‘The Good Daughter’ Stars Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy Talk About Being Sisters in Thriller Adaptation

The word “lawyer” tormented Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy on the set of The good girlPeacock’s adaptation of Karin Slaughter’s hit 2017 crime thriller. That’s not an ideal problem, considering they play ex-sisters Sam and Charlie, who team up alongside their father, Rusty (Brendan Gleeson), to defend a high school student accused of a double murder in a small Georgia town. But when they tried to say “lawyer” with that specific Southern drawl, there were, uh, objections. “Karin would come in and say, ‘It’s not that'”, says Fahy Weekly Entertainment with a laugh. “I just couldn’t hear it. It was a really tricky word.”

In fact, it was on their very first day together on set that Byrne realized she and Fahy had the kind of chemistry that would make their sisterhood powerful. They were filming a scene from the second episode, in which Rusty – their scrappy father who always stood up for the town’s downtrodden – recovers after being stabbed. Charlie, still covered in Rusty’s blood, looks up to see Sam, who hasn’t been back to Pikeville in years, and their stiff bodies and prickly gazes speak volumes about the courage, resentment, and pain of childhood. “Well, we were lucky,” says Byrne. “We did some rehearsals on Zoom and hung out a lot in Atlanta. We got along great.”

But consider that accusations of casual accent butchery were dropped because the more complex case involved the adaptation of a beloved, twisty 500-page novel about family, justice, trauma and, of course, lawyers. In the six-episode series (out today), what begins as a somewhat idyllic childhood in the rural town of Pikeville takes a brutal turn when Sam and Charlie experience a deeply violent trauma that shatters the family. Wounds, inside and out, keep the sisters apart for years until they come together to help their ailing father. While that pronunciation may have eluded the show’s stars, the depiction of the complex, heartbreaking, silly, beautiful, tragic, and unbreakable brotherly bond certainly did not. Byrne and Fahy passed that one without notes.

So much so that Slaughter felt like she could finally exhale. “We were very nervous because we were like, ‘Oh my God, is this going to work?'” she says in that drawl that eluded some others. After all, a few years ago, she wasn’t sure it was feasible.

Producer Bruna Papandrea remembers first contacting Slaughter about translating her talents into screenwriting while she was working at Netflix. Pieces of her, the Toni Collette 2022 limited series based on another bestseller by the novelist.

“Would you consider writing a movie? You’re such a good thriller writer,” Papandrea says, echoing the tens of thousands of people who share similar praise of the author on Goodreads. But Slaughter had previously given up on adapting Piecesand his detective series Will Trent (soon to enter its fifth season on ABC) – and his hesitations remained. “She rejected me,” laments Papandrea. “I was very upset by this rejection, I remember.”

“I mean, you can read a mediocre book and it’s okay, but if you read a book that sucks at the end, you’re really angry. And I felt that was doubly so for television,” Slaughter says of his anxiety about writing for film. But “I think if writing is easy for you, it’s probably because you’re not doing it right,” she adds with a laugh. So she finally took the plunge, albeit in secret. “I just wanted to make sure I could make it work in an emotionally satisfying way. I wouldn’t let (Papandrea) choose until I was sure I could land the plane,” she explains.

When Papandrea finally got to read Slaughter’s book Good girl pilot, “It had everything I wanted in a series: family, emotion, romance, thrills,” says the producer. “But that relationship between the two sisters is really what drew me in, in a big way. I was in love. I was all in. And then I had her write five more scripts.”

Once the project was greenlit, Slaughter did much more than write. The TV production rookie took on the role of showrunner, fought to film in Georgia rather than Canada and took the crew to rural communities from the Blue Ridge to McCaysville in the Georgia mountains to get a sense of Sam and Charlie’s roots. She learned about production budgets and, at least once, how to operate a camera crane. (You didn’t hear that, insurance company!) But Slaughter says she couldn’t wait to kill off the cast: “I remember when (the Apple TV drama series) Physical came out, I called Bruna because I guess she knows everyone in Australia because she’s Australian and I said, ‘I want Rose Byrne to do this.’

