{"id":424236,"date":"2026-04-29T23:47:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T23:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/424236\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T23:47:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T23:47:09","slug":"killer-reveal-explained-by-creator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/424236\/","title":{"rendered":"Killer Reveal Explained by Creator"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t[This article contains major spoilers from the series finale of Imperfect Women<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

\n\tThe whodunnit at the center of Imperfect Women \u2014 since Kate Mara<\/a>\u2019s Nancy was murdered in episode one \u2014 has finally been answered in the thriller\u2019s series finale.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd Mary (Elisabeth Moss<\/a>) was right.<\/p>\n

\n\tHoward (Corey Stoll), the stay-at-home mom\u2019s gaslighting husband whose once-distant relationship with Nancy turned inappropriately personal when the two began working together on a theater production, killed Nancy <\/a>hours after she met up with Mary and Eleanor (Kerry Washington<\/a>) for drinks in the series premiere<\/a>, and told the latter friend she\u2019d break things off with her then-unknown lover later that night.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat plan doesn\u2019t pan out quite as easily as Nancy expected, however. Instead of a mutual parting of ways, Howard professes his love for Nancy and proposes that the two be together. She rejects the idea and, upon relaying her desire to confess to Mary, Howard returns Nancy\u2019s slap at the insinuation that she doesn\u2019t care about her best friend with a deadly push into a cement wall that instantly kills her on impact.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe long-awaited revelation<\/a> comes after eight episodes of nearly every associate of Nancy\u2019s coming under suspicion, from her husband Robert<\/a> (Joel Kinnaman) and her painter friend David (Theo Bongani Ndyalvane) to her mother\u2019s abusive ex-boyfriend Scott (Wilson Bethel) and even her two closest friends.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe fun of it is not knowing,\u201d showrunner and creator Annie Weisman, who adapted the Apple TV<\/a> series from Araminta Hall\u2019s 2020 novel of the same name, tells The Hollywood Reporter, adding that the shifting points of view of each episode added to the overall mystery and anticipation of finding out who killed Nancy. \u201cIt\u2019s the fun of really being in what feels like an objective point of view, and then suddenly you realize in the switching that it was not at all objective \u2014 everything is suspect.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBelow, Weisman talks with THR about the difficult conversations in the writers\u2019 room<\/a> about presenting the interracial friend group onscreen, considering an alternative killer and the message the series sends about the danger shame and secrets pose to women.<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the series, viewers get quite a bit of detail about Nancy\u2019s current and past life, and to a lesser extent, Eleanor\u2019s. What backstory, if any, did you create about Mary and how she came to be friends with these women? She feels a bit like the financial and professional outlier of the group.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe loved the idea of them meeting in college, because it\u2019s such a time when you can really find people outside of the other ways that we group together in adult life. It\u2019s a time of reinvention and experimentation for a lot of people. So the idea was that each of these characters is somewhat of an outlier in their family of origin. They each found each other in college, and then get into adult life, and things change and they go on different tracks. That bond is still there, but it gets tested. With Mary, it was fun to think about when we meet her. <\/p>\n

\n\tShe\u2019s in the middle of heavy-duty, three-kid parenting in a really absorbed way. I was inspired by this conversation I had with a really good, very old friend of mine, who called me in the middle of the day once. She was in the parking lot of a supermarket in tears like, \u201cI just caught the eye of this woman looking at me, and I could see her dismissing me as this frumpy mom buying bargain cereal. She doesn\u2019t know who I am inside. I\u2019m not who that person sees.\u201d And it was really moving because a lot of us feel that way in the difficult squeeze of our lives, in caregiving and in whatever that looks like for you. I thought, \u201cOh, this is the value of this longtime friendship.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tWe really wanted to put that into the show \u2014\u00a0that the people you\u2019ve known for decades are the ones who know who you are inside. Mary is that person inside. She has a fiery, imaginative life that hasn\u2019t gotten expressed in a while because she\u2019s in this abusive marriage \u2014 she\u2019s in the teeth of caregiving and she needs her friends to remember that part of herself.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith Eleanor, we get a bit more understanding about why she is the way she is through her dynamic with her mom in the finale. Is that a big departure from the book?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was. She\u2019s someone who really went away from home and reinvented herself. And in this moment of crisis, there\u2019s a pull, a drawback to healing that primary bond and that home. It was something that really was built in the writers room and in conversation with Kerry: what does she come from? What is that relationship? We talked about a lot of different versions of it in our writers room and we landed on, collectively, this idea of reconnecting with mom. Then Kay Oyegun wrote that beautiful scene between her and her mom, and it felt like a grounding and a coming home for that character.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow\u2019d you get Sheryl Lee Ralph to play the mother?<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s the joy of working with Kerry Washington. Kay Oyegun, who wrote that scene and a lot of the show, is younger than I am. I\u2019m obsessed with Sheryl Lee Ralph as a Broadway legend, as the original dream girl. But Kay is like, \u201cThat\u2019s Moesha\u2019s mom. And therefore, that\u2019s my mom.\u201d It\u2019s that bond of television from your childhood. She really felt connected to her, and then Kerry\u2019s like, \u201cI\u2019ll give her a call.\u201d Then [Sheryl\u2019s] like, \u201cSure.\u201d That was really cool.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe had three Black writers on the show, all with completely different backgrounds and perspectives, and it was me doing a lot of listening about origin and identity and there was no monolithic idea about Black identity and Kerry\u2019s background.<\/p>\n

\n\tI imagine Eleanor isn\u2019t Black in the original text. How did you and the writers decide you wanted to deal with race?<\/p>\n

