Will There Be a ‘His & Hers’ Season 2 After Killer Twist? Boss Weighs In

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

It’s the twist that no one saw coming (unless you read Alice Feeney’s fantastic book, of course). His & Hers has become a sensation following its January 8 drop on Netflix, and the thriller sticks closely to some of its source material while also making some changes for the adaptation.

The series follows estranged spouses Anna (Tessa Thompson, also an executive producer) and Jack (Jon Bernthal) as the news anchor and detective both dig into a murder in her hometown where he still lives. By the end, more women are killed, and it turns out that it was Anna’s mother Alice (Crystal Fox), going after her daughter’s former high school classmates after learning about the roles they played in Anna’s assault. But the only one who knows is Anna.

Below, executive producer William Oldroyd breaks down some of the book-to-screen changes.

What excited you about adapting this book and telling the story like you did?

William Oldroyd: Well, I read the book in 2020 in the pandemic, had a lot of time to read then, and I’m an avid reader of this genre, but the thing that stood out for me was the ending. I just couldn’t see that end coming as a discerning reader of murder mysteries. It really surprised me. So I thought, well, this is a good start at least for an adaptation. And then I felt like the characters were people I could relate to anew, I come from a small town. In fact, the small town where I grew up was the neighboring town of the town in which Alice Feeney wrote the book. She wrote the book in Godalming, I grew up in Guildford, and all of the things that she described about growing up in a small town and that small town being about an hour away from a big city, which is London, I could relate to, and the sort of resentment that festers in these small towns when people leave and go away and pursue a career and then return to that small town and so on. So I really wanted to look at that. I enjoyed the twists and turns, I enjoyed the dual perspectives, and I love the genre. I’ve always wanted to make a murder mystery, and this felt like the perfect one to adapt.

Courtesy of Netflix

The killer is the same in the book and TV show, but there are some differences in the final confrontation involving Catherine (Rebecca Rittenhouse) and what led to what Alice did. Why make the changes that you did?

We had to streamline it in a way in which — I mean, in the book, you have three points of view. You have his, hers, and then there’s a third-person point of view, which is italicized, which is the killer. And it is not specific in terms of gender or identity. That’s the whole point. You can’t tell who it is, but we know it’s the killer because they are saying, I killed them all. I think the first thing they say. Well, we couldn’t obviously present that because in a visual medium, you have to show something, and even if you hear them speak, unless you wanted to — In the audiobook, interestingly, they put the voice through a synthesizer to make it sound like someone using a sort of voice box.

But it was Bill Dubuque, who’s really our showrunner in the writers’ room, who came up with a smart idea that actually the way to achieve the same idea was to hear the voiceover as if we think it is the voiceover of the killer, which is Anna’s voice. And then to reveal what we have been hearing throughout, which is Anna reading a letter from her mother at the end, which then reveals that ultimately it was her. And I thought that was a very smart way of doing it because if we were going to lose that third-person point of view, this was actually a very clever way of keeping the sort of architecture I had enjoyed about the book.

There are some other small and some significant changes from the book to the TV show. There’s the backstory like teen Anna (Kristen Maxwell) and Rachel’s (Isabelle Kusman) and Anna and Jack’s, the location, how certain characters were killed, and then there’s the assault and what actually happened that night. Can you talk about going about figuring out which ones would be adapted as they were in the book and which ones you would be changing? Starting with the assault.

I think what we needed was a clear reason why Alice would kill these women, but punish Catherine, not kill her. And the fact that Catherine ran away in Alice’s mind, I think, means that she deserves to be framed for these murders and punished, but not killed. I mean, I think maybe it’s a little simplistic, but there’s a logic to it. But for that to happen, we had to engineer it so that we would only partially reveal the truth throughout. So Anna never tells anybody what happened to her until Alice finds that out and then acts on her behalf. And I think that’s very important because with a trauma like that, I don’t think people often want to admit that these things happened.

And I think that the letter that Alice writes at the end to Anna is really a way of saying, “I know your secret. Now you know mine.” It’s a letter about a mother’s love for her daughter, but it’s also about, if I share this secret with you, then you can trust me to keep your secret.

The great thing about working with Alice Feeney was that she was very happy for this series to take on a new life from the book. And what’s funny is that by giving us that freedom to adapt it as freely as we like, we actually stayed pretty faithful throughout.

And then Anna and Rachel’s backstory?

Yeah, that unfortunately was just time because we had six episodes and we actually wrote — when we were considering eight episodes, we wrote scenes between them where they spend time, like Anna goes to Rachel’s house, Rachel lived in a nice house in the center of town around Dahlonega Square. She was more well off. And we did actually bring some of that backstory into flashbacks. But the brief we had was this had to be a bingeable show that satisfied that audience in the space of six episodes. And so inevitably some things get stripped back so that we can just focus on the main storyline

In the book, Richard (Pablo Schreiber) dies. In the show, he’s arrested. Talk about that change.

