The longtime friendship between three women unleashes dark secrets in Imperfect Women
Three female friends have been besties since college: stay-at-home mom Mary (Elisabeth Moss), wealthy philanthropist Eleanor (Kerry Washington) and trophy wife with philanthropic interests Nancy (Kate Mara). The three are a constant presence in each other’s lives, and know all each other’s secrets. Or do they? When Nancy winds up murdered, presumably by the man she was having an affair with, her two friends come to find that they actually don’t know everything there is to know about each other.
That’s the premise of Imperfect Women, based on Araminta Hall’s novel of the same name. When Moss read the psychological thriller, she was immediately drawn in by its themes. “The main thing that I loved was the exploration of friendship and the fact that it felt really honest,” she says. “The book has a very specific structure where it goes Eleanor, Nancy, Mary. You’ve got Eleanor’s story and you’re so absorbed in this character that you think that’s the whole story. And then [the perspective] changes and it’s totally different than what you thought it was. That structure, which I fell in love with when I read the book, was the most important thing to try to preserve.”
To achieve that, Moss enlisted Emmy-winning director Lesli Linka Glatter. Having put her stamp on Homeland, Pretty Little Liars and, more recently, Zero Day, she was keen to explore the secrets of the three main characters. “I love the idea of things not being what they appear to be, and you have to dig deeper to see what’s going on underneath the surface,” she says. “I love stories where characters are put in extreme circumstances and they’re forced to deal with who they really are. I never want to tell the same story over and over, I always want to dig in deep to the circumstances and to the characters. I want complicated, layered, incredibly human characters, so I was pulled to this.”
It was also the complex nature of the women at the heart of the show that drew series creator Annie Weisman to the project. “I’m always drawn to interesting female characters and it’s exciting when a story has not one, but three individual women at its centre,” says Weisman, whom Moss had passed on the book to. “Often the key relationship in a story would be a romantic relationship or a workplace relationship. But in this show, female friendship is really given its due. It’s central in a way like it is in my life. I thought that that was a really interesting avenue, especially for a thriller.”
For Weisman, having three female protagonists gave her an opportunity to explore the differences of each character. “What’s interesting to me is to show the range of roles that women play, that we all play, in our lives,” she says. “One of the reasons I like writing female characters is just they have so much going on. It can be frightening to be a woman in the world. It can be dangerous. We all feel vulnerable a lot. So, we build up these layers and these performances to keep ourselves safe. I happen to find that a really fascinating thing to write about, and I think it’s a really fascinating challenge to give to an actress to express and inhabit.”
While it feels like shows with women at the helm are becoming more common, Moss, Mara and Washington — all of whom have headlined their own series — say finding material that focuses on a female protagonist, let alone three, is still rare. “The centring of women and women’s stories and not being the accessory to a male story is important,” says Washington, when asked what exactly a “complex” character is. “I do love playing supporting characters as well, but when I’m looking for complexity, an understanding that this person is at the centre of the story is part of it. And I love that, on this show, you have three women who sit at the centre of the story at different times. That’s so, so cool.”
Of course there are no imperfect women without their imperfect men. The all-star cast is rounded out with Joel Kinnaman as Nancy’s husband Robert, Corey Stoll as Mary’s husband Howard and Leslie Odom, Jr. as Eleanor’s brother Donovan. “The men are as essential in this story,” says Linka Glatter. “The complicated inter-dynamics of the husbands, the brothers, the family relationships, it’s all interwoven.” For Washington, her relationship with Odom’s character proved to be one of her biggest surprises as an actress. “In real life, I’m an only child and I haven’t really been able to play sibling dynamics that much,” she says “Often when I’m onscreen with a man, I’m either his love interest or he’s mine. To be able to play a different kind of intimacy with a man onscreen, a deep love that was not sexual but really intense, it was really revelatory for me.”
While the structure of having the story told from three vantage points was the obvious challenge to adapting the source material, it also allowed for the writers and actors to find dimensions to characters that would normally not be part of a linear story arc. “Each character gets to play themselves in a supporting role in each of the other women’s stories, so she gets to play a version of herself that is seen on the outside, and then they get to play their inner life,” explains Weissman. “This structure gave us such a gift because we knew that each of [the actresses] would get their moment. And they’re gracious in the way that they will each happily serve the other stories.”
Although the focus of the 10-episode drama is finding a killer, Washington feels like Imperfect Women tonally had room for more than just suspense. “We’ve all worked really hard on making the characters have the right balance of humanity. And I think the tone of the show is something that we’re all very proud of — that it is sexy, juicy, thrilling and dangerous, but also that there is humour and romance,” she says. The writing is also full of all kinds of questionable, not quite best friend appropriate behaviour. “Well, that’s the really most fun challenge — to justify the unjustifiable, right?” says Weisman. “I think we’re all drawn to that as human beings, where you lean in to hear a story about someone doing something unforgivable. And then there’s the challenge of really humanizing that, because we all do terrible things. We all make mistakes.”
Imperfect Women, streaming Wednesdays on Apple TV