Meghann Fahy: My mom had read the book, so she was super excited. I hadn’t read it before I heard about the project. It was just really cool to step into this world that she created, and they did such a beautiful job of translating it. I know the ending of our show is a bit different than the book, but I don’t think it’s one that will be disappointing to the fans of the book because it stays true to what the story really ultimately was about. I think more than anything, it’ll be nice that it’s a little bit of a different twist on it.
One thing I loved about the show is while there are men main characters, the plot is really about the women. Did that appeal to you as well?
Well, one of my favorite components of the show is the journey that we watch Amelia (Hewson) go on in terms of these huge life decisions she’s having to make about whether or not she feels like she’s about to marry the right person. That’s a super relatable phase for a young woman or person in general to be going through. I loved that in the end, she makes the choice that’s best for her and decides to invest in herself. That’s satisfying because it’s very brave to get that close to making a decision like that. I think it’s really cool.
It’s really interesting that Amelia, Merritt (my character), and Abby (Dakota’s character), these three women and then also Greer (Kidman) are all sort of navigating their romantic relationships and putting them under a microscope and thinking about what they need and want out of these things. They all approach it very differently. It’s cool that the show spans such a large space of what that can be.
Yeah, absolutely. I’m just thinking now about how all these women were driven to do things by the men’s behavior. So, it was all kind of the men’s fault at the end of the day.
(Laughs) Yeah.
I just watched the finale and found the drowning scene, where your character gets murdered by Dakota Fanning’s character, to be very visceral. What was it like filming that?
From a technical standpoint, it was really fascinating for me. I had never really done anything like that before, so I was really interested in the process of that. It was definitely a little bit trickier and a little more arduous than I was imagining, and more than it might even look when you see the show, because it’s just these quick pops of this stuff. But when you’re shooting that, it’s hours.
We shot stuff in the actual ocean, and then we shot stuff in a pool and had a special tank so we could get a thing under it. We shot it a lot of different ways, and it was really tiring. But Dakota was awesome to work with, and we were both super game, so it was a really fun experience.
