A kind of ease settles into a conversation between two actors who’ve spent four and a half months living, swimming, and shooting together on the shores of Canadian waters. It’s obvious within minutes of talking to Michael Bradway and Matt Cornett. The pair, who play brothers Charlie and Sam in ‘Every Year After’, the new adaptation of Carley Fortune’s novel, finish each other’s sentences, rib each other gently, and talk about their characters the way people talk about family. Which, in a way, is exactly the point.
The show — filmed on location in Vancouver standing in for the book’s East Coast Canadian setting — leans hard into the “cottage country” atmosphere that anchors Fortune’s writing: quiet lake towns, everyone knowing everyone, summers that stretch out slow and golden. For Bradway, who grew up in Arkansas, and Cornett, neither of whom had a personal reference point for that specific brand of Canadian lake-town culture, the world came almost entirely from Fortune herself. “Carly talks a lot about how much the cottage culture influenced her growing up,” Cornett says. “She grew up in that culture, and that influenced the book, and then the show — keeping that small-town lake vibe, where everybody knows everybody, and it’s just this quiet, serene, calm, loving place.”
The shoot itself, both actors agree, ended up mirroring the show’s setting more than either expected. “We were there for about four and a half months in Canada,” Bradway says. “It did feel like a summer camp. We were on the lake swimming when we weren’t shooting, playing cards and games. Definitely one of the best experiences I’ve had.”
Matt wears
jacket + trousers. Golden Goose
tank top. Private Policy
opposite
Michael wears
shirt. Private Policy
trousers. Sandro
shoes. Birkenstock
left to right
Michael wears
suit + shirt. Tommy Hilfiger
shoes. Dr. Martens
Matt wears
coat. Tommy Hilfiger
top. Dunhill
trousers. Golden Goose
shoes. Manolo Blahnik
belt. DSQUARED2
Neither set out to be a working actor as a kid, and both origin stories run through family. Cornett grew up doing theatre in school without any real intention of turning it into a career until a chance moment with his grandmother rerouted things. Driving down the road in her old Lincoln Town Car, the two of them heard a radio announcer plugging a Disney acting audition. “My grandma frantically wrote the number down,” Cornett laughs. “We called the number, and here I am, however many years later, doing this awesome show.” Bradway’s push came from closer to home, too: his mother and sister were the ones who nudged him to simply try something new. It’s a detail that adds a layer to how deliberately both actors talk about family on this show — not just as a plot engine for Charlie and Sam, but as the reason either of them is acting at all.
Both Charlie and Sam are written across two timelines — teenagers finding their footing, and adults shaped by a decade of history — which meant the actors weren’t just building one character, but several versions of the same person. For Cornett, that meant prepping Sam at 15, 16, 17, 18, and then again at 28. “There’s so many different things that change throughout those years,” he says. “It did kind of feel like I was prepping multiple characters at once that all just shared the same core, shared the same values.” Bradway took a more visual approach to keeping the timelines straight, building a cork board for every episode with each age colour-coded on its own index card — a necessity, he says, given how often the show shot out of order.
left to right
Matt wears
jacket + trousers. Golden Goose
tank top. Private Policy
Michael wears
shirt. Private Policy
trousers. Sandro
tie. Title of Work
opposite
coat + trousers. HELSA
sunglasses. Giorgio Armani
belt. DSQUARED2
left to right
Matt wears
tank top. Calvin Klein
trousers. Dunst
Michael wears
tank top. Calvin Klein
trousers. Tommy
opposite
left to right
Matt wears
jacket + trousers. Golden Goose
tank top. Private Policy
Michael wears
shirt. Private Policy
trousers. Sandro
tie. Title of Work
Music played its own role in getting into character. Both actors put together playlists for Charlie and Sam respectively — a habit that turned out to be widespread on set, with co-star Joe Cheng also building one for his character. “A lot of the cast really enjoys music,” Bradway says. “That was something we all had in common for sure.” But it was costume that did the heaviest lifting. For Cornett’s younger Sam, the answer came down to boat shoes — worn, he jokes, through blisters and all — and oversized striped T-shirts that “for some reason brought me back to being 16.” For Bradway’s Charlie, it was loose linen shirts, versatile enough to read as both “hot lake life” attire and the slightly more expensive uniform of Charlie’s adult life in finance. “Once we put on those clothes,” he says, “we were immediately our characters.”
Fortune stayed largely hands-off on set, the actors say, with most of the creative direction on the characters coming through showrunner Amy B. Harris rather than the author directly. “She didn’t really give us any notes,” Bradway says of Fortune. “I think that’s kind of nice, though.” Cornett describes a similarly collaborative set with directors always open to input on where a character was in a given moment, without ever dictating a single “correct” way to play a scene: “There wasn’t a pressure of, ‘okay, I have to play this exact thing every single time;. We get to have our voice be known and matter.”
