La Brea Boss, Star Talk New Step in Izzy’s Final-Season Journey: ‘It’s an Opportunity for Her to Shine’

Matt Webb Mitovich

The following contains spoilers from the Jan. 23 episode of NBC’s La Brea.

It was quite fitting, given the movie musical now playing in theaters, that La Brea‘s Izzy Harris recently met the one Mean Girl in 10,000 B.C.

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But in the third episode of the sci-fi drama’s six-episode farewell season, Izzy (played by original cast member Zyra Gorecki) and the aforementioned Leyla (newcomer Edyll Ismail) warmed up to each other.

While on a boar hunt, Izzy opened up to Leyla about those who tried to put limits on her after the accident that lost her a leg. Leyla in turn shared how her wish to be a warrior clashed with her mother Ruth’s preference that she position herself for a village council seat.

Followed by some tar pit and wild boar drama, then a medical scare for Izzy’s father Gavin (who got zonked by some memory-recovering elixir), the young women found themselves expressing some feelings in the glow of a cozy campfire.

That led to some holding of hands, and a near-kiss.

Surveying Izzy and Leyla’s evolving dynamic, Gorecki recently told TVLine, “We see this big clash between the two of them in the beginning. Because if you put two strong personalities in a room, there are going to be some disagreements! And then all of a sudden, Izzy has this really emotional moment and Leyla connects to that, and they see the similarities in each other and go, ‘Hey, maybe you’re not as bad as I thought you were.’ And we see that friendship flourish.”

TVLine also asked La Brea creator/showrunner David Appelbaum about Izzy’s final-season journey, including her first steps toward being a bow-wielding warrior and now her first post-sinkhole romance.

Izzy’s LGBTQ relationship is “one of those ideas that we’ve talked about,” Appelbaum shared.

Over the series’ first two seasons, “We haven’t had a chance to really delve into Izzy as much as we’ve wanted to, because there were so many characters [to service],” Appelbaum explained. “But now, in this season, we really wanted to put a focus on who she is, and getting a deeper understanding of her as a character.”

Pairing Izzy with the equally strong-willed Leyla “was really an opportunity for her to shine,” Appelbaum added, “and to learn more about the kind of person that she is — and what she’s going to become.”

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