Spoiler alert: This story contains details from the Netflix mystery miniseries The Perfect Pair, including the crime thriller.
The butler The daughter-in-law did it.
The finale of Netflix’s six-part crime drama The Perfect Pair reveals who murdered maid of honor Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy) at the wedding of Merritt’s best friend Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson) and Benji Winbury (Billy Howle). Their wedding – at the Nantucket estate of wealthy Tag Winbury (Liev Schreiber) and his wife, successful novelist Greer Garrison Winbury (Nicole Kidman) – was interrupted when Amelia found Merritt’s lifeless body floating near the beach.
The night before, Merritt had confided in Amelia that her affair with Tag had led to Merritt’s pregnancy, which raised suspicions about the Winburys – who were marketed as “the perfect couple” to sell Greer’s books. But the culprit is Abby Winbury (Dakota Fanning), who is married to Tag and Greer’s son Thomas (Jack Reynor). Unlike Elin Hilderbrand’s 2018 novel, which inspired the miniseries, Abby’s role in Merritt’s death is much more targeted.
“We had to change (the ending) because we didn’t want the audience to know what was going on,” Schreiber says. “We needed that element of surprise. It’s so important, not just to the book, but especially to the show.”
Schreiber and Kidman reveal their thoughts on this shocking finale and what’s next for Tag and Greer.
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Who killed Merritt Monaco in “The Perfect Pair”?
In the TV adaptation, Abby drowns Merritt because Merritt is pregnant with Tag’s baby and the newest Winbury heir would delay Thomas’ access to his trust fund by 18 years. As Thomas warned Benji in the first episode, “They’re all in it for the money.”
Fanning enjoyed the role of the murderer, says Schreiber. “She loved it. She shoved it in our faces every day.” She is “the queen of witless lines on this show. She’s actually highly intelligent. But she’s incredibly witless and that’s hilarious. It’s so good.”
“And when you look at it again,” says Kidman, “and see all the layers that lead up to her, she’s fantastic in it.”
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In the book, Abby slips a pill into the drink of Featherleigh, a woman Thomas is having an affair with. (In the series, she is called Isabel.) Abby hopes that the drugged Featherleigh will not be able to have sex with her husband that night. But Merritt drinks the drugged drink and, drowsy from the drugs, drowns.
Kidman, an executive producer, says Hilderbrand enthusiastically relinquished control. “Elin said, ‘Take it and make great television,'” she says. “‘I’m writing. I’m not taking control. … Please just make it your own, but make it good.’ And so it was really freeing, I know for (director Susanne Bier) and me.”
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Although the finale solves the crime mystery, Kidman believes there is more to the story of Greer and Tag that could unfold in another season.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” she teases when asked about the couple who apparently go their separate ways in the finale after 29 years of marriage. “I think it’s time” for more.
Greer, who revealed to her children that she met the father while working as an escort and not in an art gallery as she had claimed, has finally “taken control of what she wants,” says Kidman.
“When you see the final episode and she says something like, ‘Listen, let’s just tell it like it was,’ it was really fun to do that, to just rip the Band-Aid off,” she says. “I think there’s a tremendous amount of history left and a tremendous amount of future left.”
“They’re taking a break now, but who knows?” Schreiber adds. He’s also open to more episodes if Netflix agrees.
“You can have the best cast, you can have the best director, you can have tons of money, but you don’t always get that synergy between people where they give each other space,” Schreiber says. “And this group of actors were really, really great at that. It was a lot of fun.”
Singing and dancing in the opening credits of “The Perfect Couple”
To introduce the show, the cast learned a choreographed dance that was performed on the beach to Meghan Trainor’s catchy “Criminals.”
“It took me two weeks to learn it,” says Schreiber.
“It took me five minutes,” Kidman boasts. But what Schreiber lacked in skill, he made up for in enthusiasm. “I was very nervous,” he says.
“And it wasn’t me,” says Kidman – because neither would Greer have been, she explains. “It’s hard to glide on a beach,” especially in her aquamarine column dress.
“It was very, very hard on the beach in that dress,” she says. “But I thought to myself, ‘We’ll keep (the movements) small.'”
