Imperfect Women Finale: Killer Reveal Explained by Creator
Kate Mara as Nancy in 'Imperfect Women'
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[This article contains major spoilers from the series finale of Imperfect Women.]
The whodunnit at the center of Imperfect Women — since Kate Mara’s Nancy was murdered in episode one — has finally been answered in the thriller’s series finale.
And Mary (Elisabeth Moss) was right.
Howard (Corey Stoll), the stay-at-home mom’s gaslighting husband whose once-distant relationship with Nancy turned inappropriately personal when the two began working together on a theater production, killed Nancy hours after she met up with Mary and Eleanor (Kerry Washington) for drinks in the series premiere, and told the latter friend she’d break things off with her then-unknown lover later that night.
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That plan doesn’t pan out quite as easily as Nancy expected, however. Instead of a mutual parting of ways, Howard professes his love for Nancy and proposes that the two be together. She rejects the idea and, upon relaying her desire to confess to Mary, Howard returns Nancy’s slap at the insinuation that she doesn’t care about her best friend with a deadly push into a cement wall that instantly kills her on impact.
The long-awaited revelation comes after eight episodes of nearly every associate of Nancy’s coming under suspicion, from her husband Robert (Joel Kinnaman) and her painter friend David (Theo Bongani Ndyalvane) to her mother’s abusive ex-boyfriend Scott (Wilson Bethel) and even her two closest friends.
“The fun of it is not knowing,” showrunner and creator Annie Weisman, who adapted the Apple TV series from Araminta Hall’s 2020 novel of the same name, tells The Hollywood Reporter, adding that the shifting points of view of each episode added to the overall mystery and anticipation of finding out who killed Nancy. “It’s the fun of really being in what feels like an objective point of view, and then suddenly you realize in the switching that it was not at all objective — everything is suspect.”
Below, Weisman talks with THR about the difficult conversations in the writers’ room about presenting the interracial friend group onscreen, considering an alternative killer and the message the series sends about the danger shame and secrets pose to women.
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In the series, viewers get quite a bit of detail about Nancy’s current and past life, and to a lesser extent, Eleanor’s. What backstory, if any, did you create about Mary and how she came to be friends with these women? She feels a bit like the financial and professional outlier of the group.
We loved the idea of them meeting in college, because it’s such a time when you can really find people outside of the other ways that we group together in adult life. It’s a time of reinvention and experimentation for a lot of people. So the idea was that each of these characters is somewhat of an outlier in their family of origin. They each found each other in college, and then get into adult life, and things change and they go on different tracks. That bond is still there, but it gets tested. With Mary, it was fun to think about when we meet her.
She’s in the middle of heavy-duty, three-kid parenting in a really absorbed way. I was inspired by this conversation I had with a really good, very old friend of mine, who called me in the middle of the day once. She was in the parking lot of a supermarket in tears like, “I just caught the eye of this woman looking at me, and I could see her dismissing me as this frumpy mom buying bargain cereal. She doesn’t know who I am inside. I’m not who that person sees.” And it was really moving because a lot of us feel that way in the difficult squeeze of our lives, in caregiving and in whatever that looks like for you. I thought, “Oh, this is the value of this longtime friendship.”
We really wanted to put that into the show — that the people you’ve known for decades are the ones who know who you are inside. Mary is that person inside. She has a fiery, imaginative life that hasn’t gotten expressed in a while because she’s in this abusive marriage — she’s in the teeth of caregiving and she needs her friends to remember that part of herself.
With Eleanor, we get a bit more understanding about why she is the way she is through her dynamic with her mom in the finale.