and adulthood (Perrineau’s Chantal), the adaptation is able to reveal new sides of Percy.
Every Year After reunites Soverall with Cowen, with whom she worked on Fate: The Winx Saga. “She’s like a sister to me, which was cool to play because Delilah and Percy were like sisters when they were young,” Cowen says. “When they’re young, Delilah’s this firecracker, free-spirit type of girl, and Percy’s more internal and quiet. Delilah pushes her outside of her comfort zone. And in adulthood, Percy actually pushes Delilah out of her comfort zone to eventually confront her own demons.”
The first scene that Fortune watched on set was actually a confrontation between Percy and Delilah in the second episode. “Hearing Abigail say ‘Percy’ in that scene was almost like an out-of-body experience,” the author says. “There were a lot of people around me that day. If it had just been me watching them alone on the side, I would’ve been in tears.”
Though Delilah—who has bought a house in Barry’s Bay—may present as a kind of antagonist in the present day, Cowen says her character has chosen to self-isolate amidst upheaval in her personal life. Delilah has found an unexpected confidant in Charlie, the same guy she has had a crush on since she first visited Barry’s Bay as a child as Percy’s guest. “Delilah noticed Charlie first, but Charlie always noticed Delilah as well. As they get older and Delilah helps out with the memorial, there’s a friendship that forms, and they’re both helping each other fill a void in a way,” Bradway adds. “It becomes a confusing and dangerous relationship.”
Having initially accompanied Percy on a whim, Chantal, a straitlaced lawyer, ends up spending more time in Barry’s Bay than she would have liked. But the town “changes everything for her, because it makes her step out of her comfort zone and step away from her work, which is all she really knows and cares about—or seemingly cares about,” says Perrineau, who particularly enjoys the healthy way that Percy and Chantal hold each other to account as friends.
The connective tissue in the show is surprisingly Sam’s best friend, Jordie (Joseph Chiu). A former high-school basketball whose ruptured pec injury dashed his dreams of going pro, Jordie has returned to his hometown to run his family’s motel business. “I think the feeling of having a dream when you’re young, and then, as you get older, you realize that’s not possible with your given circumstances—that’s very relatable,” says Chiu, who suffered the same injury while playing basketball in his sophomore year of high school.
When they come face-to-face again in the motel lobby in the premiere, Jordie pretends that he does not remember Percy for a specific reason. “I’d imagine that whenever they go out drinking or hang out, Sam’s probably being super vulnerable talking about Percy, and Jordie’s hearing all the bad things that he has to say about Percy, but also how much he loves her,” Chiu says. “But from Jordie’s point of view, this is the girl that has hurt his best friend over and over again. So it was really fun to play the cheekiness of pretending not to know someone who you’ve grown up with.”
While the character wasn’t originally written as Asian, Jordie also offers Chiu the all-too-rare chance to play a romantic lead. “I’m a little bit scared to take on a position where I’m representing Chinese Canadians in a role like this, but I feel deeply honored and grateful that this was given to me,” Chiu says.
From Barry’s Bay, With Love
From the outset, the creative team wanted to preserve the Canadian DNA of Fortune’s novels. “Part of what’s so beautiful about [the story] is that it does take place in Canada,” Harris reiterates. But after realizing that they “could not shoot in the actual Barry’s Bay,” the producers decided to move filming to Bowen Island, a 20-minute ferry ride off the coast of Vancouver.
Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that the welcome sign for Barry’s Bay says “British Columbia,” not Ontario—which was by design. “Because the locations we found were so stunning and really met what we hoped for in terms of the look of the dock and the water, and the mountains added this majestic element, we didn’t want to lie and say it was Ontario,” Harris explains.
Given that “British Columbia does not look like Ontario cottage country,” Fortune advocated for this fictional version of Barry’s Bay to be set on the opposite coast. “Setting is so key to me in my books,” she says. “As a Canadian, we get very used to seeing our cities represent other places, so let’s let British Columbia be British Columbia for once.” (To account for that subtle change in setting, Percy is now an American from Seattle—where she still lives and works—who used to spend her summers across the border in British Columbia.)
