Sweet Magnolias’ Dion Johnstone Explains Erik’s Struggle to Escape the Whitley Way

Sweet Magnolias Season 5 highlighted the life of Chef Erik Whitley, and Dion Johnstone brought his A game.

We first saw Erik’s home in Season 4, but viewers will finally understand his personality after meeting his family and learning about the Whitley Way.

TV Fanatic was lucky enough to chat with Dion Johnstone recently, and he talked about how the Whitley Way shaped Erik and how it interfered with his relationship with Helen.

We also dissected all the intricacies of the wedding, as I’ve longed for this day for a long time, and Dion knows I’m an Erik and Helen shipper.

Check out the interview below.

Hi Dion. I loved this season because we saw much more of Erik.

Yes, Sweet Magnolias Season 5 did a deep dive into all things Erik.

 If you have any questions about him, there’s so much mystery to this man. It’s finally laid bare in this season, where you understand the operating system that he’s working from and why he is the way that he is. This season was such a wonderful deep dive for that.

It was because last season we actually saw Erik’s house, but this season we finally got to meet his family.

It’s great. Seeing Erik’s house gave you insight into the heart of this man. But even there, by the end of the season, you start to realize that even his home is a cultivated version of himself.

By meeting his family, you see that many aspects of his personality haven’t been fully integrated because he hasn’t yet done the work of truly standing on his own two feet with his parents.

Part of what he’s done is just distanced himself from it and run away from it all so that he could find the space to be who he wanted to be, but not realizing that the tethers are still there.

With this impending wedding happening, all that’s going to be untied. And he’s got to figure a way to reconcile his past with himself.

Why do you think he was so affected by the Whitley Way?

Family ties run deep. You can spend your whole life untangling stuff that happened in your past. 

There’s been an incredible amount of pressure on Erik since childhood to carry on this family legacy. This family corporation helped them thrive, but also insulated them from the outside world.

There was quite a lot of expectation for him to carry that forward. Being unable to live up to that pressure and, on one level, running away from it all meant he left his brother.

That’s a relationship that’s been unhealed because all of the weight of that then fell on his brother’s shoulders.

I also believe that in his past, his relationship with Vera was never accepted by his family. One of his core wounds was that he never had their support when they were married.

So, when she passed, he never went to them for support in his grieving, so they weren’t able to be there with them in his grieving process.

 So he’s afraid now that, as he enters this new phase in his life with this beautiful relationship with Helen, they won’t be able to accept her for who she is, and he’s going to end up going through all this again.

He’s certainly not giving up, Helen, but his great fear is that if push comes to shove, he is going to lose his family. He knows they love him. They express love in a different form from what he’s come to accept and celebrate.

So, how does he protect both his family and Helen, and how does he protect the world he’s trying to create, so these two ships can meet without colliding and the wedding isn’t a disaster?

Absolutely. Do you think that Helen and his niece, Jessica, helped Erik get there?

I do in different ways. Helen is a reminder that what they’re building is a covenant. That means they have to come together and lay their fears, secrets, hopes, and dreams at each other’s feet so they can tackle this mountain as a team.

Throughout Sweet Magnolias Season 5, one of the big lessons Erik needs to learn is that you can’t do it all yourself. You have to trust the community, trust the people, and ultimately trust your partner to help you bear that burden.

Helen is a constant reminder to be present and to be real with who he is and what he wants. Don’t perform, don’t hide. Don’t try to manage the scenario. Lay it at my feet, let me see what it is, and then we can start to deal with it.

Jessica’s such a wonderful element because she’s a key to his past. She’s from his family, so she knows the operating system, and she’s running away from it herself.

In a way, she represents his younger self. He sees himself in her and wants to help her live a freer, more open life. But in her time with him, she helps point out the flaws in Erik’s belief about who he is.

Jessica helps Erik realize that, just because he thought he was free, he’s actually still tethered here because he hasn’t done the work himself, either. So now, when push comes to shove, he’s acting just like her dad.

He’s even acting like her grandpa, just like Erik’s father. He hasn’t shaken the Whitley system the way she thought he had. So she’s a painful mirror for Erik, helping him.

Erik thought he protected his family, but he actually hurt them by creating this pressure, restraint, and constraint over everything. So I think the way they both push him helps him truly realize who he is and what he needs to do to cut the tethers and be free.

I liked her a lot.

Jessica’s wonderful. She fits so beautifully into the community of Serenity, and what she brings to Helen and Erik’s lives throughout that summer. 

I did see that Heather Headley won with the big, elegant, and elaborate wedding. She told me that’s what you guys were going to have.

