Claudia Karvan opens up on what happens to Angie in the final season of Stan drama Bump

Claudia Karvan has had a storied career in Australian film and television: Love My Way, The Secret Life Of Us, Saved, Spirited, Dating The Enemy, The Heartbreak Kid, just to name a few.

But as her latest role wraps up, the bittersweet taste she’s left with tells her Bump was unlike anything else.

The award-winning drama, which Karvan co-created and also stars in as Angie, the matriarch of the Charmers-Davis family, is finishing up for good with its soon-to-be-released fifth season.

It’s set to be an emotional final chapter for fans; while we don’t want to give anything away, the season sees plenty of joyous moments (Oly, played by Nathalie Morris, is pregnant again and eagerly awaiting her second child) but it also sees the return of Angie’s cancer.

There was emotional turmoil for Karvan too, as she stepped away from a character she loves so much.

“I felt surprisingly sad a few weeks after (we finished filming), when the dust settled,” she explains. “When it sunk in, (saying goodbye to playing Angie) it felt like … a loss.

“Obviously, it’s best not to overstay your welcome. We had a very clear vision as to how we wanted to end the show — and we got that opportunity to breathe life into that.”

Their idea was first formed way back in season one, nutted out as she and co-creator Kelsey Munro first began sketching out storylines for Oly, Angie and their family.

“It’s a miracle that we actually got to do it,” Karvan admits.

“So I suppose it really was bittersweet, because a part of me feels relieved, but I also don’t think anything else like this will ever happen in my lifetime or my career. This is a one-off, and it’s been a really unique and charmed run.”

The series has struck a chord with fans for its often heartbreaking, always charming portrayal of a complicated, messy, loving blended family.

Over five seasons, audiences have fallen in love with the Hernandez Chalmers-Davis clan, right from when their lives first intersected with the surprise birth of a daughter to high school student Oly Davis (Nathalie Morris) who had no idea she was pregnant.

Oly went on to raise her baby with high school boyfriend, Santi Hernandez (Carlos Sanson Jr), their lives becoming enmeshed with their families on both sides, knitting together a chaotic, but ultimately heartwarming tale of a family making it work.

This final instalment precis promises fans a “peek into the future” and hints at where everyone will end up, jumping from past to present to show they’re faring “tackling the never-ending hurdles life seems to throw their way as they face Angie’s returned cancer diagnosis, while also trying to celebrate the joy of Oly’s second pregnancy”.

And while the series often heads to darker territory, true to form, it does so with a lightness of touch — no mean feat.

“It was good to make the show come full circle and confront mortality while a new life was about to come into the world,” says Karvan.

“There was some sort of creative symmetry about that.”

The return of Angie’s cancer means that it won’t be smooth sailing ahead for any of them; Karvan admits she was worried about how audiences might react to the direction of the final season.

“It was nerve-racking,” she says. “Even when we tackled Angie’s cancer storyline the first time around it was nerve-racking. But I got some really fantastic personal messages through social media, one particularly from a woman who said, ‘I’m terminal, and I’ve got metastasised breast cancer, and I just thank you so much for showing me as a human being. I am not just a patient. I’m not just carrying a disease. I am a human being’.”

Karvan, who also created the award-winning Doctor Doctor series on Nine, admits she and Munro took a lot of creative risks with their final season. But they felt they needed to give all the characters in the ensemble the send-off they deserved, “because, essentially, we have an audience that keeps coming back to the show”.

“They love the characters, and we don’t have to bring them back another time, so it was a case of ‘let’s do what we want, and be brave’,” Karvan says.

Helping out in the writers’ room this time around was series star Morris, who co-wrote episode five.

For Karvan, who got her start on the other side of the camera thanks to the mentorship of creators like John Edwards (who, alongside Dan Edwards is executive producers on this series) it’s been a full circle moment.

“It was great, empowering her like that,” she says. “For Kelsey and I, it’s one of the best parts of our job: to uncover talent and give people an opportunity, and we benefited as well, having her mind in there.

“She’s so alive to the show; so close to all the cast and knows them so intimately. She brought all that to the writing.”

Karvan has another busy year ahead; she has filmed an episode of SBS’s acclaimed genealogy series, Who Do You Think You Are, and will also appear alongside her Bump co-star Steph Tisdale in episodes of Great Australian Road Trips, also for SBS.

“We drive around three different states, Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia, gasbagging and seeing amazing landscapes and chatting to people,” Karvan says. “It was a really fun gig.”

She also has more as-yet-unannounced projects of her own on the way.

Karvan says she feels blessed to have had such a varied career, and to be at a point where she can pick and choose what comes next.

And like the characters on Bump, she is looking to the future with optimism.

“It’s funny. When you are immersed in it, you don’t understand the context,” she muses.

“Things only make sense in retrospect. What’s that great line? ‘Life has to be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards’. And that is so true.”

Bump season five premieres on December 26 on Stan.