Chase Stokes Reveals He Saved His “Outer Banks ”Costar Madison Bailey from Drowning on Set: ‘She Was Not Able to Breathe’

The 33-year-old actor said he “jumped” off a boat to save Bailey’s life

NEED TO KNOW

• Chase Stokes has said he once saved his costar Madison Bailey’s life on the Outer Banks set
• “I jumped off the boat and I realized that she was not able to breathe underwater,” the actor told Entertainment Weekly, saying he’d noticed he “couldn’t see Bails’ face anymore” as she was filming a scene in the water
• Bailey said Stokes was like a “fish” filming underwater scenes, while she found those the “hardest”

Chase Stokes is opening up about the time he saved his Outer Banks costar, Madison Bailey, from drowning.

While speaking to Entertainment Weekly in a game of “Lie v. Lie,” Stokes, 33, and Bailey, 27, took it in turns to try and figure out whether their costar was telling the truth while answering multiple questions.

At one point, Stokes insisted the most challenging scenes for him were the underwater ones, to which Bailey called him a “fish” and said that wasn’t true, insisting they were the “hardest” for her.

Stokes plays John B. Routledge in the show, which is coming to a close after the recently-released fifth season, while Bailey stars as Kiara Carrera.

Recalling a time he saved Bailey’s life, Stokes said during the Entertainment Weekly chat, “We were in Barbados and there’s a scene when JJ [Rudy Pankow] gets knocked off of a boat, and he’s unconscious in the water and Kiara’s holding him up.”

Stokes added that he realized he “couldn’t see Bails’ face anymore,” as she admitted they’d already been treading water “for like a minute” before the director called action.

“It was really hard to communicate,” Stokes went on. “I was like, ‘Oh no, Bails has been under there for a while.’ So I jumped off the boat and I realized that she was not able to breathe underwater.”

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Bailey admitted she couldn’t “swim closer to the boat,” while Stokes remembered, “Everyone thought it was like, ‘Oh, wow, they’re in the scene. This is great.’ ”

“I was like, ‘No, she’s drowning.’ I was like, ‘Hey, that’s not acting!’ ” the actor joked, as Bailey added, “Everyone’s like, ‘Wow, she’s really good!’ ”

Before discussing the scary moment, Bailey jokingly told Stokes, “You actually make a bad day worse … When I’m struggling to barely swim, Chase is like [swimming easily]. I swear he’s breathing under there just to make me look bad.”

Stokes’ comments come after he spoke to PEOPLE in December about how he felt regarding OBX coming to a close after around seven years.

The actor admitted he’d watched it go from a “little tiny boat show…to a global phenomenon,” insisting he and the cast were “thankful for the run, and we’re ready for it to be done.”

“We want the story to end on the right note versus [turning] four seasons into season nine and we’re going after aliens or something,” Stokes told PEOPLE. “We want to cut the chord before we lose the plot.”

Stokes recalled of his audition and a discussion he’d previously had with co-creator Jonas Pate, “When I got thrown out here, I kind of accepted that this was probably my last shot at this industry and at this scale.” 

“I thought I’d bombed the audition with Jonas. And I sat on the curb of the front of the production office and I had a full mental breakdown, sobbing,” he continued. “He came out and he put his arm around me and he said, ‘Hey, I don’t know what you’re going through. I don’t know what you are feeling right now, but if you can bring this right here back into the room, I promise it’s going to be magical.’ “

“There’s just so much gratitude because I was a kid who had a dream and no access to an industry, never really even knew what the process was,” Stokes said. “I’ve checked so many boxes that I thought it would span the course of the next 40 years of my career.” 

He added that after all this time, his crew and castmates have become “true family.”

Outer Banks season 5 is now on Netflix.

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