Slaughter loved Fahy, who had been on every casting director’s wish list since he stole scenes in Season 2 of The White Lotus (“I call her a Swiss army knife, because she can do anything”) and attacked Olivia Williams (Dune: Prophecy) for Gamma, Sam and Charlie’s science and literature-quoting mother. Harper Steele (Will and Harper) was simply meant to play Lenore, Rusty’s loyal longtime friend and legal assistant, who, like Steele, is also a trans woman. And getting the Irishman Gleeson to play the Southern patriarch Rusty, à la Atticus Finch, was inspired by the casting. “We knew instinctively,” she says, “that these voices would elevate the subject in a way that would be surprising and poignant and everything that makes the show so beautiful.”

For the actors, having Slaughter on set meant being able to go straight to the source for any questions about their characters. “I talked to Karin a lot,” Byrne says. “She was a tremendous resource, I mean, that’s an understatement. I was like, ‘Who is this person? Can you share with me?”

Because Sam suffers from head trauma from violence early in the series, Byrne worked on Sam’s limp with a physical therapist and a trainer who works with survivors of trauma-related injuries. “We figured out how she would walk and what it was like to go up, down, all kinds of things,” the actress shares.

She also met with a voice coach to understand how her dysarthria, a speech disorder resulting from damage to the nervous system, would impact Sam’s voice. “All of these traits are really fun as an actress to delve into and understand how they move through the world and how that affects every scene you’re in, because it does,” she explains. (It also affected Byrne two months after the series ended, when she was on vacation in Australia and her back seized up, leaving her bedridden for two days.)

Fahy delved into the novel and storylines to get to the heart of Charlie, who, unlike Sam, stays in their small town and helps his father with legal defense cases that no one else wants to touch. She’s adrift, haunted, and recently separated from her husband Ben (Michael Dorman). Like Sam, Charlie has serious scars, although his are internal and revealed to the viewer over the course of the series. “I became so invested in her journey to break free from all the shame and fear that she struggles with when you meet her,” Fahy says. “Because you support her and want her to find her way.”

As for which one is the titular good girl, that depends on who is judging. Whether it was the one who took the bullet to protect her sister or the one who refused to leave her father, the label had consequences. Williams struggled with the enormous weight Gamma put on the older sister, outdoing Sam by asking her to always take care of her younger, messier sister, Charlie. “It’s a terrible curse to foster an older child and a very difficult legacy to leave Sammy,” Williams says. “I know more than one person who was asked to look after their younger brother and sister, and it didn’t go well. »

Because The good girl has more twists and turns than a backcountry road, the challenge was retaining the DNA of the book while telling the story on screen. There was a lot to talk about, including a litany of harrowing events such as a school shooting as well as multiple counts of sexual assault. There’s also a criminal case, a romance, multiple flashbacks and plenty of dark humor. “Well, that’s life, isn’t it?” The massacre says. “You’re laughing one minute and crying the next. It’s always been important in my books to keep that balance between light and dark.”

Steph Green (Guardians) took on the challenge and became one of the rare women to direct an entire limited series. “It was really speaking my language, in terms of a directorial voice, playing with memory, playing with perspective, playing with chronology,” she says. It was also important to Green that the violence be different from what often happens on screen. “We don’t need to be traditional in our approach,” she explains of her thought process. “This wasn’t going to be a dark, formulaic thriller where we lean into violence for the sake of violence. We can make our memories, even the most traumatic, quite poetic, quite astonishing, quite specific to the way these women remember what happened to them.”

Green held extensive rehearsals and dug into details, even having Fahy record a haunting rendition of the Guns N’ Roses song “Sweet Child O’ Mine” to play over the closing credits of the fifth episode, when the viewer learns more about Charlie’s childhood. “Steph asked me to do it after I finished, and I was so excited. I just thought: What a great way to contribute…