Shortly after Rusty’s funeral, Sam, Charlie, and Ben discover that the two masked men who broke into the Quinn house decades earlier were Zack Culpepper and Huck, not Zack and his brother Daniel (as Charlie had been led to believe). Huck confesses that he had recruited Zack to attack Rusty in retaliation for Rusty defending the man accused of raping Huck’s sister. Can you each give voice to your characters’ internal dialogue after discovering that Huck had effectively caused the shooting of their mother and their own assaults?
Byrne: Karin Slaughter is so interesting, because she’s so ahead of the reader. She’s so ahead of her audience with her plots, but I do feel like Sam is that role too, and she’s a little bit ahead of the audience in her mind about what’s happening and she’s piecing it all together faster than everybody else. That was something I talked about a lot with Karin, so I tried to remember that in those scenes. I think she intuitively already knows all of this, and it’s catching up in real time as we’re watching it.
Fahy: What’s so interesting about the show is it’s so nuanced in terms of who did what, who is guilty of what, and who was wrong, because Charlie did accuse the wrong person [Daniel] of assaulting her — and that person was killed. So in the moment that she realizes that, she feels incredibly guilty for having essentially been responsible for someone losing their life. But also, she was a kid, and she was confused, and she only had the information that was in front of her. I think that really speaks to the way that we process trauma. Sometimes, it’s really hard to zoom out and look at things from a different point of view when all you can feel is the trauma that your body is still in fight or flight.
She’s unraveling all of that, feeling the guilt of that, feeling the anger of having been intimate with Huck, who is now a part of the worst day of her life. Ultimately, I think that Charlie finding out all of this is the thing that breaks her open, that ultimately allows her to come face to face with her truth. That is part of the catalyst to her being able to share that with Ben, which is what she needed to do so that they could really be together in a real way.
Byrne: They say in the birth order, the eldest daughter is such a huge responsibility in a family, especially for a young girl. So to see her sister go through this trauma again and relive it again in front of her is really harrowing and makes her so wildly furious that I feel like that is another very specific thing she’s going through.
Source: variety.com
