[This story contains major spoilers from the finale of His & Hers.]
In the finale of Netflix’s limited series His & Hers, it seems clear that Rebecca Rittenhouse’s character, newscaster Lexy Jones, is responsible for the recent deaths of her former friends. And then, in a shocking twist that tops the first shocking twist, it’s revealed that Lexy was actually framed. Rittenhouse admits to initially being bummed out to not be the murderer, only to quickly come around to preferring this outcome.
“As I thought about it, I was like, wait, it’s so much easier for me as an actor to empathize with this character,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I felt like it allowed me to have a more human experience with the performance, because she was bad, but I also felt bad for her. I mean, she’s not a good person, but she’s not a psychopath.”
Developed by Lady Macbeth director William Oldroyd, His & Hers is a mystery thriller adapted from Alice Feeney’s 2020 book. Tessa Thompson toplines as Anna, an Atlanta newscaster who has fallen into a life of reclusivity, until a murder in her nearby hometown sends her back in hopes of finding answers — and returning to her cushy gig as the face of her network. In Anna’s time away, Lexy Jones has taken over the news desk, and the tension between the two only grows as Anna requests that Lexy’s husband Richard (Pablo Schreiber) come with her to Dahlonega on the assignment. Lexy is right to be suspicious, as Richard and Anna engage in a brief affair.
“Lexy was a difficult role to cast,” Oldroyd says. “When we met Rebecca, we knew straight away that she would be more than a match for Tessa. She had a natural wit and comic timing that was essential to Lexy. It was a crucial piece of casting that would determine the success of the huge twist that launches us into the finale.”
His & Hers opens with the murder of Anna’s old friend Rachel (Jamie Tisdale), and, not long after, their other pal, Helen (Poppy Liu), meets the same fate. Flashbacks provide insight into the dynamic amongst the girls as high schoolers, with their group also involving Anna’s future sister-in-law, Zoe (played by Marin Ireland in the present), and Catherine Kelly (Astrid Rotenberry), who was bullied by Rachel. In the penultimate episode, Zoe becomes the latest victim, while a flashback to Anna’s 16th birthday finds the girls partying in the woods, when a bunch of older boys show up, which was secretly arranged by Rachel. They begin attempting to sexually assault Catherine, until Anna breaks it up. Catherine runs away, leaving Anna behind to take her place, believing she was in on it.
The finale then opens with a young Catherine preparing to go sailing with her parents and sister, Andrea (Savanna Gann). When called by her name, Catherine makes a correction: “It’s Lexy now.” Andrea tells Catherine to cut back on eating junk food, saying “You’re gonna tip the boat,” and so when Andrea asks her sister to grab her inhaler for the ride, unbeknownst to Andrea, Catherine exhausts all of the pumps in it. This leads to Andrea’s death out on the boat.
Jumping back to current day, Richard has lured Anna to what he says is the lake house of Lexy’s family, because Lexy wants to “bury the hatchet.” When she spots a photo of Catherine and figures it out, Anna traps Richard in a room, only for Lexy to come out swinging. The two women engage in an intense fight throughout the house, with them even bodyslamming each other into a glass table. Grabbing a gun, Lexy gets the upper hand, just as Anna’s detective husband, Jack (Jon Bernthal), arrives and throws Anna out of the way. Too bad for Lexy that the gun is out of bullets. Even worse is that she then gets shot in the head by Jack’s previously unseen partner, Priya (Sunita Mani).
Lexy’s guilt seems to be an open and shut case to the police, considering Rachel and Helen tried to recently blackmail her over her sister. And the local sheriff now can’t help but think back to Andrea’s funeral. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a body cry like Catherine,” he recalls, before later seeing her “eating Krispy Kremes, smiling like she just got the last parking spot at Cracker Barrel.” Further evidence of her questionable behavior was Rachel’s nails being found in Catherine’s childhood bedroom. And it sure is suspicious that she sought out to replace Anna at her job! But, a year later, Anna is visiting her mother, Alice (Crystal Fox), who seemingly had been battling dementia, when Anna learns that Alice was the real killer. “I never intended to kill Catherine,” Alice confesses in a letter, admitting to seeking revenge for what happened to Anna on that birthday. “I thought prison for abandoning you that night was fair. And I needed a killer for a juicy story.”
