The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox Shocked Even Amanda Knox

Amanda Knox knows how to put on a brave face. She was perfectly composed on the set of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, an eight-episode limited series premiering August 20 on Hulu. That is, until the day they recreated how Italian authorities questioned Knox after the brutal murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher. “I did not lose my shit on set,” Knox tells Vanity Fair—“except for that time. We spent two 10-hour days doing this scene from all the different angles over and over and over again. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to get that right, so that the next person who is wrongly accused and ends up falsely confessing feels like people are more willing to believe them.” The experience was intensely emotional: “I just remember sobbing.”

That interrogation was a major turning point in the case dramatized by The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, which debuts its trailer and key art exclusively with VF.

Knox, an American studying in Perugia, Italy, was only 20 years old when the British-born Kercher was killed in 2007. Investigators focused on the quirky Knox and her then boyfriend of roughly a week, Raffaele Sollecito, leading the media to push a false narrative that the murder was some sort of sex-torture mishap—led by a woman the tabloids called “Foxy Knoxy.” Italian courts convicted Knox and Sollecito twice of Kercher’s murder, before finally exonerating them in 2015. A separate trial convicted Rudy Guede, a Perugia local with a history of break-ins, of the crime. He was released from prison in 2021 after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence.

Last year, Knox was once again re-convicted of a crime in Italy—for slander, over a statement she made while in police custody that named Patrick Lumumba, her former employer, as responsible for Kercher’s murder. Italy’s highest court had overturned the conviction in 2023 and ordered a retrial. Although Knox was sentenced to three years in prison, she was not expected to serve any time beyond the four years she already spent in Italian custody.

Knox has spoken out several times since her exoneration—telling her story across two books, a 2016 Netflix documentary, several podcasts, and even a cameo on the prematurely-cancelled Peacock comedy series Laid, which was prematurely canceled. Though she’d long been chased by filmmakers hoping to make a scripted project based on the case, she’d also been burned before—by a 2011 Lifetime movie and, a decade later, the Matt Damon–led drama Stillwater, which borrowed the broad strokes of her case without seeking her involvement. (Director and cowriter Tom McCarthy acknowledged in a 2021 interview with Vanity Fair that Stillwater was inspired by Knox, but maintained that it was a work of fiction.)

“Today, I’m an executive producer and creative partner, whereas in the past, even those who have approached me with the best intentions, it’s always been, ‘We want to tell your story,’” says Knox. “I wasn’t interested in having yet another person’s voice telling the worst experience of my life for who knows what reason.”

The 2021 birth of Knox’s daughter and a call from the right collaborator—Monica Lewinsky, whom she’s called a fellow member of the “Sisterhood of Ill Repute”—led her to reconsider. “This story was one in which real human beings—myself, but also my roommate Meredith, my boyfriend Raffaele, and even my prosecutor Giuliano Mignini—were diminished. We were put into little boxes and judged on the basis of the labels that were stuck on us,” says Knox. “This series is really working to push back against those containers. We don’t have to be limited by black-and-white narratives when thinking about tragedies. And I think that’s really useful in a time where people are siloing off and not finding common ground. This story serves as a cautionary tale for that.”

With Lewinsky, Knox, and Knox’s husband, Christopher Robinson, assembled as executive producers, it was time to find a showrunner who could shrewdly revisit one of the 21st century’s most sensational true-crime tales. As her time on the Emmy-winning drama This Is Us came to a close, series creator K.J. Steinberg emerged as that missing piece. “I might’ve been the only person who did not have a strong opinion about Amanda Knox,” Steinberg says. “A lot of people had zealous and fervent opinions—not only about her innocence versus her guilt, but her as a person. I read hundreds of takes on her, people putting themselves as authors of who she is, and I found it all very distracting and confusing. But as soon as I met her, I was certain of her.”

Steinberg hoped to unspool the public misperceptions surrounding Knox. “They looked at her behavior and supposed that they were looking right into her inner life, which is such a dangerous thing to assume,” she says. “Our show is not a whodunit. It’s about how and why did this happen. How and why did bias take hold of the authorities on the ground, the people in the media, folks at home? Even the best of people, the smartest of people, had such distorted views.”

Grace Van Patten, who had long felt a connection to Amanda Knox, came on board to bring the story’s enigmatic heroine to life. “I vividly remember watching the documentary when it came out, and it kind of aligned with when I first started acting,” says Van Patten. “I actually said to my agents at the time that if they ever made an Amanda Knox project, that would be my dream.” After original star Margaret Qualley reportedly dropped out of the project due to scheduling, Van Patten rose to the occasion, calling the opportunity “a crazy full-circle moment.”

She crammed all her research into the two-month-span before filming, getting her most valuable insights straight from the source. “I probably asked [Knox] a million questions,”says Van Patten, on break from shooting the third season of her Hulu series Tell Me Lies in Toronto—“from tiny things like ‘what music were you listening to at that time’ to bigger questions [about] how it felt moment-to-moment in prison. She was so beautiful and open and vulnerable about her experience. After a lifetime of having people create this narrative of her, I just found it so brave that she took this leap, and that she trusted me.”