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Tessa Thompson & Jon Bernthal Break Down 'His & Hers' Killer Reveal

In the book, I felt like the body count was seriously high, and I didn’t think it needed to be that high. I think there’s a logic to killing these women because they deserved it. But actually, in the book, Catherine — in the book, she’s called Cat Jones, and we changed it to Lexy Jones because we thought an audience would work out that Catherine Kelly was Cat Jones too soon. But Cat Jones and Richard Jones have two daughters, and I just felt like this unnecessary to create two orphans at the end of the show. At some point, you have to ask, “Yre we going to really lose an audience if, yes, you kill her and you kill him, but then you leave these two children without parents when we’ve already killed Zoe [Marin Ireland] and left Meg [Ellie Rose Sawyer] without a mother?” So it just came down to being very focused on what Alice’s objective is, seeking revenge for this brutal assault that happened 20 years ago, and making sure that those people paid the price for that.

How is Anna feeling at the end there about what her mother did and now having to keep that secret from Jack? Because even if, as it seems, there’s a bit of acceptance from Anna, Alice did still kill his sister. How does she keep that from him?

That’s a good question. I mean, we’ll have to see. [Laughs] That for me is the extraordinary thing, which is, what is she going to do with this information? That, for me, is the great question at the end. I think personally, my interpretation of her look at the end between her and her mother is one of gratitude and satisfaction … there’s a wink and a smile. In a film I directed, Lady Macbeth, there is a young woman, and she is not free, she’s bought and then into a marriage paid for, and so the only way she can gain freedom is to kill everybody, to fight her way out. And at the end, she is free of all those people, and she sits down, they’ve all gone. But when she sits down, and you think, “Is she happier than she was before?” And for me, it was the same with this, which is, Alice has avenged her daughter for this brutal assault that happened. But now everything that Anna has — she’s pregnant, she has Jack back, the family is reconstructed, she has a new daughter in Meg, she has her job — all of this, the foundations are these murders that her mother has committed. And I really like that as a predicament for a character.

How would Jack react, should he find out? We see how much he cares about both Anna and Alice.

Well, I don’t think he’d be very happy, to put it mildly. I think even though they had a difficult relationship and they were constantly arguing that he loved — it’s clear. I mean, it is clear. It was clear on the page. It’s clear in Jon’s performance with Marin, I think that there was real tenderness, even in the worst moments between them. I don’t think Anna’s ever going to tell Jack because it would totally destroy his relationship with Alice, right?

Could there be a Season 2? Because I would love to see what would be next for Anna and Jack.

You have to ask Netflix.

But you would want to do one?

It was conceived as a limited series. We didn’t think beyond that. I think we’ve created some great characters. The twist is terrific, and the audience is really reacting to it. They’re really responding to this series. Again, I think you have to ask Netflix to see what plans they have.

Is there anything you would want to explore?

The question I have, which I would be interested to ask all the guys I made this with is, “Where do you pick it up from? Do you pick it up straight from where you’ve just left off? What does she do with this information? Or do we just move on?” For me, it’s like, “Do you want to see what she does with that information, or do you want to just start from a position which is further down the line and she’s sitting with it, and it’s still there, and she knows the truth, see how it plays out with her relationship with her mother after that?”

Courtesy of Netflix

What does the future look like for Anna and Jack? They do seem happy right now, but there’s still so much history there.

Yeah, and she still hasn’t told him what happened. I don’t know whether she ever will. I think they found peace. When we see them, they have adopted Meg, they’re living in their dream house that they saw years ago and were considering buying. He’s working and happy to support Anna. She takes the top job at the news station. All seems to be going [well]. They have a baby on the way. I think they’ve managed to pull their lives back together again from where it had ruptured so badly before. And I think it’s good.

Talk about having that excellent extended Anna and Jack scene in Episode 4 at the Falls, culminating in them finding comfort in one another because they’re the only ones who can really comfort each other in the way they need. Tessa and Jon are so good in that entire scene.

Yeah, I agree. It’s a great, great, great scene. I think it came out of a conversation between the writers and the actors. I think they had a lot that they wanted to say in that scene, considering that they had, by that point, already-short Episodes 1, 2, and 3. So, because of the way in which we had blocked shot it, they had shot the relationship up to that point. So it felt like everything they wanted to say to each other, they had reason to say, which I think is not always the case.

I think it came from a very raw place. You’d have to ask Anja [Marquardt] who filmed that, and she did such a brilliant job. But I think in the first instance, there was a fairly complicated idea to go into the Falls and move around. And when they arrived, actually, the simplicity of just standing there in front of each other and airing their grievances, coming to terms with their problems, and just having it out, sometimes it’s as simple as that. When you have a great scene, well-written dialogue, and brilliant actors, you can just keep it very, very simple. And I think it works very, very, very well.

His & Hers, Streaming Now, Netflix