When Ty Doran got an audition to play the mysteriously aged-up Cal in the Season 3 finale of Manifest, the specifics of his potential role were hidden from him. “It was a big deal, and they didn’t want anything getting out,” he explains to Tudum.
Then he learned exactly what was going on, but there was still a tiny problem — he didn’t have cable and had never seen the show. “I called my mom and I was explaining the situation to her, and she’s like, ‘I’m sorry, Manifest?’” he recalls. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s on NBC.’ And she’s like, ‘I love that show! I have such a crush on Matt Long! I’m a huge fan!”
With a little more information to work with — and Mom’s seal of approval — Doran caught up on the show in a couple of weeks, “both for work and just as a viewer; I wanted to know what happened to Flight 828 immediately. The show has such a hook. It really gets its teeth into you so quickly that I was helpless.”
Though Doran was only briefly in the final episode of Season 3, he was able to overlap with Cal’s original portrayer, Jack Messina, and spend some time with the young actor and his family. (Young Cal touched Flight 828’s tail fin and disappeared; Cal popped back up later in the episode, suddenly five years older.)
“It was excellent to get to meet someone that, at this point, I had watched hours and hours and hours of,” Doran says. “[I was] very carefully nitpicking his incredible performance, trying to steal as much of that goodness as I can. It was really cool to get to sit down and chat with him.”
When viewers see Cal in Season 4, things are very different. It’s been two years since Grace’s (Athena Karkanis) tragic death, and Stone patriarch, Ben (Josh Dallas), and Cal’s twin, Olive (Luna Blaise), are still struggling with Cal’s (inadvertent) help to Grace’s eventual killer, Angelina (Holly Taylor). And if that wasn’t enough stress, they have to contend with baby Eden still being MIA.
With the family unit so drastically changed, the actors also had to figure out how to play the new dynamic. “It was almost art imitating life,” Doran says. “I was the new guy. Everybody was getting to know me as we started filming this season, and we were building chemistry at the same time as these characters are trying to establish a new sort of adult relationship between each other and reconciling the dissonance of knowing someone is your son, brother, nephew, but not recognizing that physically. It’s a new body; it looks like a new person.”
“It’s the same thing with the actors,” he continues. “They have to play like I am Cal, but it’s a totally new actor with all this other stuff going on. And so there’s a little bit of that adjustment… Not that it was awkward or weird on set. But it’s us and the characters finding that rhythm. We got there, and we were able to pull from real life.”
For Doran, he was also hyperaware of how much Cal had been through in his life, both in what viewers have already seen and what they’ll discover in Season 4 via flashbacks.
“[Part of playing Cal has been] trying to navigate how do you show deep-seated trauma?” he says. “Because at this point, they’re scars. They’re not fresh wounds, but they are still very much there. They are driving all the interactions between these family members. And it’s something that is not so easily forgotten, especially by someone who has a whole different body they have to get used to.”
To find the core of Cal, Doran worked at “finding a baseline headspace for the character, and what that means just to exist in a day-to-day life, having been through what these people have been through,” he says. “It’s a hard line to follow. And I think it’s something that we all sort of worked out together, even as, like, the show was going. In certain scenes, it shows itself in different ways… They’re broken, they have a lot of damage and baggage they’re carrying with them.”
But in the middle of all the trauma, Cal does get a moment to just be a kid in Season 4. In Episode 7, directed by Dallas, Cal goes on an adventure with a friend.
“Oh my God, it was an absolute blast, for so many reasons,” Doran says. “My scene partner, Sarah [Marie Rodriguez, who plays Violet], is the coolest, and one of the better actors I’ve ever worked with — such a generous scene partner and lovely, lovely human. Josh directed that episode, and it was a blast to get to work with him in that new setting; he took to it like a fish to water. And such, like, a breath of fresh air for me as an actor and Cal as a character.”
“The show is — especially for Cal — such a chronicling of traumatic events and real deep family drama,” he continues. “And then there’s this breath in the middle there for him, where he gets to gain a little perspective and decides what’s important to him and how he wants to be spending his time. He takes charge and gets to be a kid and have fun, flirt, be happy, giggle and smile.”
And things came full circle for Doran, family-wise. Not only was his mom “so excited” about him landing the role, but also while they were filming a pivotal Cal scene in Episode 7 in Manhattan, Doran’s cousin was walking to work and happened to pass by filming. A stealth behind-the-scenes photo was snapped, “sent to my aunt, and then got to me,” Doran recalls. “It was a whole trip — I had never done anything like that, because I’ve never worked out here in New York, much less filmed in the middle of Manhattan. So that was pretty crazy.”