\n\tShe wasn\u2019t. And when I was making the story American, the hallmark of it is this is a friendship that crosses different lines, that they meet in college and they\u2019re from different class backgrounds. In England, the conversation is so much about class. In America, you can\u2019t talk about class without talking about race. I studied in England for a year and it made me understand my Americanness more, so in making [the series] American, it felt like an opportunity if we\u2019re going to talk about difference, let\u2019s talk about race too. And if we were going to do that, we wanted to have some of the more difficult conversations about what it really means to have an interracial friendship between women and not pretend like on TV. <\/p>\n

\n\tSometimes they pretend like it\u2019s just easy-breezy and it doesn\u2019t get complicated. It does. And we had some of those conversations and it was really cool. I\u2019m not going to pretend like there isn\u2019t friction because there is. And I stepped in it sometimes, and I got checked on things and the characters do too. We tried to be honest about that.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tCorey Stoll and Elisabeth Moss in Imperfect Women.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tApple TV+<\/p>\n

\n\tWith Mary and Howard, the revelation of them role playing as Nancy and Robert felt like a huge bombshell that in another series probably would\u2019ve led down a single white female stalker-esque kind of path. Did you consider making Mary the killer or a co-conspirator in Nancy\u2019s murder?<\/p>\n

\n\tWe definitely talked about it, but it never felt real. You push in a thriller, you want to think about what the most extremes are and then be guided by what\u2019s true. We definitely wanted to play around with the danger on the edges of the darkest parts of jealousy in friendship, but ultimately, the bad guy\u2019s the bad guy. I wanted to be true to that. We didn\u2019t want to do that kind of switcheroo. I felt like there\u2019d been a lot of thrillers lately where in the end, the woman did it or the girl or the teenage girl. And we\u2019re like: no, that\u2019s not true.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs you said, \u201cthe bad guy\u2019s the bad guy.\u201d How did you know Corey Stoll was your Howard?<\/p>\n

\n\tHonestly, we are all fans of his. He\u2019s able to be an intellectual and attractive, but also an underdog and a little scary. He really inhabits that combination. He\u2019s sexy and smart. I love the scene between him and Joel where they\u2019re kind of competing, because you see there\u2019s this male status fight going on and he\u2019s losing it and it feels a little dangerous because a guy who has his status diminished by another guy can be really dangerous. We\u2019re watching them navigate that and how Mary is victimized by that.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd that ultimately is why he kills Nancy. He feels dismissed by her.<\/p>\n

\n\tYes, humiliated by her and her rejection. You\u2019re not allowed to reject people because it\u2019s dangerous. The thing we unfortunately share is a very intuitive understanding that it can be very dangerous to reject a man. And they don\u2019t know that the way we do. We know it, and we\u2019re taught it, and we feel it. It\u2019s a scary reality that a lot of us live with that I think underpins a lot of confidence issues, that feeling that \u201cI better not humiliate a man because he\u2019ll hurt me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHoward\u2019s ex-wife, Jenny [Sandrine Holt], is a brief but important figure in the story too, because she lends credence to what Mary\u2019s experienced and testifies on her behalf. Was she in the book?<\/p>\n

\n\tI don\u2019t totally remember which part of that is in the book or not. I know there is an ex in the book that we find out about, but we brought more to it. It\u2019s this idea that there\u2019s a story that\u2019s been told about the crazy ex, and then when you dig into it, you realize that was a story that was told for a reason. And then, in fact, it all gets back to this idea that if women don\u2019t communicate with each other, it\u2019s dangerous. <\/p>\n

\n\tThat was very much an idea in the book and something we wanted to land on: the danger comes when we\u2019re not talking to each other and when they\u2019re keeping us apart, because then we don\u2019t say, \u201cHey, listen, this is bad, this is dangerous.\u201d When you take anyone else\u2019s word for what a woman\u2019s story is, it\u2019s not okay. I always try to remember that. Don\u2019t believe rumors about anyone, but really about women. Having been a victim of abuse, [Nancy] was ashamed, so she kept it to herself. And that\u2019s where you get into trouble; you\u2019re preventing other people from knowing, and then they might fall into the same trap.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen we talked before the series premiered, you said you wanted to give the audience a satisfying ending, which is why this is a limited series, but did you play around with alternate endings of any kind?<\/p>\n

\n\tWell, we wanted to land the plane. I felt like people are going to go on this journey and they deserve to know what happened and we\u2019re determined to put a period on the end of the sentence for people. We did play around a little bit at the end. There\u2019s a little bit of a wink towards a relationship that\u2019s kind of intriguing. I wouldn\u2019t call it a cliffhanger; we wanted people to get an ending.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn those final scenes, it seems Eleanor took to heart in a positive way what Mary said to her out of frustration about getting a family of her own.<\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, I think it\u2019s that feeling of not losing the connection with one another, but also having a world of her own that she can feel comfortable in. Because I do think that she, as the single one of the group and feeling a little unmoored from her roots in a way, her family of origin, needed both. She needed that grounding. Don\u2019t lose your connection to this friend group but also don\u2019t have all your eggs in that basket, as it were.<\/p>\n

\n\tEarly reviews of the series were quite mixed. How do you feel about how the show\u2019s being received?<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m getting a lot of good feedback from people that I don\u2019t normally hear from in my life, like old friends and stuff, so that\u2019s kind of fun because it\u2019s about friendship. It feels like my old friends are into it and watching, so I hope that\u2019s a good sign.<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tImperfect Women is now streaming all episodes on Apple TV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[This article contains major spoilers from the series finale of Imperfect Women.] The whodunnit at the center of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":424237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[3288,40798,93,61,144295,60,168859,5124,282],"class_list":["post-424236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-apple-tv","tag-elisabeth-moss","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-imperfect-women","tag-ireland","tag-kate-mara","tag-kerry-washington","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}