Rather than being a magazine editor, Percy is now an obituaries writer for a Seattle newspaper. “I loved the idea that she did a job that you could consider macabre or morbid, but it’s beautiful that you actually get to celebrate people and tell their stories,” Harris explains. But Percy, like in the novel, is still not using her voice to tell her own stories. “I was just interested in that connection to Sam and Charlie—that she could write [Sue’s obituary] for them, and at first being rejected by Sam to do that, and then that’s a little bit of an opening for them to get close again.”
“We’ll Be a Fine Line”
Not unlike The Summer I Turned Pretty, another Amazon YA hit that became famous for its high-profile needle drops, Every Year After is soundtracked by an eclectic mix of mainstream artists—Maggie Rogers, Lana Del Rey, Gracie Abrams, Mumford & Sons, and more, according to Harris.
“I have a 16-year-old daughter, but the truth is my musical taste definitively leans towards somewhere around 19 years old maybe, and always has. There’s certain music that emotionally speaks to me,” says Harris, who describes the sound of Every Year After as “both pop-y,” but with “a little bit of a bluegrass, Americana” feel. Dolly Parton, Sue’s favorite singer, features prominently in a couple key moments this season, but her songs were actually not the most difficult to license.
While writing the pilot, Harris decided she wanted the emotional climax of the season to be set to the title track on Harry Styles’ “Fine Line” album. “In my head, that was the song, and then I was told Harry Styles is really hard to get,” she recalls. “I have a friend who is very, very high up at Universal, and I was able to call her and say, ‘Whatever it takes, whatever the money... I have to have this song,’ because I didn’t know what I would do [without it].”
One Golden Summer
Even before cameras rolled on the first season, the creative team discussed the possibility of adapting One Golden Summer, Fortune’s sequel about Charlie’s love story, which Harris confirms would be the basis of a potential second season. “There were definitely things that we did in the first season that we were intentional about,” Bradway teases. Not only is the famous “banana boat” featured, but Bradway also “made sure that [Charlie] acted a certain way” in relationships, “because we knew that [his love interest] Alice was going to be coming next season.”
While all of the Every Year After actors say they look forward to grilling Fortune for more details during the upcoming press tour, no one has been able to get the author to spill her future plans for her Barry’s Bay literary universe. “This world is one my readers want to come back to. I get asked for more all the time,” says Fortune.
“One Golden Summer was a book that readers demanded. They would come up to me and demand justice for Charlie and a happy ending for Charlie. I would get pitches on who he should be with. But as soon as I finished writing Every Summer After, before I had a publishing deal, I started writing a book from his voice. His voice was just with me so strongly,” Fortune continues. “I think it’s really interesting to think about having this show where the characters exist in two places… but I’ve got lots of love for Barry’s Bay love stories.”
Harris, for her part, has always envisioned Every Year After as a multi-season show, with future installments set during different times of the year. “I love the idea of exploring happy and complicated endings and love unrequited for all of our characters,” she adds, “so I certainly hope we get the opportunity to do that and continue to honor Carley’s beautiful world.”
At the end of the day, Soverall believes that Percy’s story is about “learning how to forgive yourself and how to make amends with yourself and also the people who you’ve hurt.” To Harris, the reason Fortune has been able to cultivate such a devoted audience is because her books are “inherently optimistic, in the sense of believing in the best in people and people seeing the best in each other.”
“I remember writing the author’s note for Every Summer After [about] that theme of forgiveness, but also of empathy,” Fortune concludes. “I think forgiveness requires empathy, and empathy is in short supply these days, but it’s a superpower. We all have our own stories that we tell about ourselves and other people, but if we can allow other people some grace, some space to make mistakes, being able to do that is so special and beautiful.”