(laughs) That’s hilarious.

So, what did you think of the wedding, and what were your favorite parts?

In terms of filming the wedding, it was our last block of episodes. It was the last sequence that the entire group filmed together. My favorite moments in the show are when we do big community events.

In Sweet Magnolias Season 4, we started with a Halloween party that turned into a wedding, and every cast member was there.

We just got to hang out and enjoy each other’s presence and personalities. That’s how we ended this season as well.

It felt so good to continue being part of this amazing community that fosters Serenity.

 Erik would’ve preferred a white tie and conceded on that to offer something that would go better with the ladies’ dresses.

The Brownies were pure Erik, something that I don’t think Helen would’ve pushed and certainly is not something that his parents would’ve understood or accepted.

That’s Erik’s touch, and it allows him to pass on his version of legacy to Isaac. That’s another relationship I enjoyed watching build over the course of this season, too.

I did too. I love that Sweet Magnolias actually focuses on the men’s friendships now, and Erik and Isaac’s has always been one of my favorites, especially this season, because it’s evolved. It looked like Isaac was supporting Eric more this season, too.

It’s wild because this season, even though they’re on parallel tracks, they’re going through a similar experience of stepping into their joy and allowing it to unfold.

One of the bits of advice that Erik gives Isaac at the beginning of the season is to lean into each other, explore together, and take the ride.

It’s complicated. It’s got ups, and it’s got downs, but you have to take it. So you watch Isaac throughout his season as he comes to terms with how to celebrate his relationship with Michael and how to lean into his joy.

Erik is doing the same thing. He’s learning that he can’t lean into joy if he’s trying to manage it. So something has to give, and there’s a level of vulnerability that’s needed. He needs support.

Erik needs to lean into the support that he has. So having Isaac be one of his best men is a wonderful thing.

Having him be along with Cal, one of the people who put together his bachelor party, but they know him so well that they get to come up with just the right theme, and ultimately, he’s the one who caters the event and makes the brownie tower.

It is a recipe that has been with Erik since his grandmother, and to him, she represents the person who, through her recipe book, really pulled him out of the darkness.

So it’s a personal and intimate thing to pass that recipe on and entrust it to someone else’s hands. It’s a symbol of how Isaac has moved a bit more out of the mentor-mentee relationship and into more of a brotherhood.

 Erik may still be the older brother in this relationship, but they’re definitely brothers and can support each other. It’s a beautiful evolution over the arc of the five seasons to watch where they started from and where they end up by the end of the season.

Absolutely.  Speaking of that, do you think there are more stories to tell for Eric and Helen? Do you think the series will get renewed? If so, what would you wait to see for a couple?

I hope it gets renewed. One of the exciting things about this season was traveling to New York. We got to travel quite a lot. The ladies go to Savannah for the bachelorette party.

Even though we don’t literally go to Chicago, you feel its presence, and still, there’s this longing to come back to Serenity. But Serenity can hold all these big ideas.

It’s a foundation that’s being laid that leaves room for all kinds of new stories to be told, all kinds of new adventures that can happen and still bring us back to Serenity. It brings us back to the foundation of where it all starts: community, family, love, support, and friendship.

For Helen and Erik, I’m interested in what legacy they will build together. Now that they’ve found that union, they’ve built this covenant, and they’re on the same page.

What can they do together? We ended Sweet Magnolias with them acknowledging the difference that they’re already making in the lives of those around them. They’ve talked about maybe adopting, maybe not. Maybe they’ll mentor.

Having Jessica with them over the summer helped them realize they were pretty good at this parenting thing. So I would love to see in what form a child of some kind would come into their lives that they would be responsible for, and what would that challenge bring to them?

They definitely need a challenge. Nothing can ever just sort of coast and be just easy, because I think these are two characters, two people who are always seeking to grow. What’s the next level of growth that we can do? How can we be better? How can we grow deeper?

Yes, I could see them mentoring teenagers. They’ve already both helped Jessica, Annie, and Cece.

Maybe a possible storyline is that they foster a teenager into their lives. That would be really exciting to see. Something that’s a complicated situation, something that’s not easy, that they have to really wrestle with to figure out. 

Sweet Magnolias Season 5 is streaming now on Netflix.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interviews like this take time and care — and we hope it shows.
If you liked hearing from me, please comment or share the article. That’s how we keep conversations like this going.

TV Fanatic is searching for passionate contributors to share their voices across various article types. Think you have what it takes to be a TV Fanatic? Click here for more information and next steps.