'Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox': Knox believes her mother's experience was 'harder' than being incarcerated

Yahoo

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The new limited series starring Grace Van Patten explores 'the anatomy of bias' in Knox's case
Amanda Knox and Monica Lewinsky have joined forces to produce the new eight-episode series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox (on Disney+ in Canada, Hulu in the U.S), starring Grace Van Patten. Working with creator and showrunner K.J. Steinberg, Knox wanted to tell the story of her global scandal from her perspective, after experiencing extreme public shaming and intense media scrutiny.
At the age of 20 Knox, an American who was in Perugia, Italy as an exchange student, was convicted of the murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher, who was found dead in their apartment in 2007. Knox's boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito, and Rudy Guede were also convicted.
While Knox was exonerated by Italy's highest court in 2015, she faced particularly harsh media coverage of her case around the world, being labelled a "vixen" and called "Foxy Knoxy," with a sexualized portrait of the 20-year-old presented in reporting of her case.
Amanda Knox felt her mother's experience was 'harder'
But Knox's story has been covered extensively. She's done a number of interviews, written two books, and has been the subject of a number of documentaries, films and TV episodes. For Sharon Horgan, who plays Knox's mother Edda Mellas in The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, the focus on exploring the experience of Knox's family, particularly the mother-daughter relationship between Amanda and Edda, felt unique to this project.
"Everyone thinks they know the full story behind, and actually they really don't," Horgan told Yahoo Canada. "And I think what intrigued me was that the filmmakers weren't approaching it like a typical true crime drama, or courtroom drama. It felt like this was a perspective on the story that we hadn't seen before."
"It's drawing on Amanda's experiences and exploring everything that contributed to her journey, right up to the court case, then after the court case. ... As someone who played her mother, I realized it's a story about the relationship between a mother and a daughter, and about the impact it had on her whole family. So I did feel like it was doing something quite different."
Horgan shared that in the very first Zoom meeting she had about the series, with producers, Steinberg and Knox herself, Knox stressed that it was important to her to show the impact her conviction, and the attention around it, had on her mother.
"She talked about her time in prison, clearly a desperate and awful time, but she always said that she felt what her mother went through was harder," Horgan said. "That very first conversation with Amanda really stayed with me. And I really felt that was very important to portray."
"I'm the mother of a 21-year-old girl and a 17-year-old-girl who have done their own fair share of travelling abroad. That mother-daughter bond and how scary it is, it's scary all the time, let alone in a situation like this. It's so awful and so brutal."
John Hoogenakker, who plays Knox's father Curt, found that a lot of people who he talked to about Knox's story didn't actually know the real outcome of her case.
"I've had countless interactions with people since actually starting work on the show who didn't know that she was innocent, didn't know that she had been exonerated by the Italian Supreme Court, maybe thought she was still in jail," Hoogenakker said. "And so I think the show has a lot to offer people in terms of a narrative about a young person whose life is completely taken out of their control, and then has to spend perhaps the rest of their life talking about this event that made them notorious in the minds of people all over the world."
"There's so much here that didn't really bubble to the surface in any of the coverage that I read about the event, or subsequent to the event. So I think there is a lot here to look at."
For much of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, in Hoogenakker's portrayal of Curt you see this real drive and desperation to do anything in his power to get his daughter out of Italy. The actor stressed that there was a lot to work with as Curt feels "helpless" in his quest to save his child. That's particularly evident in one scene where it's just Amanda and Curt in a visitation room and while he talks to her about what he's doing to try to get her out, which includes him going back to the U.S., his daughter begs him to not leave her.
"That was one where the crew gave us a lot of space, because they knew it was going to be an emotionally draining day," Hoogenakker shared. "You get into that room with your scene partner and you do your best to just make it all about them, and for everything that Amanda was going through in that moment."
"[Grace Van Patten] was absolutely a gift of an actor and a performer to get to work with, because she was so emotionally available and so incredibly dialled in to depicting Amanda in this series."
Exploring 'the anatomy of bias'
A guiding principle for The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox was what Steinberg calls "the anatomy of bias," the conditions in which bias exists, from evaluating Knox's false imprisonment, to how she was portrayed in the media, and how the series strives to not completely villainize the Italian prosecutors in her case.
"The aim of the show has always been not only to tell the story of what happened in Perugia and its aftermath, but to explore what we like to call the anatomy of bias," Steinberg said. "The ecosystem in which false information and false narratives, personal biases, biases of the players involved in the stories. Biases inherent in institutions and systems are fertile soil for grand injustices to happen, and so it was really, really important to represent as many points of view as we could."
"And an imperative not only to dimensionalize Amanda's experience as someone who was flattened and made into a caricature as 'Foxy Noxy' in the global press, but also dimensionalize her prosecutor, former prosecutor Giuliano Mignini. If we don't treat him with respect and assume, as I did, that he is a good man who wakes up every morning thinking he's the good guy and wanting to do the right thing, and wanting to exact justice, then it's not a story. That's not of interest to me. And I think our viewership is smarter than that. And I think in order to engage on the broader themes and questions, they really needed to feel that we were representing him dimensionally and honourably."
As executive producer Warren Littlefield added, Knox actually wanted to dissolve the labels that were put on her, and Mignini, through with this series.
"When Amanda came to us and said, I've been labeled a monster, but then eventually also so was Mignini, her desire was ... to strip both of those labels away and examine those people," Littlefield shared. "And as she told us that story, we just became far more interested in engaging with her and working with her, because we'd never heard anything like that before."
"For Mignini, that had never happened to him in his entire career as a prosecutor, he did not know what to make of that. And that is Amanda Knox. That is just one of the unique aspects of who she is."
Horgan shared that in going through the process of creating The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, it made her reflecting more on how sometimes presenting the juicier, more engaging story takes precedence over revealing the truth.
"I think exploring bias, or what K.J. calls the anatomy of bias, institutional and the bias we hold ourselves, it's very hard to not be fully aware of the part that we play in that," Horgan said. "And of course it's not easy, but you can, with perspective, look at those headlines and call them disgusting, and you think about the part they played in how the court of public opinion was affected."
"But, you know, we were buying those papers, and we were consuming that nonsense. And it's not really getting any better, is it? It's kind of just got a different route now and it's all pervasive. ... For me, it would be a wonderful thing if, when people watch it, they come away with the same sort of feeling that they want to stay away from that kind of sensationalism, especially around young women. Edda says it in the show, the pretty young girls and ... that story, as tragic, as awful as it was, was in some way sort of sexy. That sort of stays with you."
Respecting Meredith Kercher's memory and her family
But no matter the presentation of Knox's story, Meredith Kercher's family and friends still have to be exposed to coverage and discussions of the events around her death. When asked how the individuals behind The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox worked to respect Kercher's family, and her memory, as the series is released, Steinberg stressed, as she got emotional talking about Kercher, that she was a "North Star" for the project.
"Always the North Star for myself, for Amanda, and for all of us, was to tell the story with the utmost sensitivity to Meredith, her memory, her family," Steinberg said. "All throughout the process I had a ... picture of Meredith in the writer's room, in my office, on my bedside table."
"And I think the smartest thing that we did as a creative team was to cast Rhianne Barreto as Meredith. She just exudes light and goodness and depth and an old soul. ... But Meredith Kercher was more than the girl who was murdered, and we had always endeavoured, and it was always an imperative for me in telling the story, to keep that in mind and to represent her dimensionally and sensitively."