Sarah Snook And Dakota Fanning On ‘All Her Fault’

In All Her Fault, Sarah Snook stars as Marissa, a woman living every parent’s worst nightmare. When she goes to collect her five-year-old son Milo from a playdate, she is stunned to find there was no playdate, and her son has vanished. And that’s just the beginning…

“When they gave me the book and I read it and found out what the twist was, I couldn’t say no, it was just so juicy and there’s so much to explore,” Snook told Deadline.

Soon, it becomes clear that Milo has been taken by someone close to home, and as Marissa, her friend Jenny (Dakota Fanning) and Marissa’s husband (Jake Lacy) try to unravel the mystery, everything Marissa thought she knew will be turned on its head.

Plus, both women will come to see just how uneven the division of labor is in their homes; how they are not only running their work lives but are still left holding the proverbial baby and all the household tasks. Even Milo’s abduction is looked upon as something the women somehow allowed to happen, hence the title, All Her Fault.

Says Snook: “I think it’s a conversation that’s been certainly happening in my life, in my friendship circles for the last, certainly five years at least, and coming more to the public forefront, about the invisible labor that women tend to take on in a relationship that has children involved. And that was something that we thought was interesting to explore in a world where the worst thing has happened to a parent, their child going missing… I really enjoyed being able to explore and get into those areas of social commentary in a thriller.”

“It’s not some exposé of men and all their terrible traits,” Fanning told Deadline at SCAD Savannah Film Festival this past weekend, where she was the recipient of the award for excellence in television. “It’s more about the things that they just don’t see that women do, or just the pieces that are left behind that they don’t realize are theirs to pick up. And so, it’s very hard for a woman to walk away and not pick up the pieces. It ends up that the burden falls on the female in that dynamic. And then I think in a more zoomed-out way, just the title of it, how that can turn into blame and shame and guilt and all of that as well.”

Fanning was also thrilled to work with Snook, she said. “She was a huge reason why I wanted to be a part of this experience. I’m such a massive fan of hers, and I’ve only heard the best things from people who have worked with her. And so I just really admired her going into it.”

The limited series from Peacock was adapted from the novel of the same name by Andrea Mara — a book that Carnival Pictures’ producer Nigel Marchant (Downton Abbey, The Day of the Jackal) happened upon by chance.

“I actually was reading The Sunday Times,” he said, “and this book, All Her Fault was the crime thriller of the month. I just read the little blurb, and it is such a clear proposition. That’s very sellable, if you can sum up a show in a paragraph or a couple of lines — it just felt very clean to me. I read it while I was on holiday and just thought, This is great. And I shared it with [showrunner] Meghan [Gallagher] and she felt the same.”

One key move for the onscreen story was to shift the action from the book’s Irish location to Chicago. “We shared it with some colleagues over at Peacock when we were looking at a co-production opportunity,” Marchant says. “They read it and said, ‘This is exactly what we were looking for. We feel that themes of the show are universal and is there any chance we could look at relocating it to America? And it just so happened Meghan was a U.S. writer who lived in Europe, so it was a really easy fit.”

Gallagher deeply related to the themes of inequality in parenting. “That world of women who are CEOs at work and then CEOs of their household, that’s the world that I know, and that’s the world of every woman I know who’s between the ages of about 30 and 55, which is quite a lot of people. Every woman I know who is working and raising children has hysterical breakdown crying fits outside their kids’ school. They just feel like they can’t do this anymore. And I’ve never seen that theme tackled sufficiently in television.”

The show was shot in both Chicago and Snook’s native Australia, and the show’s direction was split between Minkie Spiro (Better Call Saul, Pieces of Her) and Kate Dennis (The Handmaid’s Tale).

Snook said that working on a female-led team was key to bringing out the nuance of the female role in child-rearing so that it hit in an authentic way.

“It was really intentional to make sure we had a woman directing and having Meghan be the showrunner, because you don’t want to be too on-the-nose with those kinds of things. Otherwise, they’re overlooked and they are ignored. Whereas if you are more deft with illustrating it, I would hope that at least the deftness means that they are still seen. Then the people who need to be seeing those moments go, ‘Oh, actually that’s a really good point.’”

Adds Gallagher, “From a writing perspective, in terms of knowing [Shapiro and Dennis) are going to direct it, as corny as this sounds, you just relax, because you know that you can write a scene that you think is only going to work if it’s executed perfectly.”