‘Nine Perfect Strangers’: Lena Olin Reveals Her Reaction to That Death Shocker

Amanda Bell June 18, 2025, 12:00 pm

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Lena Olin in Nine Perfect Strangers — Hulu

[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for Nine Perfect Strangers Episode 6, “The Other Side.”]

Well, it looks like Masha (Nicole Kidman) has been haunted by more than one ghost this season on Nine Perfect Strangers. Not only is her daughter lurking around in the shadows (of her mind), but it turns out her Zauberwald mentor Helena (Lena Olin) is also dead and living on only in her imagination.

The episode begins with Masha reflecting on the breakthrough she had with David (Mark Strong) as Helena urges her to forgive him for what he did to her and her daughter. Forgiveness isn’t only hers to give David, though, and she decides to spend the day working Matteo (Aras Aydin).

We then learn, with excruciating imagery, that Matteo’s entire family was murdered in a drone strike guided by the satellite Imogen’s (Annie Murphy) father created. He was treated in a field hospital by none other than Agnes (Dolly de Leon) when she was still a nun.

Without Masha around, Peter (Henry Golding) decides to hunt down his dad using a map and his tripped-out senses, and when he finds him, he’s covered head to toe in a mudbath and wants to get even more dirty: He’s decided to take over Zauberwald for profit. Also messy is the journey Agnes, Brian (Murray Bartlett), Tina (King Princess), and Wolfie (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) find themselves on after they discover a giant wine bath and decide to play “F*** Marry Kill” and sling red juice at each other.

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About that scene, Richardson-Sellers told TV Insider, “The wine bath was insane. We were in that wine bath for like six, seven hours. We were all just prunes, and it really would sting… ’cause it was water with dye in it. But it was chaos, it was fun … I think often in life, we’re not allowed to play as much as we should as adults — just be wild and silly and get rid of any self-consciousness — and I definitely got to do that in the show.” Will the fun outing be enough to save Wolfie’s relationship with Tina, though? We’ll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, with all of the others, erm, indisposed, Martin (Lucas Englander) decides to use his Masha-free time to do a little business, perhaps to prove that he doesn’t need her, despite his mother’s prior wishes for them to share responsibility for the place. Martin oversees the administration of drugs to Imogen and Victoria (Christine Baranski). Through the experience, Imogen discovers that her father died by suicide due to his sense of responsibility for deaths like Matteo’s family. She also emerges from the trip to find her mother having adverse reactions to the drugs due to her symptoms, which are from ALS.

After Victoria is treated by EMTs, Helena demands Masha cancel the grand finale of the experiment. She tells her, “You came to me a broken woman, but I thought I managed to fix you… You’ll break them. You’ll break anything you try to heal.”

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However, we soon learn from a photo that Helena died in 2022, and any sight of her at this retreat experience is Masha’s own mental machinations and self-torture.

“That was something that created an urgency to me to what she does,” Lena Olin said of how the revelation that Helena is actually dead and now a device of Masha’s mind affected her performance. “It gives you some kind of fearlessness and it goes straight to honesty, I think, because who wants to put up a facade and come up with simple little lies? … I think it turns you into a straight shooter. It must do. And that’s certainly the case for Helena.”

Nine Perfect Strangers, Wednesdays, Hulu