‘Imperfect Women’: Corey Stoll Breaks Down Howard’s ‘Manipulative’ Behavior

Howard (Corey Stoll) has proven to be the most unhinged character of all on Imperfect Women. Not only was he cheating on his wife, Mary (Elisabeth Moss), with her best friend, Nancy (Kate Mara), but he put his own daughter’s life at risk when he realized Mary was becoming suspicious that he was a murderer.

In Episode 6, Mary discovered Howard’s affair and started coming up with evidence that he was the one who killed Nancy. He retaliated by drugging their daughter Artemis with Mary’s Adderall pills, which she had hidden out of reach in the kitchen. By the end of Episode 7, Howard turned the tables on his wife, making her appear untrustworthy and threatening to have the kids taken from her by the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS).

“As an actor, you’re supposed to be the top advocate for your character. I was really able to do that up until the hospital,” Stoll admits to TV Insider. “Then it became this whole other thing. It’s obviously something deeply, deeply wrong with his ethical framework at that point.”

Artemis ended up surviving, but Stoll says Howard was willing to do whatever it took to save himself, even if it meant taking down his wife and potentially killing his daughter. “I think he can see himself as operating from love, but at that point in the story, he’s really just in absolute survival mode,” Stoll reveals. “He’s just a cornered animal, and doing anything he can to survive. He’s very smart, and he’s very capable and manipulative in that way. But I can’t excuse it.”

Howard showed just how manipulative he was when doctors were saving Artemis’ life, and he made sure to tell Mary, “She’s here because of you.” The DCFS launched a formal investigation into what happened to Artemis. An emergency protective order was filed against Mary, requiring her to leave the family home and denying her unsupervised contact with her two minor children.

When Mary confronted Howard with her suspicion that he had poisoned Artemis because he knew she was onto him, he denied any involvement. And when she erratically made her accusations about him in front of the police, Howard remained stoic, ultimately putting more negative attention on Mary, who only calmed down under Eleanor’s (Kerry Washington) guidance.

Mary went to the detective with her evidence against Howard (the poem from his book that he gave Nancy and Nancy’s Claddagh ring that she found in his closet), but he bamboozled her again by giving the police a box of Nancy’s things that Mary had taken over the years (unbeknownst to Eleanor, who was incredulous over this new information).

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“It’s not what it looks like,” Mary insisted, shutting down Howard’s claims that she was “jealous” of and “obsessed” with Nancy. “She would never have even noticed that any of it was gone. Nancy had so much.”

This put Mary and Eleanor back at square one, and they met with a private investigator to find out more about the crime scene where Nancy was killed. The PI explained that the blood pattern suggested the killer dragged Nancy to the water with one arm, leading him to theorize that the suspect had an injury.

Despite not being allowed in her home per DCFS, Mary snuck in to obtain Howard’s medical records that proved he had a shoulder injury. He walked in on her, resulting in a back-and-forth between the two, during which Howard continued to gaslight his wife. “You’re tearing this family apart,” he told her, later adding, “[Even] with me out of the picture, it’s not like you’d be granted custody, nor anyone in your colorfully unstable family.”

Howard told Mary he still wanted to be a family and that they could start over together in Ohio, but when Mary wasn’t willing to budge, Howard played more mind games, flashing back to when he and Mary would role-play as if they were Nancy and her husband, Robert (Joel Kinnaman). “I wasn’t the one with a thing for Nancy,” he said to his wife. “That was you. I know you loved her. You thought she was so beautiful. That’s why I went along with your little game.”

It was enough to break Mary down and make her believe she had no other option but to let it go. “I can’t do it,” she told Eleanor. “I can’t go to the police. He wins. Howard wins. I could lose my children, do you understand? … He’s so much smarter than I am, Ellie. Every move I make, he is two ahead.”

Even after Eleanor laid it out point-blank (“He’s a murderer! He’s a f**king murderer! He murdered our best friend!”), Mary was no longer willing to go to the police with the new evidence against Howard (his medical records). Instead, she snuck out of Eleanor’s home in the middle of the night and went home to her husband.

When Eleanor went to Mary’s house to tearfully beg her to change her mind, her best friend wouldn’t even speak to her. Instead, it was Howard who said, “She doesn’t wanna see you. This was her choice. She came back of her own free will.”

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Despite Robert ending his relationship with Eleanor, she went to him for help, filling him in on the evidence about Howard. She begged Robert’s powerful father to go to the police with the new information, and although he declined at first, Robert convinced him by threatening to go public with all their family secrets.

Authorities produced a warrant to bring Howard in for questioning, and Howard automatically assumed that Mary was the one who called them. As he was being carted away, he asked for DCFS to come to the house, and Mary had no choice but to look on in tears as her children were taken away from her.

As Mary and Eleanor separately figured out how to move forward from here, they both caught wind of a new news report that revealed Nancy’s stepfather, Scott (Wilson Bethel), who had sexually abused her when she was a teenager, was now the prime suspect in her murder after a video surfaced of him on the night she was killed.

There are plenty of questions to be answered in next week’s finale, including: Who really did kill Nancy? Will Mary lose custody of her girls? Will Mary and Eleanor be able to repair their broken friendship? The final episode drops on April 29.

Imperfect Women, Wednesdays, Apple TV