‘The Good Daughter’: Jake McDorman on Huck’s Big Secret & Shocking Finale Confession

Jake McDorman‘s character in The Good Daughter, Mason “Huck” Huckabee, starts out as the random high school history teacher who Charlie (Meghann Fahy) drunkenly sleeps with, but by the Episode 6 finale, his connection to the overarching storyline is revealed in a bombshell twist. WARNING: Spoilers for The Good Daughter ahead.

It turns out that Huck was the one who orchestrated the attack on Charlie and Sam’s (Rose Byrne) dad, Rusty (Brendan Gleeson), more than 20 years earlier because Rusty, a defense attorney, represented his sister’s rapist in court. Rusty wasn’t there when a masked Huck and Zach Culpepper (Ian Elrick), who Huck hired to help him carry out the attack, came by, so Sam, Charlie, and their mom, Gamma (Olivia Williams), became collateral damage.

Zach killed Gamma, left Sam with lifelong injuries after shooting her in the woods, and raped Charlie, who was just 13 years old at the time. Sam and Charlie identified Zach as their mother’s killer, but mistakenly said his brother was the accomplice because Huck, who remained masked the entire time, called him “brother” at the scene (“I called everyone brother,” Huck later explained).

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“I think he’s a good guy who made one really awful mistake that he never atoned for,” McDorman tells TV Insider. “So he almost made himself atone by going and enlisting in the military, having tours overseas, and kind of running from it as fast and as far as he could.”

While McDorman doesn’t know if it’s possible to forgive Huck for what he did, he notes, “It’s just even more tragic to make such an awful, awful mistake when you’re so young because he’s haunted by it. I think by the end, when it finally gets out, it’s a catharsis, even though he knows that he’s damned. I think he wants to atone and say his side of it, which is, like, ‘You were awful to me. I was hurt, too.'” Huck was the one to find his sister after she hung herself because of the rape.

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Sam and Charlie not only learned about Huck’s involvement in their past, but also that Rusty had been keeping it from them for years. He decided not to tell the police or his daughters what he knew to spare them having to relive the situation at a trial. Charlie followed in her late father’s footsteps and also didn’t go to the police with Huck’s confession, although he was still taken away from the scene in handcuffs for stealing the murder weapon from a shooting at the high school, which took place while Charlie was stopping by his classroom after their one-night stand.

“Rusty has had to defend some pretty unsavory characters; that’s part of the job. So being able to empathize with someone who’s made a mistake and kind of fight for them, I imagine, is in the Quinn DNA,” McDorman points out. “And once Huck got it off his chest … I was there, this is what happened, but this is why … I’d imagine that empathy from Rusty can probably play a role there.”

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McDorman thinks Huck probably did have real feelings for Charlie before he connected the dots and realized who she was after their tryst.

“It’s almost a completely different show before the school shooting,” he notes. “In that encounter in the classroom, they switch phones; they’re both hungover. Huck’s at school; Charlie comes to meet him. There’s still a spark there. She’s married. I mean, that’s already enough to build a story and a show out of. There’s people making decisions in the gray, and Charlie and Sam have this traumatic thing that happened to them 27 years ago, and she’s got this confusing relationship with her husband, and now this guy. The flirtation and the kind of vibe in that classroom is one that we just do not ever see again in the show.”

The shooting wound up interrupting the “flirty, fun, loose banter” between Huck and Charlie, and once he made his confession, there was no hope. “I do think that chemistry-wise, they could have been something,” McDorman says. “But once she knew what Huck did, that was never going to work. Not at all.” In the end, Charlie gets back together with her estranged husband Ben (Michael Dorman).

Check out the video above to see McDorman break down filming the chilling confession scene and more.

The Good Daughter, All Episodes, Streaming Now, Peacock