‘Malice’ Team Talks [Spoiler]’s Death & How Adam Feels About It (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Malice Season 1.]

It doesn’t take long in Prime Video‘s new revenge thriller Malice for you to see just how chilling of a character Adam (Jack Whitehall) is. By early on into the second episode, he’s poisoned a person and killed a cat. But that’s just setting the stage for what’s to come, as he targets the Tanner family, specifically Jamie (David Duchovny), for a wrongdoing from his past, in increasingly disturbing ways.

It’s not until Adam has manipulated his way into the Tanner family — originally introduced to them working for their friends, Jules (Christine Adams) and Damien (Raza Jaffrey) — and Jamie has lost everything (his dog, his job, his reputation) that it comes to light just why he has so much hatred towards his new employer. Jamie invested millions in Adam’s father’s company, but after four months, the man couldn’t make his interest payments. As Adam sees it, Jamie killed his family’s company — and his parents, because his father set fire to their house and killed himself and Adam’s mother.

Their confrontation ends with Adam killing Jamie, then leaving Greece on a boat. But he’s not exactly feeling the way he expected, Jack Whitehall tells TV Insider.

“That’s the note that we wanted to chime at the end, is the sense that he’s executed his plan, and he’s exacted his revenge that he’s been determined to, but he’s left with this slightly empty sense of it not filling the void that he thought it might and a sense of a kind of hollow victory and that the revenge hasn’t brought him the closure that he thought it might,” he says in the video interview above with the rest of the cast and creator James Wood.

Yannis Drakoulidis/©Prime UK

David Duchovny knew going into the series that Jamie would be killed by the end of the first season. The how wasn’t written yet at that point, however. “I didn’t know where, and I didn’t really know how until we were kind of in the middle of filming, and it was something that we got to discuss, in fact, how it was going to make enough sense for me, for us to get to a place where he could do that,” he explains. “It was actually fun to be hurdling towards this conclusion and also being able to help create it.”

Adam’s goal was to make Jamie suffer like he felt he did because of the Tanner man, so when did the plan become about killing him? According to Wood, “he always knew he was going to kill him,” it was just a question of how and when.

“That plan — we talked about this a lot, actually — really only comes together in Episode 6 when they go back to Greece, which Adam wasn’t expecting. I think he then decides to escalate things,” Wood explains. “The first couple of episodes, it’s all about him inveigling his way into the family, poisoning the nanny so he can take that job. And then in the middle of the season, Episodes 3 and 4, it’s about him learning the family’s weaknesses and where they have secrets and hidden agendas and then exploiting them to hurt them.”

He continues, “I love Episode 5 where Jamie loses everything — his dog, every possession, his family, his job. That was always a big part of the plan. And I think once Adam had achieved that, it was then just a question of how he killed him and when, but he didn’t know how and he didn’t know when, but he knew he was going to.”

Adam does kill Jamie’s dog, but Duchovny doesn’t think that his character figured that out when he put the pieces together. “He didn’t think he was going to kill him,” he points out. “He’s walking away by the end. Jamie thinks Adam got what he came for. ‘He f**ked up my life. He created havoc. He hurt me.’ I don’t think he thinks he wants death. That’s why he kind of tells him off even at the end. He is not apologetic. He’s not trying to brown nose his way out of there. He’s ready to go. It’s over. He believes it’s over.”

Related

'Malice': Will There Be a Season 2?

Jamie’s wife Nat (Carice van Houten) is in Greece, with their kids, when she hears the sirens at the end, and there’s a look in her eyes that suggests that she knows what has happened. “I think she can feel it,” van Houten says. “She knows. I love nonverbal acting. If it’s just something with an eyebrow or a wink of whatever, that’s my favorites. Those are my favorite bits. So I’m happy you picked up on something there.”

Jamie isn’t the first human that Adam kills. Damien also suffers that fate after he starts digging into his former employee and realizes things aren’t adding up. Like Duchovny, Raza Jaffrey knew his character wouldn’t survive the season from the beginning.

“When he meets his end via cricket bat, it’s quite a moment, absolutely. And it was more thinking, ‘Now, how are we going to do this, and how am I going to keep a straight face because it’ll be Jack Whitehall doing it to me?’ And Jack was really genuinely making me laugh at this moment,” Jaffrey shares. “It kind of goes on and on, and he keeps coming back for more. In fact, that was something that was difficult, not making it seem too hammy as I was crawling across the floor trying to grab his ankle for the 15th time.”

Damien does lead the charge in looking into Adam’s past once he catches onto something not being quite right, and Jaffrey enjoyed that part of his character.

“He’s checked out in the world, but actually, he’s a bright man underneath it all, and he’s perhaps a better listener than a lot of the other characters in the show who are much more about being part of the scene and the surface,” he says. “Damien’s checked out in that way, so he was able to observe a little bit more.”

Amazon MGM Studios

Christine Adams suggests that “Damien was never a big fan of Adam,” that it was her character who really wanted him to tutor their children. Jaffrey agrees, but adds that Damien should have been “more engaged” from the start, when Jules first suggested hiring Adam.

Jules remains in the dark about her husband’s death at the end of the season because Adam calls and tells her that Damien knows about their brief affair — “Damien never knew, they didn’t give me that script,” Jaffrey jokes — and is upset. As for why Jules slept with Adam in the first place, Adams says it was likely many things.

“These things are complicated,” she explains. “It could have been that Adam’s character was just so disarmingly charming, and they’d had a lot of drinks, and he was able to sort of weave his magic. I think perhaps her and Damien have been in this long-standing relationship, which might have started to feel a bit dull and a bit boring, and she wanted a bit of excitement. I also get the sense that it’s not something that she’s ever done before, so really out of character for Jules, which I think speaks more to who Adam is rather than who Jules is. I think for Adam, it’s like a sport. Chasing people and compromising people is something that’s his catnip in a way. And so I think for him, I don’t think she ever had any choice about that. I think he’d probably made a decision very early on that he was going to make that happen. And once he’d done it, it was kind of onto the next. And I don’t think it was meaningful. I do think it was just sort of one of those awful blips that she’d rather forget, but obviously, it has real consequences.”

Adams does think that Jules starts to see red flags when she realizes Adam’s working for Jamie and Nat in London during their post-holiday dinner. “Also, she’s a bit thrown because the history of her with Nat is that Nat always takes what Jules has, so there’s this really sort of mixed feelings about why is he here, but also this is very Nat behavior to take something that she wants for herself,” she adds. Then, when Jules and Adam have “a very heated conversation” during which he tells her Damien knows about them, “she knows that’s when things were about to be really bad.” Still, Adam killing her husband isn’t even on her radar. “He’s managed to throw enough kind of dynamite into the scenario to make everybody question everyone.”

Watch the full video above for more from Jack Whitehall, David Duchovny, Carice van Houten, Christine Adams, Raza Jaffrey, and James Wood about Season 1 as well as what they each think the worst thing Adam did in Season 1 is.

Malice, Streaming Now, Prime Video