Chase Stokes has revealed he once saved his Outer Banks co-star Madison Bailey from drowning during filming, and nobody on set realized it was happening in real time. The two actors play John B. Routledge and Kiara Carrera on the Netflix drama, with its fifth and final season dropping on Thursday, August 20.
The incident happened while the cast was filming in Barbados for an underwater sequence. Bailey has been candid about how physically demanding the water scenes were for her throughout the show’s run, while Stokes has joked about making the process look easy by comparison.
During a segement of Entertainment Weekly’s “Lie v. Lie” segment, Stokes explained that the scene involved Rudy Pankow’s character JJ getting knocked off a boat and floating unconscious in the water while Kiara held him up. Stokes said that’s when he noticed something was wrong with Bailey, who had gone quiet just out of frame.
“I was like, ‘Oh no, Bails has been under there for a while,’” Stokes recalled. “So I jumped off the boat and I realized that she was not able to breathe underwater.”
The scene itself is the key to understanding how close the situation came to turning serious. Bailey explained that she and Pankow had already been treading water for close to a minute before the director even called action, leaving her worn out before the cameras started rolling.
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Once filming began, Bailey said she couldn’t swim closer to the boat, and the crew mistook her exhaustion for strong acting. Stokes recalled everyone around him assuming the scene was simply going well, unaware that Bailey had genuinely stopped being able to keep herself afloat.
“Everyone thought it was like, ‘Oh, wow, they’re in the scene. This is great.'”
Bailey added her own take on the confusion, noting that the crew’s reaction only made the moment scarier in hindsight.
“Everyone’s like, ‘Wow, she’s really good!'”
Stokes ultimately jumped in to help her, a detail that lines up with Bailey’s own description of the underwater sequences as the hardest part of playing Kiara across five seasons.
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Their exchange also touched on their dynamic in the water more broadly, with Bailey joking that Stokes made her look worse by swimming effortlessly next to her.
“You actually make a bad day worse,” she joked. “When I’m struggling to barely swim, Chase is like [fake swims]. I swear he’s breathing under there just to make me look bad.”
The story lands differently now that Outer Banks has wrapped for good. Season five closed out the series entirely, with Kiara’s arc culminating in a life-or-death confrontation of her own during the finale.
Stokes and Bailey looking back on a real near-drowning on set adds another layer to a show that spent five seasons putting its characters through the wringer, both on screen and, apparently, off it.