As Sullivan’s Crossing Season 4 came to an end in Canada last month (catch up on Crave in Canada), with U.S. audiences now caught up when the finale aired on the CW on Monday, the biggest variable of the season was Maggie’s (Morgan Kohan) ex Liam, played by Marcus Rosner, reentering Maggie’s life and impacting her relationship with Cal (Chad Michael Murray). But as Rosner told Yahoo Canada, when he joined the show after briefly appearing at the end of Season 3, he was “naive” about how disruptive the role would be in Maggie’s new life at the Crossing.

“I had binged the first three seasons, and so I knew what I was walking into, but I really looked at myself as sort of like a supporting player, and just joining this ensemble,” Rosner said. “And now that I’m watching it, I’m like, oh, I’m right up front there, and I’m really messing things up.”

Throughout the season, we find out that Liam never just abandoned Maggie after they got married; he was taken hostage after his assignment and was held captive for three years. With everything Maggie knew flipped upside down and emotions high, she and Liam shared a kiss, leading to a breakup between her and Cal, but Maggie and Cal ultimately came back together in the season finale.

“I remember [showrunner Roma Roth] telling me about what she was seeing for this, and … I was like, this sounds incredible, to explore this depth of human experience and baggage that he’s carrying, … and I was surprised that they were going to be doing it on Sullivan’s Crossing,” Rosner said. “I think that’s one of the reasons I didn’t think about him in relation to … the ensemble as much, because he was having the singular experience and coming from the singular place, you almost feel like it comes from a different show. … The only way for me to execute that was to really stay locked in on Liam’s truthful existence.”

Marcus Rosner’s friendship with Morgan Kohan, Chad Michael Murray

Rosner knew Morgan Kohan before coming to Sullivan’s Crossing. They met in 2019 while working on a Hallmark movie together, and they stayed friends. As Rosner recalled, it was actually Kohan who sent a text message in 2024 asking if he was available in a week to play Maggie’s secret husband on Sullivan’s Crossing. Rosner was actually in Morocco at the time, but he flew to Nova Scotia, shot his Season 3 finale moments in two days, and then went back to Morocco, where his wife, producer Alison Kroeker, was attending a conference.

“Morgan is a big reason I’m on this show, her and Roma Roth,” Rosner said.

“Marcus is a sweet baby angel and I love him, and he is so supportive and kind and wonderful, ” Kohan told Yahoo Canada on the red carpet of The Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment Canada gala even in Toronto last month. “He’s the best at being like, ‘I got you.’”

While Rosner met Chad Michael Murray working on Sullivan’s Crossing, the actors formed a real friendship on the project.

“I think that Canada, CTV, CW, all of us should be very grateful to have him on, but he doesn’t approach it like that, he’s just very grateful to still be at the level that he’s at, at this point in his career,” Rosner said. “I talk to him on the phone like every other week for half an hour. … I think that men of our age don’t have a lot of people we can just chat with on the phone, and we’ve just started doing that.”

“I just became a dad, and we talk about being dads. … I tell him frequently, I’m like, you’re living the dream, man, not just because your career is so great, and you get to be sexy, Chad Michael Murray, but because this family of yours that you take everywhere. And that’s [something] that my wife and I learned from him and his beautiful wife, Sarah, is that they take all their kids to all the gigs that they do. They move as a unit. And I didn’t think that was possible, and that was one of the reasons I was sort of putting off having my own family, because I was afraid that I was going to have to make that sacrifice. … So I continue to learn things from Chad about being a leading man and being the lead on a show, and being a public-facing person.”

‘Emergency’ film: ‘I saw a lot of things as a child growing up’

But aside from Rosner’s acting roles, he’s proven to be a skilled and moving filmmaker, writing and directing his short film Emergency. The story is centred around two young children who meet in the waiting area of a hospital emergency room, and through the kindness and compassion of one little girl, a boy who is struggling in silence is able to have a “reclamation of innocence,” as Rosner described.

“I saw a lot of things as a child growing up on the west end of Edmonton, and so the short is really about having witnessed some domestic abuse towards my mother when I was a kid, and trying to process that and deal with that,” Rosner shared.

