Is 'The Perfect Couple' Based on a True Story?
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Susanne Bier knows how to tell a story about afflicting the comfortable. After all, the director of the new Netflix series The Perfect Couple—about a murder during a wedding weekend on Nantucket—has previously helmed TV series that investigate a similar milieu of power, privilege, and secrets, including The Undoing, The First Lady, and The Night Manager.
That doesn’t mean she was entirely prepared to immerse herself in the codes and customs of an old-money New England dynasty and the trouble that finds its way to their door. “I read the pilot script, and I loved it, but I knew I couldn’t do it,” Bier says. “It’s Nantucket. It's a world that I'm not familiar with. The Undoing was also a very wealthy American world, but I did feel that I knew people from there; I didn’t have that familiarity with this Nantucket kind of wealth.”
Bier was convinced, however, by executive producers Gail Berman, Shawn Levy, and Jenna Lamia, who also serves as showrunner for the series, that directing the series would in fact play to her strengths. “Nantucket is a very defined world, and that’s why it lends itself to a mystery,” she notes. “The series addresses things that could give you the creeps.”
Are any of those things rooted in fact? According to Bier, you might be surprised.
The Perfect Couple is Based on a Novel
The Perfect Couple
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In 2018, Elin Hilderbrand published The Perfect Couple, which tells the story of a wedding between Celeste (called Amelia Sacks in the show, played by Eve Hewson), a girl most certainly not from Nantucket, and Benji Winbury (Billy Howle), whose family—including powerful parents played by Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber— seems to practically own the place. On the weekend of their nuptials, though, Amelia’s friend Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy) turns up dead—and nobody is above suspicion. The source material for the series was fiction, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any real-world inspiration.
But Not Entirely…
“It's all fiction, but I did read as much as I could about anything real that had been going on, I did try to see whether there were any great murders in Nantucket’s history,” Bier says. She didn’t find very many in the island’s past, but she did allow her time on the island—and on nearby Cape Cod, where the series filmed—to help inform the show she was creating.
“You go to have lunch, and you look at the way people are dressed, what kind of bags they're carrying, the family structures,” Bier says. “I would sit there watching every single detail, and I felt that there was a lot of fun, but also there was something under the surface that was very explosive. But maybe I was reading it into it because that's the way this series worked.”
The Characters Are Fictional, But Their Habits Aren’t
Bier’s attention to detail is certainly on display as viewers get to better know each character—almost every one of them is a suspect as well—and learn what makes them sympathetic and not so much. “The entitlement and the snobbishness, those things are delicious, but they are also not entirely sympathetic,” Bier notes. “But you can't ever make anything which is funny and engaging about completely lovable characters. These characters are lovable, but they all have sides to them that are not necessarily that kind. Amelia is our normal person; she's a young, slightly confused girl who wants to do the right thing. She doesn't really fit into this world.”
The Undoing Helped Inform the Series
When The Undoing, a murder mystery set on the Upper East Side that also starred Kidman, premiered in 2020, Bier told T&C, “A powerful part of the pleasure for the audience is access to a world that most of us have no entry to.” That same notion was at play making The Perfect Couple and is another example of the real world bleeding into a fictional tale.
“I did learn a lot from The Undoing, but I felt that this was very different,” Bier says now. “The Undoing was maybe a more recognizable world. This is very specific and very insular, not just in terms of the physical island [of Nantucket], but also in terms of the self-affirming society; it's very much a group of people constantly telling themselves and each other that their world is perfect. When they do that, we all know that it's everything but—and it's in that space that the deliciousness comes out.”
The Actors Bring Their Own Ammunition
Bier might have spent time observing the natives of Nantucket—“there was something under the surface that was very explosive,” she says, “but maybe I was reading it into it because I was doing a series which has that element”—but she didn’t necessarily encourage her cast to do the same. “I don't think that an actor’s process is necessarily to go out and watch,” she says.
It might not be a huge stretch for the A-List actors Bier works with to imagine denizens of a world of money and privilege, so when it came to working with the performers to develop their characters, Bier made sure to allow them time to play. “On a shooting day, I start out by meeting the cast in the morning before the crew comes to set. We have an hour, an hour and a half on our own at the location where we play around with the scenes, we might scrap all the dialogue and improvise something new. In that space where we are all playing, the cast gets to own every minute. That’s why they’re able to really inhabit those characters.”
It Will Have Real-World Consequences
After making The Perfect Couple, would Bier attend a wedding on the island? “Absolutely,” she says. “I doubt it would be as dramatic as the series, but I bet you it would be gorgeous and fun—and there would probably be some severe things going on in between all the beauty.”
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