More than two decades after Claire McLeod’s devastating final moments, Simmone Jade Mackinnon has revisited the scene that still brings her to tears.
Speaking in Nine’s exclusive Back to Drovers Run series, the actress who played Stevie Hall looked back on Claire’s death in McLeod’s Daughters — and revealed that what appeared on screen as one of television’s most polished and heartbreaking moments was anything but simple to film.
For Mackinnon, the memory has lost none of its emotional power.
She still considers Claire’s death one of the hardest moments the series ever produced.
The scene that changed McLeod’s Daughters forever
Claire McLeod’s death aired in 2003 and remains one of the defining moments of the original series.
Lisa Chappell’s character was trapped in a vehicle with her sister Tess and baby Charlotte after a crash left the ute precariously close to a cliff.
Tess managed to escape with Charlotte, but Claire sacrificed herself to ensure the baby was safe before the vehicle plunged over the edge.
The death marked a huge turning point for McLeod’s Daughters.
Claire had been at the centre of the drama from the beginning, running Drover’s Run alongside Tess and helping establish the emotional identity of the series.
Her absence changed the balance of the show — and eventually made room for Stevie Hall, the character Mackinnon would play for the remainder of the series.
Simmone still calls it one of television’s hardest deaths to watch
More than 20 years later, Mackinnon has not become numb to the scene.
In Nine’s Back to Drovers Run, she described it as “the worst TV death ever, in my opinion.”
She admitted that even now, she would cry watching it.
“I will cry like a baby watching that scene anytime,” she said.
That reaction is striking because Mackinnon was not one of the actors who carried the central Claire-and-Tess storyline.
She arrived as Stevie shortly before Claire’s death.
Yet the impact of that moment clearly stayed with the cast as the show underwent one of its biggest transformations.
What viewers never saw was just how chaotic the shoot was
On screen, Claire’s final sequence looks frighteningly seamless.
Behind the camera, however, Mackinnon remembers a very different atmosphere.
“It was such a chaotic shoot,” she said.
Yet somehow, all of that uncertainty disappeared in the finished episode.
“When you watch the final product, it’s so realistic,” she reflected.
Nine says Mackinnon also shared a behind-the-scenes detail in the exclusive video that viewers at the time would not have known.
The published article does not spell out that full detail in text, but her recollection makes one thing clear: producing the scene was a far more complicated experience than the final few minutes suggested.
The strange contrast between chaos and heartbreak
That contrast may be part of what makes the scene so powerful.
The production itself was hectic.
The finished scene was devastatingly controlled.
Claire is trapped.
Tess is desperate to save her.
The rope cannot reach.
The two sisters realise, almost at the same moment, that they are saying goodbye.
And then Claire makes the final choice.
The people making the programme knew exactly how important the scene had to be.
The audience did not know what was coming in quite the same way.
That difference helped make Claire’s death one of the moments that defined the series.
The actresses behind Claire and Tess later explained why it mattered so much
Mackinnon’s recollection fits with what Lisa Chappell and Bridie Carter have previously said about filming the sequence.
Chappell had decided to leave McLeod’s Daughters, and she believed Claire would never simply walk away from Drover’s Run.
“Claire would never leave the property, so we have to kill her off,” Chappell recalled telling creator Posie Graeme-Evans.
The story team then worked to give Claire an ending that honoured the qualities that defined her — her courage, compassion and loyalty to her family.
That became the cliffside sequence viewers still remember.
Bridie Carter was not just acting that day
For Bridie Carter, filming the scene involved more than Tess losing her sister.
She was also losing her closest on-screen partner.
Carter later said she was not only playing Tess saying goodbye to Claire, but also “Bridie losing Lisa.”
The cast’s own emotions became part of the atmosphere around the filming.
Chappell recalled the set as a “hushed atmosphere”, while Carter remembered a moment when the crew itself began crying.
That gives Mackinnon’s description of a chaotic shoot an especially interesting contrast.
There may have been technical complexity behind the scenes.
But emotionally, everyone understood exactly what they were filming.
One unsettling detail made the scene even more surreal
The production had to create the illusion of the vehicle going over the cliff.
Chappell later revealed that a dummy dressed in Claire’s clothing and wearing a wig was used for the shot.
She remembered watching the vehicle go over and finding the sight “very strange” because it looked disturbingly like her.
It was one of those moments where the line between actor and character became particularly blurred.
For viewers, Claire was falling.
For Chappell and the crew, they were watching a carefully constructed effect designed to make that fictional death feel horribly real.
Claire’s death became the emotional dividing line of the show
The episode did more than end a character’s journey.
It changed the entire shape of McLeod’s Daughters.
The original series had been built around Claire and Tess, their relationship and their shared struggle to protect Drover’s Run.
After Claire’s death, Tess had to navigate the farm and her grief without the sister who had originally anchored her there.
Stevie became increasingly important, while the series continued to introduce new characters and relationships over its eight-season run.
The series ultimately ran for eight seasons and 224 episodes, with Mackinnon remaining part of the main cast from Season 3 through Season 8.
Stevie was brought in at one of the show’s biggest turning points
Mackinnon joined the series as Stevie Hall in Season 3, shortly before Claire’s death.
Stevie was introduced as an old friend of Claire and Alex. Although she initially clashed with Tess, the two women gradually developed a close relationship.
Tess eventually asked Stevie to remain at Drover’s, and Stevie went on to become part-owner of the property.
That makes Mackinnon’s connection to Claire’s death especially interesting.
She arrived just as the series was losing its central character — then became one of the people helping carry its next chapter.
For Simmone, the scene has never become “just television”
Mackinnon’s latest comments suggest that Claire’s death still sits in a very unusual place in her memory.
She can recognise the craft behind it.
She can laugh about how chaotic the production was.
But she still cannot watch the finished scene without becoming emotional.
“If you were to put [the scene] on now, I would cry, for sure,” she said.
That response says something about the role the scene continues to play in the lives of the actors as well as viewers.
It was a piece of television.
But it was also the moment a group of performers realised that one of the most important people in their story was about to disappear.
And Claire’s legacy is still growing
The timing of Mackinnon’s reflection is especially striking because McLeod’s Daughters is once again moving back into the spotlight.
Stan announced in September 2026 that the series will return as a new Stan Original in 2027, marking 25 years since the original show began. The new production will be made by Werner Film Productions and is built on the world created by Posie Graeme-Evans.
No full cast has been officially announced for the new series yet.
But the revival has already prompted former cast members to revisit the original show’s most emotional moments.
And Claire’s death remains one of the hardest moments to talk about.
A goodbye that still works after all these years
There are countless television deaths that audiences remember for a few days, weeks or even months.
Claire McLeod’s is different.
More than 20 years on, the scene can still make the actors who filmed it emotional.
The audience still talks about it.
And the people who were there still remember how difficult it was to create.
Perhaps that is why Mackinnon’s words carry so much weight.
The scene was chaotic.
The production was complicated.
The finished result was brutally convincing.
And underneath all of it was the simplest truth of the story:
Claire was not supposed to survive.
Tess was never going to forget her.
And neither, it seems, was anyone who helped bring that goodbye to the screen. ❤️