Sharon Horgan: A mother's love is central to 'Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox'
NEW YORK, Aug. 20 (UPI) -- Catastrophe and Bad Sisters creator and actress Sharon Horgan says she wanted to star in Hulu's The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox because it is a nuanced family drama as opposed to a salacious true-crime saga.
"It is looking at the story from a new perspective and sort of giving it a wider lens and not just focusing on the courtroom drama of it, but on Amanda's journey," Horgan, 55, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview
"A lot of what led up to it and and happened after involved her family and impacted her family and, as someone who plays her mother, I realized how much of the the story was about their relationship and what you do for the people you love."
The actual Knox was a producer on the fact-based miniseries, which premieres Wednesday.
Horgan plays Edda Mellas, a German-born Seattle math teacher who is shocked to learn her daughter Amanda (Grace Van Patten) has been wrongfully imprisoned for the sexual assault and murder of her British flatmate while they were studying abroad in Italy in 2007.
As a real-life parent herself, Horgan couldn't help but envision how hard she would fight to protect her own daughter if she ended up at the center of such a painful ordeal half a world away.
"I'm a mama," she said. "I've got a 21-year-old girl and a 17-year-old girl, so, I, unfortunately, found it very easy to imagine either of my girls finding themselves in a terrifying situation [like this]."
Knox's trial, conviction, retrial and eventual acquittal made news headlines around the world for more than a decade.
"There was sort of a feeding of the public's obsession with it," Horgan said of the non-stop media coverage of the case, which led to countless documentaries and TV news-magazine specials.
"It's an absolutely tragic, terrible story involving two young women, so I understand why it got under people's skin so much."
Horgan was happy to spend time with the real Mellas and Knox when they visited the show's set.
"When I was researching for the role, I was watching anything I could find of her online and there wasn't really that much. There were a few interviews and [some footage of Mellas] dealing with the media, dealing with the press and I was always struck by her composure ... and how calmly she dealt with the whole circus of it," Horgan said.
"When I met her in real life, she's just a lovely, fun, young-for-her-age woman and I liked her very much and I think it's a testament to her strength of personality and her character that she's managed to pull together as normal a life as possible. I don't know if I'd have been able to manage that."
The real Knox was involved in the project from the very first Zoom call Horgan took with the filmmakers.
"It was Amanda and how she spoke about her mom, actually, how she spoke about what her mom went through while she was in prison, that made me want to do it, if I'm honest," Horgan said.
"She's incredibly smart, a very emotionally intelligent, very warm, friendly mother," Horgan said of Knox, who now has two children of her own. "She's someone who had a real curiosity about the film and TV making process, as well. She's very open about being so new to that and I really enjoyed having them around. Edda came down for a couple of days, as well."
Horgan said it was easy to bond with Van Patten (Tell Me Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers) and make that mother-daughter connection seem authentic.
"I just felt incredibly motherly towards her. I was away from my girls at the time and I did not love that," Horgan laughed, noting that Van Patten's sister Anna played Amanda's sister Deanna, so she also looked out for her.
"The two of them are adorable, sweet, kind girls and we hung out a bit. We did a bit of wall climbing together. We went for a few drinks," she added. "But, really, it was something that happened very quickly and, then, after that you're on set for so long. You have these long, long days, especially for the courtroom scenes. You really are sitting around for hours and days and, so, you do really just get to know each other."
Horgan described the production as having a relaxed, collaborative atmosphere in which everyone involved understood the responsibility they had to get this story right after years of misinformation, misunderstandings and bias obscured the truth.
"There's nothing about the team that made you feel anything other than protected," she said about the cast and crew.
"You were in good company and everyone was there to take care of the story and tell it to the best of their ability. That was a good feeling. You felt like everyone was very aware of the story that they were telling and being careful with that."
Amanda Knox returns to the U.S.
