The Sarah Snook-led Peacock thriller All Her Fault quickly drops viewers into a parent’s nightmare, kicking off with a mother discovering that her 5-year-old child is missing.
Though the search for this child drives the plot, the storyline takes a number of dramatic twists and turns, with dark secrets revealed about the show’s adult characters, including central couple and parents of the missing child, Marissa (Snook) and Peter Irvine (Jake Lacy).
And the team behind the show, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter at Monday’s New York premiere, teased that the audience will not be able to predict what happens.
“You will never guess. Not only will you never guess, but you’ll never guess what happens after you find out what happens,” Jay Ellis, who plays Marissa’s best friend Colin Dobbs told THR of the show’s multiple twists. “There’s a giant turn in the penultimate, and then there’s a giant turn in the finale and like we all read it and were like, ‘What the?’ Every single one of us. None of us saw it coming.”
Snook adds, “It’s a big ride. The family dynamics reveal so much, and there’s so much there to mine, which was so great as an actor to really get into the meat of the show and the story. It’s not just about a kid that goes missing. I have friends who have kids who are like, ‘Oh can I watch a show about a missing kid? I don’t know if I can handle it.’ And I’m like, ‘Trust me, you can handle it; it’ll be OK.’ And there’s a great twist.”
Dakota Fanning, who plays Marissa’s friend and a fellow mom, Jenny Kaminski, and recently revealed that she likes to spoil things for herself, was told early on what happens — “because I wanted to know as I always do,” she said. But she was still “very surprised.”
“I really didn’t see that coming,” she said. “I was really shocked by the twists and turns that are revealed.”
Minkie Spiro, who directed the first half of the season and serves as an executive producer, insisted that “people are going to be blindsided.”
“For somebody that has worked in TV for a while. I’m always like, if I read a book that I’m adapting, I think, ‘I kind of saw that coming, but we can massage that in the script.’ This, when I read the book, I wasn’t expecting that,” she said, urging audiences to go in “open minded” but inquisitive.
She added, “It’s great when you go into a show and you start to think, ‘Oh, maybe it’s him. Maybe it’s her. Or maybe that’s what happened there.’ Like, I want the audience to have those thoughts and ideas so that then they can see whether or not they saw it coming.”
Though, as Spiro indicates, viewers do have a hack to discover what happens: the book of the same name on which the series was based.
While some things have been changed from the book to the series, including the setting switching from Dublin to Chicago, both kick off with a missing child, specifically with Marissa showing up to pick up her son from a playdate only to be told by the woman who answers the door that she has never heard of the kid.
Marissa’s frantic initial attempts to find him and figure out what happened create a suspenseful, frightening opening.
And executive producer Gareth Neame wouldn’t have it any other way.
“The number of scripts that we work on that we have difficulties getting a show airborne, I can’t think of another show that we’ve done to this degree where you really are in from the first shot, from the doorbell ringing on that front door and that front scene,” he told THR at Monday’s premiere. “It’s not only the cliche that it’s any mother’s worst nightmare, it’s actually any member of the audience’s nightmare. Within seconds, it hooks you in. So I think it’s a fantastic, bold arresting opening of the show. And I wish we could find openings like this more often.”
Showrunner Megan Gallagher said there was “no hesitation” about starting the series with such an unsettling development, mirroring the beginning of the book.
“It was a no-brainer from the get-go,” she said. “And now that it’s on screen, it’s a great way to open the show.”
It was that opening that helped attract Ellis to the project.
“The writing was so gripping and fast. I have a child, and in the first four minutes of this thing you find out that Marissa’s child is missing and my mind immediately exploded because I think I read it and my daughter might’ve been on a playdate at the time. That immediately gripped me,” he said. “And then as you go through and you meet all of these characters and hear their backstory, I think all of them are so layered for so many different reasons, and you want to root for all of them but you also kind of think one of them is the culprit as well, which is what a thriller does so well and makes you love somebody and then look at them with a side eye at the same time.”
And Spiro, though she didn’t direct the entire season, hinted that she included some clues to later developments in the first half.
“Any time I take on a show and I’m doing the pilot, I actually create the entire arc of the show, which I then talk through to the next director so that there is a vision. So there are a lot of a lot of things visually we set up that wouldn’t pay off unless the director that does the episodes after me follows through,” Spiro said. “So that was very much an important part of the deal when we brought another director on was to make sure that they honor the visual arc of the show. So when I create a show, I’m always looking at top to tail. So it’s a show where there were some various specific visual clues, which obviously I don’t want to give away at this point, but they were very specific things that subtly adjusted as twists and toes and the characters true colors start to unfold.”
Spiro, though she wanted the audience to “lean in” to wondering what happened to this child, said she was also trying to tease out the series’ look at gender dynamics in parenting.
“There is something that we try to inject as a sub layer, which all about what it’s like, primarily in heterosexual relationships, where the woman is often expected to do the heavy lifting of the child business,” Spiro said. “And so there is a social commentary underneath this thriller.”
Neame adds, “The title itself is really speaking to how a couple, both holding down professional jobs, somehow it’s the woman who still has to do domestic duties as well as professional work and the husband or the father invariably doesn’t. It’s kind of using the [hook] of the thriller to really look deeply at contemporary relationships.”
All eight episodes of All Her Fault are now streaming on Peacock.