“I think that kids who, unfortunately, have to witness and go through things at a young age, there is a sort of early loss of innocence, and that is something that I find really heartbreaking. And so to me, it is really the story of reclamation of innocence, because the little girl that comes in is precocious and bubbly and energetic, and really can’t understand what this boy … is going through.”

The idea came to him one night in 2019, when Rosner couldn’t sleep, and he pictured two children having an exchange, set within a memory of him in an emergency room waiting for his mother to be treated.

“It was sort of semi-autobiographical, nonfiction mixed with fiction event,” Rosner said. “I wrote it within like 20 minutes; it just kind of came out of me all at once.”

While Rosner had the script, he lacked producing experience, so he sat on it, but it was a project that was on his mind year after year.

“I came to realize that I just had this mental block around tackling that material, around what creating that would do to the people that are kind of depicted in it, besides myself, and I didn’t know how they would receive it,” Rosner shared. “I was concerned about their feelings, and so I had a lot of reasons to put it off and put it off.”

“And then my wife and I started talking about starting our own family, and somebody mentioned to me, if there’s anything that you don’t resolve, you will take it into fatherhood, and your son will feel that to some extent. And so it really sort of incited this motivation to get it done and get it out, regardless of the consequences. And all the consequences have been remarkably beautiful in my life.”

While Rosner was frequently told that it would be difficult to get children to act in this project, given the subject matter, being an actor himself he knew how to pull the performances out of the film’s young stars. He also worked with his own “acting guru,” Andrew McIlroy.

“We both worked together with the kids, and I kept saying to them, … the magic trick with this will be these performances with these kids, and … we seemed to get it out of them,” Rosner said. “Part of it was that I knew I was starting with a blank slate with these kids, … they just accept everything at face value. They didn’t even really understand the depth of what they were tackling, which is good, because their characters didn’t necessarily either.”

“One of the strategies that we used is we just ran the cameras for the better part of both shoot days, and I just spent months pulling the footage that I was going to use. … I could just keep them in the flow, and then Andrew and I would give them directions and suggestions throughout, but then it kept them in a much more naturalistic place.”

The ‘cathartic’ experience

Working with his wife on Emergency was also particularly special because, as Rosner shared, she’s very much the girl in his life who enabled him to experience that reclamation of innocence.

“She is the girl, she is this person who came into my life and helped me sort of reclaim this joy and this innocence,” Rosner said. “I met my wife at a very dark time in my life, I wasn’t eight years old, … but what she provided for me in my life is what the girl is providing the boy in the short film.”

“So there were so many different layers of catharsis in this thing, and not the least of which was getting to do it with the love of my life.”

In terms of navigating his feelings around Emergency coming to completion, Rosner said it was emotional, but he also felt so satisfied in expressing this story, that it didn’t even matter to him how many people would watch the film.

“I was terrified to make it, and then we made it and we wrapped, and I broke down in tears on the drive home after the second shoot day, because … it was such a cathartic release,” he said. “And then I remember I got on the plane, … I had the little hard drive that the $20,000 of my personal investment, plus all our time and effort and energy, … and I remember looking at this thing like, if I misplaced this right now, it would all be gone. But I’d be OK. And that told me everything I needed to know about the process of making it.”

“After I edited it and finished it and showed it to my wife, and we had another cry, I was like, if nobody ever sees this, I’m good. … It’s all been gravy on top of gravy.”

While Rosner thrives as an actor, writing and directing are things he plans to continue to do in the future. Rosner shared that through his production company he’s currently in pre-production on a new project that explores the world of esports.

“It’s sort of a comedy slash four-quadrant family-based movie, so it’s going to be really exciting, we’re hoping to shoot that in the next few months,” Rosner said.

“I’m a big fan of psychological thriller type things, like Denis Villeneuve’s earlier stuff, like Prisoners is a movie that I think is perfection, and that kind of thing is my north star that I would love to gravitate towards. … I’m carving out somewhat of a distinction between what I do in terms of my writing and directing, and what I’ve done … as an actor.