Madelyn Cline Says Sarah & Rafe’s Last Scene In Outer Banks Felt “Loaded”

The Pogues have completed their last adventure, and Madelyn Cline says the theme of filming Outer Banks Season 5 was a string of “lasts.” As the cast started to wrap up filming, they had to say goodbye to locations they’d come to call home since Season 1 in 2020, and the strong connections forged with their co-stars. That includes the familial bond Cline and Drew Starkey had formed to play warring siblings Sarah and Rafe Cameron over six years.

Spoiler alert: This post discusses events from the Outer Banks series finale.

One scene in particular — the final one between Sarah and Rafe — got both Cline and Starkey in their feelings. “Neither Drew nor I planned on it being that emotional, but that was towards the end,” she says. “That goodbye ended up, for him and I, feeling accidentally really loaded.”

Rafe's arc is so complicated and their relationship is very loaded, so it was cathartic.

In the aftermath of the Kildare-destroying hurricane, Rafe and his girlfriend Sofia were forced to flee their home and start new lives in South America, unable to return to the Outer Banks due to their crimes. In a tearful farewell, Sarah embraced her brother and cried as she realized it would be the last time she’d be with him.

According to Chase Stokes, it was Starkey who cried the most on set: “I look over and [Drew’s] just sobbing, and he's not the most emotional human being, so knowing that he was the first one to really let it rip, we all were just sobbing the whole time.”

The Onslaught star wasn’t ashamed to admit his tears either. At the premiere in Hollywood on Aug. 15, Starkey told Elite Daily, “I cried for two hours straight. Our last couple of days filming were pretty rough, because we knew it was coming to an end.”

That raw emotion helped make the final goodbye scene between Sarah and Rafe even more meaningful than Cline planned. She says, “Rafe's arc is so complicated and their relationship is very loaded, so it was cathartic.”

Rafe Is *For Real* Never Coming Back To The OBX

As Rafe sets off for Rio with Sofia, he tells Sarah that he won’t be able to come back to the Outer Banks — even to see his newborn nephew. There’s a little silver lining in the finale’s end credits, which show Rafe FaceTiming his Pogue crew to virtually celebrate Sarah and John B’s wedding, but apparently, that’s the closest he’ll ever get to being with his sibling again.

Cline says she was told by the powers that be that Rafe is never going to come back to Kildare. “Our writers said no in the world of Outer Banks,” she says. Knowing that Sarah and Rafe’s goodbye was truly the last time they’ll ever see each other, I, too, would spend two hours sobbing.