The story of friends-to-lovers Dr. Mike and Sully on “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” was very good. The real-life story of series co-stars Jane Seymour and Joe Lando — think: lovers-to-coworkers-who-could-barely-stand-each-other-to-friends — is even better.
Though it wasn’t public knowledge at the time, Seymour and Lando dated while filming the series’ first episode. “We fell madly for one another,” Seymour tells me when I sit down with her and Lando to talk about their latest joint acting venture on Acorn TV’s “Harry Wild,” “and then that didn’t work out.”
She goes on to explain that neither she nor Lando expected the network to order “Dr. Quinn” to series; when that happened, “He’s with someone else, and I’m with someone else,” she continues. “And my someone else is James Keach, who’s directing all of our love scenes.”
For the record: “I was fine with it,” Lando interjects. “I like James a lot.”
But any warmth that had previously existed between the co-stars was absent for the majority of the six years they spent shooting the series, which centered on Seymour’s Dr. Michaela “Mike” Quinn, a Boston physician who relocated to Colorado in 1867. Lando played Byron Sully, whose traumatic past sent him seeking shelter and community among the Cheyenne.
A ‘very awkward, very difficult’ working relationship
Sully and Mike eventually fell in love and married — all while Lando and Seymour barely spoke to each other outside of their scripted scenes. Which leads to the natural follow-up question: Good God, how?!
“Love and hate,” Lando says. “I’m being honest. When you have that intense emotion on either end, you can turn it around and use it. I mean, we didn’t hate each other, but we just didn’t get along.”
Seymour grimaces comedically. “I tried,” she says.
Lando continues apace. “But once we cross that line and come onto a set, we’re professionals.”
“It was very awkward and very difficult,” Seymour recalls, more serious now as she explains how they later learned that factions behind the scenes were amping up the backstage drama. “There was someone in the background, setting fires purposely,” he adds. “But again: It never showed up on screen.”
The “Dr. Quinn” finale aired in May 1998; Mike and Sully’s story later continued via two made-for-TV movies. Seymour and Lando went on to other jobs, like Fox Family’s “Higher Ground” for him and a string of guest-star spots on series like “Smallville” and “How I Met Your Mother” — not to mention a scene-stealing part in the film “Wedding Crashers” — for her.
Seymour and Keach were married from 1993-2013; she recently announced her engagement to boyfriend John Zambetti. Lando wed Kristen Barlow in 1997. Time apart served the former co-stars well. A few years after “Dr. Quinn” was over, after Lando returned to the United States after shooting “Higher Ground” in Canada, “I think you just invited me over to dinner,” Lando says to Seymour. “You, James, myself.” The enmity and weirdness “was just gone. That — whatever that was.”
“We never questioned it,” Seymour says. “And it just got better and better,” Lando adds. The relationship healed so well that Lando and his family even stayed with Seymour at her home for weeks after their house was destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires of 2025.
Chemistry strikes again
Fast-forward to the present, in which Seymour has played the title role in Acorn TV’s “Harry Wild” since 2022. (She’s also an executive producer.) In the Irish dramedy, Harry is a retired professor of literature who solves mysteries. Season 5, the premiere of which hits the streaming service today, introduces Lando as Pierce Kennedy, an American pathologist who encounters a troubling case, “hears about Harry through some friends, and says, ‘Would you be interested in taking this on with me, because I feel there is a serial killer here?” Lando previews. “I’m kind of a lonely guy with a dark secret, and then she comes along.”
Lando’s addition allows the series to play up the pair’s time-tested dynamic, which they previously revisited in a couple of TV movies. “Apparently, unbeknownst to both of us, the directors and producers, they looked at one another and they went, ‘Oh my God, there’s an underlying chemistry here that we’ve never seen that’s crackling,'” Seymour reports. “And I said, ‘That’s why you got Joe Lando in to do this. Because, for some reason — it doesn’t matter what show we’re on, whether it was [“Perfectly] Prudence” for Hallmark or it was “A Christmas Spark” for Lifetime, that just happens.”
She looks at Lando. “I mean, it happens to us in real life, too, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he says, smiling.
“We just don’t act on it,” she adds, “because you’re married, and I have a lovely man.”
‘Every time we get together, it’s exactly the same’
“Harry Wild” drops new episodes on Mondays. “People who’ve watched Season 5 have said it’s the best season of all,” Seymour says proudly. “So there you go. Let’s just think we’re starting over. It’s a fresh new show now.”
And if that fresh new show receives a Season 6, will Lando stick around? Neither he nor Seymour are at liberty to say — though she does tell me that they shot two different endings to the finale. “There’s the one where Harry dies,” Lando jokes, “and I take over the show.”
“No, that didn’t happen,” Seymour clarifies.
Despite their long history of working together, and everything that’s happened off-screen, I ask whether it takes a minute to slip back into their collective on-screen mode when they start something like “Harry Wild” Season 5 together.
“No,” Lando says without hesitation. “It’s exactly the same for me.”
“Every time we get together, it’s exactly the same,” Seymour says, nodding. “It doesn’t matter if we haven’t spoken to each other, or we’ve been really close, or we’ve been through, you know, literally fire and brimstone — which we have.”
She adds: “We just pick right up.”
