Glamour: A lot of people will be interested in the show because they love the book and Elin Hilderbrandâs work. Had you read it before you signed on?
Meghann Fahy: My mom had read the book, so she was super excited. I hadnât 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 itâs 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, itâll be nice that itâs 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 sheâs having to make about whether or not she feels like sheâs about to marry the right person. Thatâs 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 thatâs best for her and decides to invest in herself. Thatâs satisfying because itâs very brave to get that close to making a decision like that. I think itâs really cool.
It’s really interesting that Amelia, Merritt, and Abby [Fanning], 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. Itâs cool that the show spans such a large space of what that can be.
Yeah, absolutely. Iâm just thinking now about how all these women were driven to do things by the menâs behavior. So, it was all kind of the menâs 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 Fanningâs 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 itâs just these quick pops of this stuff. But when youâre shooting that, itâs 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.