Amanda Knox, left, follows her attorney Michael Nifong as they attend a news conference held at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport near Seattle, Washington on October 4, 2011. After spending four years in an Italian prison Knox arrived in the United States after departing Rome's Leonardo da Vinci airport. Knox's life turned around dramatically Monday when an Italian appeals court threw out her conviction in the sexual assault and fatal stabbing of her British roommate. UPI/Jim Bryant | License Photo
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San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
How Monica Lewinsky and Amanda Knox teamed up to reclaim Knox's narrative
Monica Lewinsky is keenly aware of what it feels like when your name is no longer your own and becomes attached to a character conjured by others. An affair that she had with President Bill Clinton nearly 30 years ago as a White House intern made her an international headline. So, when Lewinsky read that Amanda Knox, another woman whose image precedes her, wanted to adapt her memoir for the screen, she felt she was in a unique position to help. Knox was on a study abroad program in Italy in 2007 when one of her housemates, Meredith Kercher, was killed. She and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito quickly became the prime suspects. The story was a tabloid sensation and Knox was branded Foxy Knoxy. After a lengthy trial, she and Sollecito were convicted of Kercher's murder and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison. They were later acquitted and exonerated. Knox has already told her story in two memoirs and it's been dramatized by others. There was a Lifetime movie about the case and she believes the 2021 movie 'Stillwater' starring Matt Damon was unfairly familiar. 'I have a story to tell because I have a mission, and my mission is to help people appreciate what really is going on when justice goes awry,' Knox said about why she entrusted Lewinsky to help tell her story through 'The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,' a limited series now streaming on Hulu. The show stars Grace Van Patten ('Tell Me Lies'), and both Knox and Lewinsky are among its executive producers. 'This woman, who has gone through her own version of hell where the world had diminished her to a punchline inspired me to feel like maybe there was a path forward in my life,' Knox said. Lewinsky was not always in a place to help others reclaim their narrative because her own was too much to bear. She admits to vaguely hearing about Knox's case but didn't have the energy to give it attention. 'I was allergic to cases like this,' Lewinsky said. 'I had just come out of graduate school at the end of 2006. And 2007 was a very challenging year for me.' She believed graduate school would lead to a new beginning and desired to 'have a new identity and go get a job like a normal person.' She said the realization that wasn't going to happen 'was a pretty devastating moment.' In 2014, Lewinsky wrote a personal essay for Vanity Fair and became one of its contributors. She went on to produce a documentary and give a TedTalk called 'The Price of Shame,' addressing cyber-bullying and public-shaming. Educating others provided Lewinsky with a purpose she had been looking for. 'With most everything I do, it feels really important to me that it moves a conversation forward somehow,' said Lewinsky, who now hosts a podcast called 'Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky.' By the time they officially began working on 'Twisted Tale,' Lewinsky was in protective mode. 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'The scope of this story isn't, 'Here's the bad thing that happened to Amanda, the end.' The scope of the story is Amanda's going back to Italy and to appreciate why she made that choice, we need to go back and revisit everything that leads up to it,' said Knox. Viewers will also see others' perspectives, including Sollecito's, a prison chaplain and confidante, and Knox's mother. It also shows how the investigators and prosecutor reached the conclusion at the time that Knox and Sollecito were guilty. 'We did not want mustache-twirling villains,' said Knox. 'We wanted the audience to come away from the story thinking, 'I can relate to every single person in this perfect storm.' That, to me, was so, so important because I did not want to do the harm that had been done to me in the past.' 'It's showing all of these people who are going through the same situation and all truly believing they were doing the right thing,' added Van Patten. Knox isn't presented as perfect either in the series. 'I wasn't interested in doing a hagiography of Amanda Knox, nor was Amanda,' said Steinberg. Knox had a hard time adjusting to so-called 'real life' after she was acquitted and returned home to the United States, and that is shown in 'Twisted Tale.' 'I couldn't interact like a normal person with other people. I went back to school and there were students who were taking pictures of me in class and posting them to social media with really unkind commentary,' said Knox, adding the stigma has become 'a huge, like, life-defining problem for me to solve.' Knox said she's learned that there are positives and negatives to her unique situation. 'There are exoneree friends of mine who have been able to move on with a life and be around people who don't know about the worst experience of their life,' she said. 'That's kind of a blessing and a curse. You don't have to explain yourself all the time, but it's a curse because then this thing that was so defining of who you are as a person is something that you maybe feel like you don't know if you should share. 'In my case, I never had that choice.' Knox is now a married mother of two and grateful that her life did not turn out the way that she feared it would while in prison, particularly that she would never have children. 'I was 22 years old when I was given a 26-year prison sentence. I could do the math,' she said. 'So every single day when I am with my children, I am reminded that this might not have happened. I don't care if I'm exhausted and I'm overwhelmed, this is what life is all about.'
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