Trying's Rafe Spall and Esther Smith on How Season 4 Made Them Up Their Parenting Game

Every parent will tell you time really does fly. As the cliche goes, one minute they are in diapers; the next, they are asking to borrow your car keys.

For its fourth season, the Apple TV+ series Trying leans into that adage. When viewers last left Nikki (Esther Smith) and Jason (Rafe Spall), they formally adopted their two foster children Princess, age 10, and her brother Tyler, age six. 

But when Trying returns for a fourth season on May 22, the series leaps forward six years. Princess (Scarlett Rayner) is now a 16-year-old teenager learning to drive and very curious about her birth mother. Tyler (Cooper Turner), now 12,  is struggling to find friends and fit in. Nikki’s uptight sister Karen (Sian Brooke) discovered she was pregnant in the third season finale. Now that baby is six years old. 

Executive producer and series creator Andy Wolton told Smith and Spall about the time jump while filming the show’s third season. Spall calls it a “rogue and rare decision” that creatively pays off. “It gives you a lot because you find these characters as parents of a teenager which is probably difficult in the best of times,” he says. “ But when it’s a teenager trying to find her biological mother, there’s a lot of sort of dramatic interest and intrigue there, as well as comic potential too.”

Smith loved experiencing her ever-optimistic character navigate being a mom to a teenager. “If we had just gone along the timeline that wouldn’t have come for ages,” she says. “It’s nice to kind of see the challenges they face. It gives it a new and different kind of energy. It’s been really lovely.”

While Smith jokes they added wrinkles to their faces to age their characters, she credits Wolton’s script with helping her fill in the gaps of what occurred during the ensuing years “Reading the dynamic between Nikki and Princess, I just got a real sense of how Nikki has been parenting for the last six years,” Smith says. “It just seemed to flow really easily and that’s down to Andy’s brilliant writing and really understanding human dynamics, he’s so good at that.”

For Spall, it’s more about living in the moment. “You don’t really play a character's backstory when you’re in the scene,” he says. “You just play the truth of the scene. Really my job is just to make it as naturalistic, as real and as funny as possible. The skin of this, as an actor, is to serve up the jokes in a way that looks like I’m not. Because there’s a joke on every single page and you’ve got to deliver them without looking like you are demonstrating, ‘Oh here's a joke.’ That’s where the skill lies.”

All of the fan favorite characters return for the fourth season including Karen, her goofy husband Scott (Darren Boyd), Jason’s wealthy friend Freddy (Oliver Chris) and his man-of-few-words dad Vic (Phil Davis). Rayner and Turner, of course, just joined the cast this season. “We had the chemistry read with both of them to make sure we found the dynamic that suited the show,” Smith says. “When they both came in it felt obvious that they were the right people for the job. They slotted in so well. As people they are so open. Scarlett is 20. Cooper is 12. They’re both so easy to talk to. I definitely wasn’t like that when I was [young].”
 
Nikki and Jason have been on a parenting journey since the show first premiered in 2020. From accepting that they wouldn’t be able to conceive, to going through the arduous adoption approval process, to fighting to be able to foster both Princess and Tyler so the siblings would not be separated to finally convincing a judge that they could adopt them. While the show is often hilarious, the heart of Nikki and Jason’s experience reflects what so many people go through.

“Honestly one of the most lovely things about social media is that people get in contact directly,” Smith says. “I read all these messages of people going through the adoption process, or have been through it or are going through fertility struggles and just what the show means to them. They don’t feel alone in it and they feel like their story is being represented. I think that’s so important to have something like this to show that other people are going through something similar to what they’re going through. Because I can imagine at times that must feel incredibly lonely and hard.”

Since the show’s debut, Spall and Smith have become a real-life couple and recently announced they are expecting their first child together. [This interview was conducted before they made their announcement.] Spall has three children with his ex-wife Elize Du Toit and says playing Jason has given him a new perspective on being a parent. 

“Not to sound too sentimental but it just makes me feel so grateful because parenting is extremely challenging,” he says. “The most challenging thing I’ve ever done and it’s really hard and difficult and I fail at it constantly and this show reminds me of how grateful I am and I don’t just mean because I was able to naturally conceive kids. I mean just lucky to be a dad because it’s the great joy of my life and it’s the great stress of my life. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done and will be my most important contribution to life really. Family comes about in a myriad of different ways which is what this show tries to deliver the message on.” 

The dramatic thrust of the season centers on Princess’ desire to find her birth mother and learn more about why she and her brother were given up for adoption. When the fourth season concludes on July 3, it will end with multiple cliffhangers for almost all of the characters. 

“We don’t know whether we are going to do it again,” Spall says of a possible fifth season. “It’s in the lap of the gods. If people keep responding to the show and enjoying it, we would love to do more. We love doing it. In the same regard, we feel blessed to have had four seasons with a show we really love and has connected to an audience. That’s all you can hope for — that the work that you do connects. It’s a show that people are still discovering. If you discover it now you’ve got 32 episodes to enjoy it’s all there. A whole bounty.”

New episodes of Trying Season 4 drop Wednesdays on Apple TV+. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Amy Amatangelo is a writer and editor. In addition to Primetimer, her work can be found in Paste Magazine, Emmy Magazine and the LA Times. She also is the Treasurer of the Television Critics Association.