[The following story contains spoilers from the Prime Video limited series The Better Sister.]
When the execs at production company Tomorrow Studios were talking to people about producing a TV adaptation of Alafair Burke’s The Better Sister, they would ask prospective partners after reading the first episode who they thought was behind the story’s central murder mystery of who killed Adam Macintosh, played in the Prime Video limited series by Corey Stoll.
“People had different answers,” Tomorrow Studios president and Better Sister executive producer Becky Clements told The Hollywood Reporter at The Better Sister‘s New York premiere last month. “And for us that was perfect, because you wouldn’t be able to predict.”
Even the Better Sister actors were surprised when they learned who did it, despite helping to realize the narrative.
“I was shocked because they put so many twists and turns,” Maxwell Acee Donovan, who plays Adam’s son and murder suspect, Ethan Macintosh. “Even after we made it and I’ve been watching it, they totally threw me off and I’m like, I was there. I did not see it coming.”
That sentiment was echoed by the actors behind a number of other key characters in Ethan’s murder trial.
“I was shocked,” Austin Smith, who plays the prosecutor making a case against Ethan told THR. “As somebody who usually figures it out, I was shocked. So I’m hoping audiences will be as well.”
And Bobby Naderi who plays Detective Bowen indicated he was upset he wasn’t able to connect the dots: “I was like I can’t believe I didn’t see it. But I was genuinely paying attention because I know what type of world I’m in but I was like I can’t believe I missed that. The nuggets are there but you just have to be super observant and into that world.”
And Lorraine Toussaint, who plays Chloe’s (Jessica Biel) mentor Catherine, hopes audiences get caught in the story’s twists and turns as she did.
“I got screwed up several times when reading it because I thought, ‘I know who the murderer is; I know who the murderer is’ and, ‘Oh God, it’s not that person; it’s not that person,’ so I was really shocked when it turned out to be the person it turned out to be,” she said. “So I think the audience is going to go on the same kind of journey I did, which is a lot of wrong guessing, which is the fun of it all.”
In addition to learning who killed Adam, viewers see Chloe and Nicky (Elizabeth Banks) come together to protect Ethan, who has learned the truth about why he was taken away from his biological mother and raised by his aunt.
For Ethan, who’s already been through so much in the series, Donovan says what he thinks comes next for his character involves some real psychological work.
“He’s in such a different place than we found him at the beginning. He’s going to have to basically rebuild his life and kind of redefine what he means and how he interacts with the world,” Donovan said. “It’s interesting because he’s still 17. He’s still a kid. He’s got that opportunity to reinvent himself at a very young age, but I don’t think it was anything that anyone was expecting him to have to do.”
As for Chloe, Biel has a radical suggestion of what her character should do next.
“I hope Chloe changes careers fully and moves away, starts a new life, gets a new haircut — not that I don’t love the bob — but I think she needs new color, new vibe, new wardrobe,” she told THR. “I think she needs a full re-do, start over situation, with her new family.”
Though The Better Sister is a limited series and based on a book with a beginning and end, showrunners Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado told THR they were open to telling more of the sisters’ journey, with Milch specifically teasing, “Even though at the end of the season, so many secrets have been revealed and so many mysteries sort of have been solved, there’s now this new set of lies agreed upon, and secrets and choices that have been made that are setting things in motion.”
Speaking to THR again at the Better Sister premiere, Milch stressed that she and Corrado wanted the limited series to feel “satisfying and complete as a story,” but as for what’s next for the characters, “I think for us the question is, ‘What happens now that the sisters are now back together?’ They start so far apart, and then have to find each other once again. So where does that go? Is it possible? You find each other. Do you forgive? Can you move forward and what does that look like?”
Corrado added, “There’s so much that’s unresolved too. It’s the big stuff that was resolved but not the internal.”
Tomorrow Studios’ executive vp, development, and Better Sister executive producer Alissa Bachner, said the production company would be open to continuing on the Better Sister journey if the opportunity presented itself.
“Yes, of course we would,” she told THR. “Olivia and Regina are incredible storytellers and creators and if they want to keep telling the story, we would love that.”
All eight episodes of The Better Sister are now streaming on Prime Video. Read THR’s interview with Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks and the series’ showrunners.
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