Elisha Cuthbert has returned to screens for the first time in four years, and the reason for her long absence turns out to be a deliberate one rooted in motherhood rather than a lack of opportunity.
The Canadian actress, best known for playing Kim Bauer across nine seasons of 24 and for comedic turns in Happy Endings and The Ranch, stepped back from acting after 2022’s The Cellar and Bandit when the demands of raising two children made the prospect of working feel like the wrong choice. Speaking to Today, she was direct about her reasoning. “After we had our second, I realized — because I had worked all through the first four years of our first child — it was really hard to separate that mom from the working person I was,” she said. “When we had our second, I just felt like I didn’t want to waste any second of it and I didn’t want to be on set.”
The role that pulled her back is Sue Florek, a warmly drawn matriarch in Prime Video’s Every Year After, an adaptation of Carley Fortune’s bestselling novel Every Summer After. All eight episodes dropped June 10. The series, developed by Amy B. Harris and Leila Gerstein, follows two childhood sweethearts — Percy (Sadie Soverall) and Sam (Matt Cornett) — who reunite at a lakeside Ontario town after Sue’s death from cancer forces a reckoning with their unresolved past. Cuthbert’s character, though largely present in flashback and memory, anchors the show’s emotional core.
The timing felt right, she said, precisely because her children are now in school full time. “I have the space and the energy and the heart to kind of leave them and do it.” She joined the production in September 2025, shooting in Vancouver through mid-September.
The series has drawn inevitable comparisons to The Summer I Turned Pretty, another Prime Video YA drama built around a dying maternal figure and a lakeside summer romance. Cuthbert addressed that parallel plainly: she hadn’t watched the show when she took the role and made a point of reading Fortune’s novel to build Sue from scratch, without any external reference point shaping her performance.
Critical reception has been mixed. Reviewers praised Soverall and Cornett’s chemistry and the show’s lakeside atmosphere, with some calling it an effective summer watch. Others found the plotting predictable and felt the series leaned too heavily on the template its predecessor established.
