‘His & Hers’: Tessa Thompson & Jon Bernthal Break Down Killer Reveal (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for His & Hers Season 1.]

“It felt like unlike anything I’ve ever seen in this space before,” Tessa Thompson, who stars and executive produces Netflix’s captivating new thriller based on Alice Feeney’s book of the same name, says of the killer reveal at the end.

His & Hers follows estranged spouses, news anchor Anna (a superb Tessa Thompson) and detective Jack (Jon Bernthal, who does a great job portraying a character juggling a lot) as they’re reunited following a murder in her hometown where he still lives. That death, of a woman with whom Anna went to school and Jack was having an affair, is just the first, and quickly, more of her previous “friend” group, including his sister, are murdered. While it seems like the killer is another former classmate who was bullied and set up to be raped, the truth is much darker. Anna stopped the assault and was the one raped, as her “friends” watched. Anna’s mother, Alice (Crystal Fox), found her old video tapes and had watched them to see her after she’d moved away, only to find the tape of that night. She was the one to kill the women for what they’d done to her daughter.

One year after the case has been closed — with the aforementioned classmate, who dies when Jack’s partner Priya (Sunita Mani) intervenes as she’s attacking the estranged spouses — Anna, back with Jack, raising his niece, and pregnant, learns the truth, via a letter from her mother. It looks like there’s a bit of acceptance on her face at the end, and Thompson agrees.

“We wanted to leave a tiny bit of ambiguity.  I think it’s all things, I think it’s a complicated reveal, obviously, and I think it’s layered, but certainly acceptance,” Tessa Thompson tells TV Insider in the video interview with Jon Bernthal above. “What’s done is done.”

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She continues, “And I think structurally, what felt really exciting when I read the book and when we were building the show is it felt like the reveal of who this killer is — and ultimately this serial killer — is a kind of serial killer we haven’t seen before, and the motive is a kind of motive that we haven’t seen before, which is essentially a mother’s love. And for it to be a Black woman who is — partially why she gets away with it is because she’s so kind of underestimated in these spaces and invisible in these spaces. And so I think finding that kind of protagonist just felt very exciting for us in general because it felt like unlike anything I’ve ever seen in this space before.”

What we don’t see if whether Jack ever finds out. After all, Anna’s now keeping Alice’s secret, which includes killing his sister, and he cares deeply about these two women; we see that he continued to check in on and help Alice even after Anna had left. Neither Thompson nor Bernthal think that Anna ever tells Jack.

There were “a lot of conversations about that,” Jon Bernthal shares. “Look, this is a relationship, for better or worse, that has a lot of secrets in it, and like any healthy or unhealthy relationship, there’s things that you share and there’s things that I guess you don’t. And in this particular relationship, there’s definitely deceit, there’s definitely secrets, and then there’s definitely — these are the only two people on earth that have experienced sort of the same kind of thing and that kind of complete each other and know each other so intimately. So it’s that weird dichotomy.”

Watch the full video interview with Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal above for more, including about the ending; the powerful Episode 4 scene in which Anna and Jack tell each other they’re not the murderer and discuss the baby they lost, ending in them comforting one another; and if their characters ever thought the other was really a killer. Then, head to the comments section and let us know what you thought of the ending and the killer reveal.

His & Hers, Streaming Now, Netflix