It’s 3:17 a.m. on the freezing Tiergarten set in late March 2025. The crew has long gone home. Only two people remain under the sodium lights: Harriet Herbig-Matten, wrapped in a blanket that still smells of fake rain, and Damian Hardung, hoodie soaked through from the final take. They are crying. Not acting-crying. Real, ugly, can’t-breathe tears.

Because the script pages in their hands, the original version of Episode 6, didn’t end with Ruby and James sobbing in each other’s arms under the swell of “Chasing Cars.” It ended with them breaking up. Permanently. No embrace. No hope. Just Ruby walking away into the night while James screamed her name until his voice gave out. Fade to black. Roll credits.

That was the version showrunner Ute Fischbach and the writers’ room had fought tooth-and-nail to keep. That was the version Harriet and Damian refused to film.

And tonight, for the first time anywhere, they are telling the full story of how two 23-year-olds forced one of 2025’s biggest global hits to rewrite its soul.

The script arrived on Valentine’s Day 2025, cruel cosmic timing. Titled “Reaching for the Stars – FINAL,” it was brutal even by Maxton Hall standards. After Ruby’s expulsion, the bakery buy-out, Lydia’s pregnancy reveal, and Mortimer’s will betrayal, the original climax was merciless. Ruby confronted James in the courtyard, told him their worlds were irrevocably incompatible, that loving him had cost her everything: Oxford, her family’s livelihood, her future. James, drunk on grief and whisky, begged on his knees. Ruby kissed him once, soft, final, devastating, whispered “Thank you for teaching me how to dream,” and walked away. Final shot: James alone on the lacrosse field at dawn, hurling his stick into the empty stands while Snow Patrol played.

Harriet read it on the U-Bahn home. She got off two stops early because she was hyperventilating. Damian read it in his trailer and punched a hole through the plasterboard.

“I felt physically sick,” Harriet says now, nine months later, curled up on a hotel sofa in London the night before the Season 2 premiere. “Ruby had fought so hard for agency, for self-respect, for Oxford. And the message was: love a rich boy and lose everything? That’s the lesson? No. Absolutely not.”

Damian’s voice is still hoarse from screaming in that unfilmed scene. “James spent two seasons learning that love isn’t possession. The original ending made him regress into a toxic mess who couldn’t let go. I refused to play that version of him. I love James too much to betray him like that.”

The next morning they marched, unannounced, into the writers’ room in Potsdam. No agents. No publicists. Just two actors clutching dog-eared scripts and the kind of raw desperation that makes executives listen.

“We literally got on our knees,” Damian says, laughing through the memory, though his eyes are wet. “I’m not even joking. We knelt in front of Ute and said, ‘Please don’t do this to them. Don’t do this to the fans who stayed up all night for Season 1’s kiss. Don’t punish Ruby for daring to love across the class divide.’”

Harriet’s voice cracks. “I told them I would rather walk away from the biggest job of my life than film Ruby giving up. Because that’s what it felt like: surrender. And Ruby Bell does not surrender.”

The room was silent for a full minute. Then head writer Fey von Studnitz asked the question that changed everything: “What would you film instead?”

What followed was forty-eight hours of pure chaos and creation. Harriet and Damian camped out in the production offices with Ute Fischbach, Fey, and lead director Martin Schreier. They ordered currywurst at 4 a.m., cried over cold coffee, and rewrote the final eight pages from the ground up.

They wanted the hug, the single, wordless embrace that said everything language couldn’t. They wanted Ruby to stay, not because she was weak, but because she was choosing the fight, choosing James, choosing love even when it cost her the world. They wanted James to collapse into her instead of screaming after her, because sometimes surrender looks like holding on tighter.

They argued that the audience had invested two seasons in this impossible love story. Ending it with a clean, tragic break would feel like punishment, not payoff. “We weren’t asking for a fairy tale,” Harriet explains. “We were asking for honesty. Real love isn’t walking away when it gets hard. Real love is staying in the rain and crying together until the storm passes.”

Damian nods. “And James needed to earn the right to be held. He’d spent the whole season pushing her away. The hug wasn’t forgiveness handed on a plate, it was Ruby saying, ‘I see you breaking, and I’m still here.’ That’s braver than any break-up speech.”

By dawn on the third day, the new pages were done. The embrace was in. The walk-away was gone. The “Chasing Cars” needle-drop was locked. And when they finally shot it, weeks later, under real Berlin rain at 2 a.m., the entire crew was crying with them.

“It felt sacred,” Harriet whispers. “Like we’d saved something that mattered.”

The ripple effects were immediate. Prime Video executives, initially nervous about softening the gut-punch, watched the dailies and green-lit Season 3 on the spot, something that had been quietly on ice until that moment. The leaked set photos from Oxford that sent the internet into meltdown last month? Those scenes only exist because Harriet and Damian refused to let Ruby and James die in that courtyard.

Even Mona Kasten, the author of the original Save Me trilogy, sent them a voice note after reading the new ending: “You fought for them harder than I ever did on the page. Thank you.”

Now, with Season 2 shattering records (Prime’s biggest international launch week ever, topping charts in 127 countries), the irony is delicious. The ending fans call “heartbreaking but hopeful,” the one that spawned a million reaction videos of people screaming “DON’T YOU DARE BREAK UP” at their TVs, almost never existed.

Harriet laughs when I point this out. “Imagine if we’d filmed the original. The internet would have burned Berlin to the ground.”

Damian grins. “We’d be in witness protection by now.”

Instead, they’re on a world press tour, fielding questions about Season 3’s Oxford arc, the baby shower blow-out, and whether Ruby will finally wear James’s Beaufort ring. They won’t spoil, but their eyes give everything away: the fight was worth it.

As we wrap the interview, Harriet pulls out her phone and shows me a photo from that 3 a.m. night on set. She and Damian, soaked, mascara-streaked, arms wrapped around each other exactly like Ruby and James in the final frame.

“This is why we begged,” she says softly. “Because sometimes the characters become more real than you are. And you have to protect them.”

Damian leans his head on her shoulder, the same way James does with Ruby in every leaked Season 3 still. “We didn’t just save the ending,” he murmurs. “We saved the soul of the show.”

And somewhere out there, millions of fans who sobbed through that hug, who immediately hit “play next season” the second the credits rolled, know exactly how close we came to losing it all.

Thank you, Harriet. Thank you, Damian. For getting on your knees. For refusing to let love lose.

The world between us is a brighter place because of it. 🌟