‘Dr. Quinn’ Stars Jane Seymour & Joe Lando Reveal How They Fell in Love — and Why They’re Closer Than Ever

At 75, Jane Seymour is still one of the coolest people you could hope to meet. Just ask the fans who lined up throughout 90s Con weekend for a little time with television’s beloved Dr. Quinn and her leading man, Joe Lando. The pair reunited for a panel during the fifth anniversary convention, held October 16–18 in Hartford, Connecticut, treating fans to stories about Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, their real-life romance and a friendship that has carried them through far more than any television script could cover.

Though their real-life romance ended long ago, their affection for each other remains unmistakable. Sitting side by side, the actors behind Dr. Michaela Quinn and Byron Sully made it clear that their love story didn’t end when their romance did.

“We really fell in love for a while,” Lando acknowledged.

“That’s a secret,” Seymour teased, before reconsidering. “It’s not a secret, is it, anymore?”

Seymour recalled accepting the role at a particularly difficult time in her life. Her marriage was falling apart, she had two young children, and her financial circumstances had left her desperate to work. Then she read the script.

“I read it, and I was so moved by it,” she remembered. “I read it again, and I’m crying.”

Things moved quickly after that. She accepted the job at 10 am, was being fitted for costumes that afternoon and started work at 6 a.m. the following morning. Meeting her handsome costar provided an unexpected bright spot.

“Now I am hired to play someone that’s going to fall in love with this gorgeous guy,” she recalled. “And he turned out to be a really lovely guy.”

Lando, meanwhile, found reasons to linger on set after his scenes were finished. Seymour noticed him watching her work and asked what he was doing.

“Oh, just figured I could learn something,” he told her.

Their budding attraction took a dramatic turn when a flash flood threatened the ranch where they were filming. Seymour was in a Cadillac as water rose around it, prompting Lando to pull alongside her in his pickup.

“He had a pickup truck. Of course he had a pickup truck,” Seymour said. “So you can imagine, I am now climbing out of the window of a Cadillac into the window of a pickup truck.”

Once safely away, the pair found Mexican food and margaritas. Getting to Beverly Hills took about five hours, Lando recalled.

“And then we realized that we had actually fallen in love,” Seymour said.

Their romance proved less enduring than their television counterparts’ relationship, but even when they weren’t getting along off camera, Michaela and Sully’s chemistry remained intact.

“They said ‘action,’ and it was Sully and Michaela,” Seymour explained. “It was transcendent.”

These days, their families are close, too.

“Now he is married to the most fabulous woman, who I’m very, very fond of,” Seymour said. “And his kids and mine all grew up together, and we know each other really well. We’re like two joint families.”

The flood wasn’t the only adventure the actors remembered from their days filming outdoors. There were rattlesnakes, mountain lions, yellow jackets and fires close enough to send ash falling onto their hair and costumes.

“It was actually very dangerous to work on Dr. Quinn because there was no studio,” Seymour said.

“But so much fun,” Lando added.

Being away from a studio also had its advantages. Lando remembered network visitors arriving in fancy clothes and nice shoes, eager to take credit for the hit series, only to discover the less glamorous realities of the location.

“They’d come once and get all dusty and dirty and be out there in the sun,” he recalled. “And then they just stopped coming.”

The wardrobe alone gave Seymour plenty of exercise. Asked about the amount of running on the show, she explained that getting between her trailer and the set was a workout in itself.

“I would always be wearing winter clothes, and 10 layers of them, in the summer when it was 90 degrees,” she said.

Not every challenge involved the elements. Lando remembered a deer that proved considerably less cooperative than his human costar.

“Beat the crap out of me,” he said.

Seymour, naturally, had better luck with the animal.

“You didn’t like it that I could control the deer,” she reminded him, recalling his proposed solution: “It’s a bad deer. Get another deer.”

For all those unpredictable moments, the pair also remembered the care that went into the show’s biggest occasions, particularly Michaela and Sully’s wedding.

“You were nervous like a real bride,” Lando told Seymour.

“Will Joe show up?” she recalled wondering. “Usually the groom is there waiting, and the bride comes late.”

Seymour helped bring the wedding dress to life with vintage lace she had collected in England and fabric decorated with tiny seed pearls. A designer who had worked on Princess Diana‘s wedding dress even contributed to the final fitting.

“So he put his royal hands on it as well,” she said.

Their latest screen reunion trades frontier life for modern mysteries. In the fifth season of Acorn TV’s Harry Wild, Seymour’s crime-solving retired literature professor meets Lando’s Pierce Kennedy, a charming new state pathologist.

According to Seymour, she had been suggesting the pairing for some time.

“I kept saying, ‘Why don’t we bring Joe in?’”

Production and union complications initially stood in the way, but the writers wanted him, too. Once the reunion finally happened, colleagues noticed a familiar spark.

“They kept saying, ‘Wow, there’s just this chemistry between them. What’s going on?’” Seymour recalled.

But perhaps the most moving example of their bond came from life away from the cameras. After Lando lost his home in a fire, Seymour welcomed him and his family into hers, along with their animals.

“She let seven people come into her house, two dogs and two birds,” he said. “Imagine one day you have stuff, and the next day your whole life is gone.”

Seymour also helped him secure a place to live by cosigning for him. “This is something normal people don’t do,” Lando said. “And that’s her.”

Seymour, in turn, remembered how the former restaurant cook took charge of meals, using a small stove on her balcony and turning an awful situation into an opportunity to care for the people around him.

“If I try to cook, he always just grabs the instruments away from me and takes over,” she said. “So he cooked all these amazing meals.”

The two may have first captured viewers’ hearts with a television romance, but the stories they shared in Hartford offered something more lasting: two people who still make each other laugh and know they can count on one another when it matters.

As Seymour put it, “Now we’re even closer than ever.”