Across several seasons of Virgin River, Zibby Allen has become one of the show’s most dependable emotional anchors. As Brie Sheridan, she brings a grounded intensity that has helped shape some of the Netflix drama’s most affecting material, giving Brie a sense of strength, vulnerability, and quiet resolve that continues to resonate. With Season 7 now streaming, the character enters another complicated stretch as romance, loyalty, and the emotional fallout of life in Virgin River push her into new territory.

In conversation with Stardust, Allen reflects on returning to Brie year after year and finding fresh layers within a role audiences have come to know so well. She discusses how her connection to the character has deepened over time, what this season demanded from her as a performer, and how she approached material that called for vulnerability, restraint, and emotional range.

Virgin River has such a devoted audience, and Brie’s story has expanded so much over time. What has it been like continuing to play her and uncover new sides of her season by season?

Zibby Allen: It's a rare privilege, and one I genuinely don't take for granted. The long form creates something you just can't manufacture in a shorter run—room for nuance, for new dimensions to emerge naturally, for me to pay attention to the larger ecosystem of the job. Not just the performance piece, but the set, the people, the craft of it all. I've learned so much more about how things work by staying in one place long enough to really look around.

And then there's the more personal side of it—the overlap between Brie's inner life and mine has become a really sweet, sometimes profound thing. I feel like she came to me in this life to point me toward parts of myself that wanted more attention, or just needed to be brought out. I've done a lot of growing as she's lived with me. That's not something I could have anticipated, and it's been one of the coolest, most unexpected gifts of this job.

What has surprised you most about the way fans have responded to Brie as her story has deepened season by season?

Zibby Allen: Well—people always joke that Virgin River is the show everyone's mom loves, which I find hilarious and kind of great. And look, part of what that tells you is that mom's libido is very much alive and well. The Brie and Brady passion is real, and the fans are loud about it! Ben and I have built something genuine on screen over the seasons, and I think people feel that.

But beyond the heat of it, what's actually moved me is how the audience has responded to Brie as a whole person, finding her place. I think her sense of belonging in Virgin River has been a gradual thing—shaped, yes, by the writers, but honestly also by the fans, who've made clear what resonates. Her love story, her work as a lawyer showing up for her community, solving crimes, advocating for people who need it—and then there's her relationship with Jack, which I love so much. Siblings navigating adulthood alongside each other is such a rich, underexplored dynamic on TV, and I feel lucky we get to bring that to life. All of it together has made for a really wonderful evolution for Brie, and I think the audience has had a hand in that, too.

What do you think Virgin River has challenged you to do as a performer that other roles may not?

Zibby Allen: One of the more genuinely challenging—and rewarding—things about this job is that because it's an ensemble show, I have to carry really substantial storylines that are, by necessity, compressed by the format. There's no room to sprawl. So I have to keep the full emotional weight of Brie's story alive and present, woven into just a handful of scenes per episode. Every moment has to count and carry something larger beneath it. All of us on Virgin River feel that—we're deeply protective of the integrity of our characters' storylines, and there's a real art to threading the needle between what lives off-screen and what lands on screen. You have to trust the iceberg principle: that what the audience can't see is still felt. And honestly? The cast is so extraordinary that I think you could spin off every single main character and have a compelling show. Everyone's story runs that deep. Everyone is that good.

Looking back on this season as a whole, did spending so much time with Brie shift anything for you personally?

Zibby Allen: Of course—she always does, in some way. Playing Brie has helped me develop a tougher skin. She's taught me more about nuance, about sitting with grey areas rather than needing everything resolved into neat categories of right and wrong. One thing we genuinely share is a deep sense of justice—but where I think my own sense of integrity and principle has sometimes gotten in the way of allowing for imperfection, Brie lives there, despite herself. She has to. She's deeply in love with someone who operates in the grey, and her tolerance for that complexity has become my own in many ways.

Her battle between head and heart is something I relate to deeply, too—but in order to really inhabit that in her, I've had to get more honest about how that tension actually lives in my own body. Learning to tell the difference between what my head is telling me and what my heart is saying—that's been real work. So yes, I shift with her and along with her. That's just how it goes at this point. She's in me, and I think I'm in her too.

You’ve built such a varied body of work across drama, genre, and long-running ensemble series. At this point in your career, what kinds of roles are you actively looking for that maybe you were not ready for earlier on?

Zibby Allen: I'm really drawn to the idea of period drama—something like early 1900s American Southwest feels exciting to me right now (maybe because I just started riding horses in this last season of VR and I loved it). And honestly, anything filming in the UK is appealing on a practical level too, since I'm already there quite a bit—my husband is British, so we have a real life there. But beyond geography, I just feel ready to sink my teeth into something that stretches a different part of me creatively.

I love occupying the world of Virgin River—genuinely. And at the same time, I'm aware that I have a lot more of my creative heart left to show beyond this genre. I come from theatre. The first decade of my career was largely comedic character work. There's real range in my history that I'm ambitious to revisit and build on. My creative diversity and my appetite for this work are both very much still in motion—I feel like I'm just getting started in some ways, and that's an exciting place to be.

You’ve spoken about wellness, nature, and crafting herbal tonics and teas with intention. Where did that connection begin for you, and what do those rituals give you that the film/TV industry often cannot?

Zibby Allen: Because I'm extremely ambitious and give a lot to my work, I need a significant counterbalance to the noise and intensity of this industry. Nature, wellness, and our life in Scotland really provide that. They always have, in some form. I've long been interested in supporting my health naturally, but lockdown is really where it deepened. I was fortunate not to be directly impacted by COVID, which left me with something rare in this industry—genuine spare time. I used it. I took herbal classes, absorbed everything I could, and eventually started making my own infusions and tonics. What came out of that has been genuinely transformative for my health in ways that surprised me.

It's all connected now—the herbs, listening to my body, using nature as a support system, spending time in places like Scotland that ground me and feed my perspective outside of the industry bubble. That whole ecosystem has become pretty much a necessity. It's how I stay balanced enough to keep doing the work I love at the level I want to do it.

Virgin River is now streaming on Netflix.