‘The Perfect Couple’ Director And [Spoiler] Talk ‘Outrageous’ Killer, Motive And Show’s Ending
SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains spoilers for the finale of The Perfect Couple.
The Perfect Couple contains quite the recipe for disaster and an ensemble of characters messy enough to each have their own motive for killing Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy), maid of honor to Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson) in her upcoming wedding to Benji Winbury (Billy Howle).
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Based on the book by Elin Hilderbrand, the story sets up a lavish wedding weekend full of festivities planned by the groom’s mother Greer Garrison Winbury (Nicole Kidman), but the morning of the ceremony, a dead body is found on the beach, and suddenly, everyone in the wealthy Winbury clan is a suspect.
The show diverged in many ways from Hilderbrand’s book, but it did keep one thing the same — the killer. Unraveling the complicated tangle of events left Abby Winbury (Dakota Fanning) exposed in the finale. Fanning, who had worked with director Susanne Bier before on Showtime’s The First Lady, boarded the project with the knowledge of her character’s fate.
“[Susanne] called me when this was all getting put together, and she told me that she wanted me to play this part. She was describing the part, and it was like rapid speed in her way of describing the bullet points of the character, and the last thing was, ‘and she’s the murderer,’” Fanning told Deadline. “So I knew going into it before I even knew the title of it, to look up the book, that I was playing this character who was pregnant and kind of crazy and outrageous and absurd and a murderer, and so I was like, “Well, Gotta do that.”
A tragic connection between victim and killer is that both are pregnant. Fanning believes Abby has “dissassociated” from that fact.
“It’s hard to describe Abby in the context of real life, but I do think that that Abby would be a person that, after she left that beach that night, she forgot that she did that,” she said. “In her head, it was something that had to be done, and she’s moved on. It’s pathological, and it’s not something that’s eating her up.”
Merritt is pregnant with Tag Winbury’s (Liev Schreiber) child, which would complicate financial matters for the three Winbury brothers as they are supposed to get their trust funds soon once the youngest, Will (Sam Nivola) turns 18.
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“It’s not like there is a perfect killer. There’s also no perfect couple. There’s a number of potential motives. The person who has been killed. There’s quite a few people who have a reason to kill her,” Susanne Bier told Deadline. “You look at Agatha Christie. There’s quite o a number of people with a clear motive, and this one is the same, and only one acts upon it, and that person does it quite smartly.”
In the book, Abby’s motive makes the outcome more of a perfect storm accident because she puts a sleeping pill in a drink with the aim of preventing family friend Featherleigh Dale (Isabelle Adjani, whose character is Isabel in the show) from sleeping with her husband Thomas Winbury (Jack Reynor). There is no mention of a trust fund. The drink instead goes to Merritt, who ends up drowsily drowning when she tries to collect a ring she threw in the water. The show makes it much more purposeful when Abby brings Merritt a crushed up pill in orange juice and holds her underwater until she can’t breathe anymore.
“Her motive is ‘This family cannot fall apart because then my life falls apart.’ She’s not seen by her husband, not valued by her husband, cheated on by her husband, doing all the work to keep up with the appearances and the Joneses and all that stuff with zero support from him. Again, we’re talking about Abby in the context of real life here,” Fanning said. “It comes from that deep down, and then starting to see this facade that’s going to crumble, and somebody has to save it. And she’s going to be, in her mind, the hero that not only saves her own immediate future, but is going to have it in her back pocket that she kind of saved everyone somehow. And I think [she] was planning on kind of riding very, very high on that for a long time.”
When the time comes for Abby’s arrest, the whole family barely reacts as she is taken away, to which Fanning jokingly responded, “Assholes.”
“We’re in a heightened alternate reality so it’s crazy, and when she’s being taken away, she’s like, ‘Call the lawyer. Do I have to do everything? Do something at once,’ And that’s something that Greer says to Tag, ‘Do something for once.’ so I do think that in their own way, all of the female characters, Greer, Amelia, Abby, whether it’s positive or negative, or good or bad, or whatever place it’s coming from, they’re all women that are having to do everything and not being supported by anyone,” she added. “And all those people happen to be the men in their lives. It’s that rage that comes from that, which at its root is a feeling that a lot of women can relate to, feeling unsupported and feeling like you’re the one that’s holding it all together. They’re all experiencing it in their own ways. Abby’s just missing a little — or more than a little, but missing the chip of empathy. Somehow that’s been lost along her journey. They’re all emotionally stunted and ill-equipped to deal with something like this so you see that in the end, when she’s being taken away, and everybody’s like, ‘Alright, well…’ it’s another kind of dynamic.”
Bier also pointed out Abby’s complications as a character through her interactions with Detective Nikki Henry (Donna Lynne Champlin) and Greer.
“She’s so entitled, and she’s like, so weirdly condescending, but Detective Henry is just not taking it. There is a clash between them,” she said. “There’s also a whole lot of fun going on between Abby and Greer, like at the dinner scene, where Abby is constantly trying to please Greer, and Greer is so frustrated in general that she can’t be polite. She takes it out on Abby because Abby is the obvious target for her annoyance.”
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