Kristin at E! Online reports that Sarah Wayne Callies will be back as Dr. Sara Tancredi for season four of “Prison Break”! What? Huh! Yep, turns out it wasn’t Sara’s head in the box after all. The producers are bringing back Callies as a regular. Callies couldn’t return to shoot Sara’s “death” scene last season, so producers used a Polaroid photo of her from a wardrobe test.
Executive producer Matt Olmstead says that Sara’s been alive, although not necessarily well, this whole time:
It wasn’t because of the fans that we did that, but it was the combination of the fans’ reactions on the boards and emails, and people we, the writers, know personally would ask about it. And that led us all to have conversations internally, about the fact that there were a lot of people out there asking, “Is she really dead?”
We knew internally that when we didn’t get Sarah Wayne Callies to come back in season three and be there to portray her character’s death, as soon as it was written and filmed and we saw it on screen, we knew that it was actually a way you could describe how this wasn’t Sarah’s head in the box, basically. But at that point, we were going forward with other stories, so we kind of put that on the back burner.
But throughout that time we watched how people externally were really talking about what we thought might be the case, internally: The question of, “Is Sara Tancredi really dead?” So throughout season three we were mindful of references we’d make to and who took credit for killing her and all kinds of stuff regarding her death.
Ultimately, we came back after the strike to talk about season four, and that’s when a bunch of things kind of came together, and we then had the big conversation. Is Sarah really alive and can we bring her back? And once we opened it up, it happened really quickly.
Click here to read the whole interview with Olmstead in which he talks about bringing back Callies, the future of the doctor and Michael Scofield, and more about season four.
