THE DOCTOR IS IN

’90s Actress Reveals Secret Romance With Co-Star

The pair were entangled both on and off screen.

Jane Seymour, 75, has revealed that she had a brief romance with her Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, co-star and on-screen love interest, Joe Lando, 64.

The pair played Dr. Michaela “Mike” Quinn and Byron Sully, respectively, in the Western drama, which ran from 1993 to 1998. In the show, Michaela is a physician who leaves Boston and heads west to Colorado Springs, where she meets rugged outdoorsman Byron.

Seymour won a Golden Globe Award in 1996 for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series—Drama for her role and earned nominations for the same award in 1994, 1995, and 1997. After the show ended in 1998, Seymour and Lando starred in two subsequent made-for-TV Dr. Quinn movies.

The actors reunited on October 17 at 90s Con for a panel about the show, moderated by People executive editor Breanne L. Heldman.

Seymour said she and Lando fell in love in 1992 while filming the pilot episode, leading to a short-lived, secret relationship. Now, they’re each involved with different partners but remain close friends.

Lando has been married to his wife Kristen since 1997, and Seymour told People in June that she was engaged to emergency room physician John Zambetti.

But that first day on the Dr. Quinn set, sparks flew, both on-camera and off.

“I went, ‘Oh my God, I’ve not seen a man that looks that gorgeous as long as I can maybe ever remember except, you know, as an imaginary romance song or something,’” Seymour said on the panel.

“We really fell in love,” she continued. “That’s a secret. It’s not a secret, is it anymore?”

She said they realized their love for one another during an emergency flash flood while filming. They escaped the dangerous weather conditions in Lando’s pickup truck and got Mexican food and margaritas.

“We got out of there,” Seymour said. “It was the craziest thing ever. And it took us, like, $5, and then we realized that, you know, we had actually fallen in love.”

Ultimately, they broke up after realizing their long-term interests weren’t compatible. Seymour was older; she’d already had two children with her ex-husband David Flynn, and she “was never gonna be able to have [more]” (though she later had twins with James Keach, to whom she was married for over 20 years before divorcing in 2015).

“We realized that Joe really needed to—he had a plan,” Seymour said. “He had a, was it a four-child white picket fence [plan]?”

After their breakup, filming was “difficult” and “tough,” Seymour told Us Weekly.

“We didn’t actually talk to each other, other than in dialogue or making out, for about six or seven years,” she said, adding, “We obviously clearly loved one another and realized we couldn’t be actually in real-life together. I think we just played it [off] as Michaela and Sully.”

She said that the breakup gave their characters extra “sexual tension that we wouldn’t have had if we’d been playing happy households or something.”

In June, Lando told People in a different article that he and Seymour are now “kind of like an old married couple,” despite their lack of romance. Seymour agreed.

“We actually can finish one another’s sentences. We could predict what one another’s going to get upset about.”

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

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