zdask
Home
/
Arts & Entertainment
/
Sarah Snook, Dakota Fanning, Jay Ellis Tease ‘All Her Fault’ Twists and Turns: “You Will Never Guess”
Sarah Snook, Dakota Fanning, Jay Ellis Tease ‘All Her Fault’ Twists and Turns: “You Will Never Guess”-March 2024
Mar 8, 2026 6:49 AM

The Sarah Snook-led Peacock thriller All Her Fault quickly drops viewers into a parents 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 shows 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 Mondays 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 youll never guess what happens after you find out what happens, Jay Ellis, who plays Marissas best friend Colin Dobbs told THR of the shows multiple twists. Theres a giant turn in the penultimate, and then theres 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, Its a big ride. The family dynamics reveal so much, and theres so much there to mine, which was so great as an actor to really get into the meat of the show and the story. Its 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 dont know if I can handle it. And Im like, Trust me, you can handle it; itll be OK. And theres a great twist.

Dakota Fanning, who plays Marissas 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 didnt 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. Im always like, if I read a book that Im adapting, I think, I kind of saw that coming, but we can massage that in the script. This, when I read the book, I wasnt expecting that, she said, urging audiences to go in open minded but inquisitive.

She added, Its great when you go into a show and you start to think, Oh, maybe its him. Maybe its her. Or maybe thats 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.

Marissas frantic initial attempts to find him and figure out what happened create a suspenseful, frightening opening.

And executive producer Gareth Neame wouldnt have it any other way.

The number of scripts that we work on that we have difficulties getting a show airborne, I cant think of another show that weve 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 Mondays premiere. Its not only the cliche that its any mothers worst nightmare, its actually any member of the audiences nightmare. Within seconds, it hooks you in. So I think its 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 its on screen, its 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 Marissas child is missing and my mind immediately exploded because I think I read it and my daughter mightve 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 didnt 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 Im 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 wouldnt 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, Im always looking at top to tail. So its a show where there were some various specific visual clues, which obviously I dont 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 its 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 its the woman who still has to do domestic duties as well as professional work and the husband or the father invariably doesnt. Its 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.

Comments
Welcome to zdask comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
Arts & Entertainment
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.zdask.com All Rights Reserved