That trust extended to how the two actors leaned on their own lives to build Charlie and Sam’s relationship — with limits. Cornett, who has an older brother he calls his best friend, pulled directly from that dynamic, particularly in the back half of the season when the brothers’ relationship fractures. “If my brother, who I trust implicitly with literally my life, broke my trust to that degree… I genuinely don’t know how I would respond,” he says. “I think Sam is in the same boat. I think he just kind of blocks it out and is like, I don’t know what to say to this.” Bradway, who doesn’t have a brother of his own, approached it differently, thinking instead about friends with older siblings and the way an older sibling often ends up raising a younger one, in miniature, the way Sam and Charlie’s mother raised them. “As actors, we always try to pull from our own personal experiences,” Bradway says. “However, they are not us.”
Both actors are careful, in fact, to draw a line between using their own families and letting the show become about them. Loss and grief run through the season — Sam and Charlie’s mother’s death is what pulls the family back together in the first place — and both say they thought about their own families while approaching it, without wanting to make it a one-to-one substitution. “It’s still keep it true to the character,” Cornett says, “so it’s definitely an interesting dynamic to figure out.”
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Michael wears
vest + trousers. MCM
Matt wears
top. MCM
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Matt wears
blazer + trousers. Max Esmail
shirt. Tommy Hilfiger
Michael wears
coat + trousers. HELSA
sunglasses. Giorgio Armani
belt. DSQUARED2
opposite
Michael wears
suit + shirt. Tommy Hilfiger
shoes. Dr. Martens
That research paid off most visibly in one of the season’s heavier scenes — a tavern conversation where Charlie tells Sam their mother struggled in the year after their father’s death, a truth Sam had been shielded from. Unlike the season’s more combative scenes, this one required the two actors to sit on the same side of the table. “It felt very natural for us to be having these conversations with our fake mother together,” Bradway says. “That was one of the easier days on set, just because of my relationship with Matt off-set.” Cornett agrees the tavern episode — largely built around the two of them reminiscing on their childhood — ended up being one of his favourites to shoot precisely because it let the real friendship do the work. “Because of the true brotherhood that we’ve created with each other,” he says, “those scenes were so easy and so fun, and genuinely did not feel like any deep work needed to be done.”
Both actors point to that same off-screen closeness as the reason the show’s depiction of masculinity feels distinct — less bravado, more vulnerability, without losing the sarcasm and needling that mark a lot of sibling relationships. For Charlie, love looks like teasing. “If Charlie’s not joking around with you, he probably doesn’t really care about you that much,” Bradway says. For Sam, it’s closer to the opposite: opening up, wearing his emotions visibly, treating vulnerability as trust extended to the people closest to him — Percy, Jordie, Charlie.
That contrast plays out in small, specific beats throughout the season — Cornett points to a morning scene before a will reading, where Sam sits with an old photo album trying to hold onto a memory of their mother, while Charlie walks in wanting to spike his coffee and move things along. “That’s such a perfect juxtaposition of the two of them,” he says.
suit. Golden Goose
shoes. Scarosso
watch. Carrera
opposite
left to right
Matt wears
top + shorts. MCM
shoes. Dr. Martens
socks. Uniqlo
Michael wears
vest + trousers. MCM
shoes. Dr. Martens
With season two already greenlit — word came through only a week before this conversation — neither actor has scripts yet, let alone a sense of what’s ahead beyond a reread of Fortune’s second book. What they do have is a fan base that’s made its enthusiasm for the adaptation clear. “Carly wrote these amazing books. She has these diehard fans, and just the fact that we get to be a part of that is incredible,” Bradway says. Cornett is similarly hopeful the next season will bring material from the second book to life: “I feel so lucky and blessed to be able to play this character, and also just to do it with this group of people. Everybody is so lovely.”
That off-screen closeness has spilled well beyond the tavern set — the two have been filming TikToks together at press events, including one bit they’d yet to post at the time of this conversation. It’s the kind of easy chemistry that makes it unsurprising the two hadn’t done a proper photo shoot together until recently, despite playing brothers all season. Asked what advice they’d give the men they play, both answers land close to the show’s emotional core. “Do your best to make up with your brother,” Bradway offers simply. Cornett’s is more forgiving still: “Hear people out. I’m all for second chances.”
left to right
Matt wears
jacket. Golden Goose
tank top. Private Policy
Michael wears
shirt. Private Policy
tie. Title of Work
opposite
left to right
Michael wears
suit. Golden Goose
watch. Carrera
Matt wears
suit. Grayson Kelly
shoes. Christian Louboutin
watch. Carrera
‘Every Year After’ is streaming now on Prime.
photography. Drake Alexander
fashion. Avo Yermagyan @ The Wall Group
talent. Michael Bradway + Matt Cornett
hair. Aika Flores + Kerrie Urban @ The Wall Group
casting, production, interview + editor. Kelsey Barnes