The feeling was very mutual. “I didn’t know Grace prior to this process,” says Knox, “but once I did see her work, I was really impressed. She was deeply thoughtful about her questions for me, but also had really good instincts of her own.”

Knox’s relatively upbeat demeanor in the days after Kercher’s death—kissing her boyfriend outside of the crime scene, doing a cartwheel in the police station—made her a target for suspicion. “Somebody asked me if it was embarrassing for me to see these stupid moments when I was 20 acted by an actress,” says Knox. “No. Because I was a well-meaning, but oblivious 20-year-old. Grace really captures that essence of youth and naivete in a true way that doesn’t feel like caricature.”

On the show, as in real life, Knox’s happy-go-lucky nature gets stripped away over the course of her two high-profile trials and years-long imprisonment—a transformation that proved daunting for Van Patten. “There were definitely moments where I felt incapable,” she says. “The emotions of it all were extremely challenging.” When asked if Knox’s presence on set intensified the pressure, Van Patten says the opposite was true: “When she wasn’t there, I was so aware of who I was playing. But when she was there, it all clicked. It really felt like we were rooting for each other.”

There was also the matter of learning Italian. “In the beginning, Amanda is not fluent in the language,” says Van Patten, “and by the end she’s giving her appeal speech in Italian.” It was important that The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox delve into the cultural and language barriers that complicated the judicial process. “A lot of shows might have everyone take on a British accent, and just purposefully assume that one European dialect can cover them all,” says Steinberg. “But there were these inflection points in Amanda’s story—the villain was not the prosecutor, not the cops, certainly not Amanda, but tragic mistranslation and miscommunication.”

Because so much was lost in translation, Knox initially believed she could help law enforcement find Kercher’s killer. “She was active in trying to help the police. They anointed her as the most important witness, a person with singular insight to Meredith with phrases like, ‘You were the closest one to her,’” says Steinberg. “So I think that emboldened her with maybe a very human grandiosity of thinking that she could perhaps save the day. She would rather do that than sink into the trauma of what had happened to someone close to her.”

Depicting Kercher onscreen was a “delicate” process for the show’s creative team. “It was really vital that we approached the story with deep sensitivity and empathy for her, certainly to represent her as much more than just the girl who was murdered,” says Steinberg. “I had a photo of her in my office. I had one in the writer’s room. I had one at my bedside. There was no shortage of tears for her and her family as I figured out how to respectfully honor her.” (Kercher’s family was not involved in the series. “Our family has been through so much, and it is difficult to understand how this serves any purpose,” Kercher’s sister Stephanie said in a statement to The Guardian last November.)

Steinberg hopes the show can be uplifting, that viewers will be inspired by Knox’s journey from trustful twentysomething to outspoken advocate. “As the series moves forward, you’ll see Amanda really embracing what she can do for herself. She starts taking a more active role in her case, and she is her own best agent in her ultimate fight for freedom.” And not just in her quest for exoneration—“in the reclamation of her name and identity.”

It all comes back to that fateful interrogation scene. “I’m an advocate in the world of wrongful convictions, and one of the greatest challenges that I have faced is conveying to people what it’s like to be interrogated,” Knox explains. “I don’t have 53 hours of screen time to represent all of the hours that I spent being questioned by police. I have limited time to convey a very big, overwhelming experience that had a huge impact on this case—and ongoing trauma in my life. It acts as this lens through which I now have conversations with anyone.”

Knox is usually unimpressed with the way police questioning is portrayed on screen. “They’re all in that same token room with the swinging lamp, and that’s not what it’s like,” she says. “The people in that room with me were all different. They all had different approaches.” In the show, some officers scream at Knox, badgering her to conjure memories she doesn’t have. Others inch close to Knox’s face, whispering their leading queries—confident that they are on the path toward justice for Kercher. “I wanted it to be really clear from watching it what it would feel like to be pushed to imagine things that aren’t true,” she says, “and scramble in order to make sense of what the police are telling you.”At the same time, “it was really, really important to convey the humanity of those people,” says Knox. “They weren’t just brainwashing me—they were brainwashing themselves.”

Knox, who co-wrote the show’s final episode with Steinberg, gets teary when she thinks about what they made together. “I was deeply touched by how much care has been brought to this story from everyone involved,” she begins, her voice breaking. “To go from being vilified and imprisoned for something I didn’t commit, treated like I was trash and that my life didn’t matter, to having hundreds of people coming together and giving their best to do honor to me… was so deeply moving, and a shock to my system, honestly.”

She is eager to share this telling of her story, “not just because it’s a fucking amazing ride,” says Knox, “but because it has universal resonance. I want people to come away from this show thinking that they’re going to see me, and [themselves] feel really seen.”

As Steinberg puts it, “In a time of great polarization, when people seem to be so certain of their positions, I do hope that people come away from the show considering that certainty is different than the truth.” She pauses. “Perhaps certainty can be the enemy of the truth.”