Note: This story contains spoilers from “His & Hers” Episode 6.
For series star and executive producer, Tessa Thompson, the toughest part of crafting the “His & Hers” twisty ending was ensuring it felt justified throughout the entire series. In order for it to pay off on its shock value, she and the producers knew it had to logically make sense to viewers.
“I consider myself a fairly discerning viewer and reader of murder mysteries,” “His & Hers” showrunner and creator William Oldroyd told TheWrap. “I could usually spot whodunnit. But with this one [while reading], I was really blindsided, really surprised and I thought well, that’s great, that’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Both he and Thompson thought the ending was the most compelling part of Alice Feeney’s book while they were adapting it into the Netflix series, but for Oldroyd, a couple of tweaks were necessary to make it pay off on screen.
The book was told from three perspectives: Anna’s, Jack’s and that of “The Killer.” This format did not quite translate to the screen, so Oldroyd told TheWrap they instead weaved in a letter, written by Anna’s mother, Alice, and voiced over by Anna (Thompson), to represent the omnipresent killer.
Anna’s mother, Alice, was the unexpected killer in both the book and the series. The slight change for the series was instead of finding Anna’s suicide note in her room – like it is in the book – Alice, played by Crystal Fox, rewatches her daughter’s news reels to feel closer to her. While watching though, she stumbles upon a home video that showed her daughter being sexually assaulted on camera as three of her so-called friends watched and jeered at her.
“We thought the video camera would be more visual,” Oldroyd added. “It makes sense that Alice wants to stay connected to her daughter when her daughter leaves, so she watches her on TV, and then that is seeing that [assault] then puts everything into motion, and the letter felt like a good way of expressing herself.”
Anna, played by Tessa Thompson, reads from the letter as a voiceover throughout the series, but it is not revealed until the final moments of the finale that she is reading a letter her mom wrote her a year after the murders took place. A year afte, Lexy Jones, also known as Catherine Kelly, was shot by police after being targeted as the lead suspect in the case.
Alice walks her daughter through why she killed each of the women – Rachel Hopkins, Helen Wang, and Zoe Harper – in the letter, stating that it was out of pure vengeance and maternal instincts to attack after they were passive bystanders, watching Anna be sexually assaulted by multiple men.
“It needed to be unequivocally bad that you would think when you see it, yes, these women deserve to die,” Oldroyd said. “We didn’t want to put anyone in any sort of doubt as to whether Alice was motivated to kill them…For me, there’s no question that a mother would feel such a strong reaction to do those things.”
In the finale, the Netflix murder mystery series takes viewers back to the night of the rainy crime scene, showing how Alice waited for Anna to come to her child’s grave but instead saw Rachel hooking up with her estranged husband, Jack (Jon Bernthal). Alice stabs Rachel 40 times, strips down and walks home in the rain.
For the other murders, Alice knew the ins and outs of the town and worked as a housekeeper for Lexy, so she was able to frame her by leaving clues in her lake house.
“They could’ve stopped me but they see what they wanna see,” Alice says in the series. “No one expects a woman to be a serial killer.”
Thompson said that having an elderly Black woman as the killer was compelling to her when they were adapting the book and when she was brought on to star as Anna.
“I loved that we could create an ending that felt very surprising, but also very fresh,” she said. “I can’t think of a show where I’ve seen an elderly black woman be the killer, and also the reason, which is essentially the depth and ferocity of a mother’s love, which is such a unique motive.”
As for Anna and Jack, the will-they-won’t-they love story ended happily after all. The estranged spouses adopted Jack’s orphaned niece Meg, and the couple moved into a house in Atlanta, allowing Anna to return to her broadcast news job. However, the couple are still not 100% honest with one another. Although Anna knows the truth from her mother’s letter, Jack is not aware that his mother-in-law killed his sister.
All six episodes of “His & Hers” are available to watch on Netflix now.
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