“When Anna turns up at Lexy’s family lake house and unloads a handgun at Richard, Lexy is left in no doubt that Anna is the murderer,” Oldroyd explains of what turned out to be a deadly misunderstanding. “Now the choice is simple: kill Anna or be killed. After all, Anna has a genuine motive for wanting all these women dead, and that includes Catherine who abandoned her that night. The fatal tragedy of the final showdown is that if they had just stopped to ask each other why they’d killed these women, they would realize that neither of them had. But, in the craziness and confusion, they had to fight it out to the bitter end.”
Best known for her comedic runs on The Mindy Project and the Four Weddings and a Funeral series, Rittenhouse got her own juicy story with Lexy and His & Hers, including her first-ever on-camera death. Read her chat with THR, below.
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How relieved are you to finally be able to openly talk about your role in the series?
When I was auditioning, it was very protected information. I knew there was a big twist, but I didn’t know exactly what happened with her. So it’s definitely nice to be able to have a spoiler conversation.
Since you didn’t know the twist, what was it initially that drew you to Lexy and His & Hers?
Obviously, the talent that’s involved is incredible. William Oldroyd is someone I’ve wanted to work with since Lady Macbeth came out [in 2016]. Maybe that says something about the power of manifestation. But he was always one of those directors that I was like, man, if I ever had the chance…. And then when I met him over Zoom, I was like, wow, this guy’s a really nice, lovely person, and it was such a refreshing little surprise. And this character is fun to play, because there’s so much going on underneath and so much that the audience doesn’t have context for, but you’re like, “God, why does she want to take her down so badly?” You get the feeling that there has to be more there.
What’s the reaction when you eventually learned what that “more” is?
The twist was revealed to me right when I got to Atlanta to shoot. I remember going to my costume fitting, and they were like, “So, it seems like you’re the murderer… but you’re not!” And then it was revealed to me who actually was, and I was like, whoa, that’s mind-blowing, and also such a brilliant twist. It’s been a while since a show I loved had a crazy 180 like that.
Did you want to leave breadcrumbs that viewers could look back on afterwards and realize that it was there the whole time?
We would try to do different versions of the performance to give Will flexibility in the edit, in terms of what story he was wanting to tell and how much he wanted to lean into that. As an actor, you don’t ever want to twist your mustache too much. Then there’s some moments where he was like, “Give it to me a little heavier.” He’d also do a cool thing where we would just do silent takes, where we’d go through the lines in our head but wouldn’t say them out loud. So it was a lot of looks that probably ended up being useful to him in the edit.
How did you approach playing someone who is, in a way, playing someone else?
I always viewed Lexy as someone who was thrilled to be able to reinvent herself. Her identity as a young woman is something she wants to run away from as much as possible, and I think it’s why her relationship with her husband is so important to her. She feels like she finally got something that the other girls got growing. Also, being a news anchor, it’s in her skillset to put on another skin. So she does have to be a good actor, but it’s so lived in for her to be putting on some other identity that I don’t think it’s a challenge for Lexy to pretend. If you think about what happened with her sister and the inhaler, that’s a big secret to have on your shoulders, and she finds a way to not feel bad about that. You gotta have a dual personality to be able to handle that kind of thing.
Now that you know Lexy wasn’t behind the killings, what was your perspective on what her actual plan here was?
We worked really hard on that final scene to figure out: How does this spiral out of control in this way? And we decided that it came from such a feral place of mortal fear, and that sort of spirals into what is essentially this accident. In terms of her larger plan, this is why she’s such an interesting character to play, because on one hand, she’s so callous, and then on the other hand, she has so much trauma from her childhood that you could understand her callousness. She’s operating from such a place of fear, and I basically tried to view her as a 13-year-old girl the whole time that I was playing her, because she’s driven by the fear of being humiliated again.
I don’t even really think it’s about destroying Anna. It’s more about not allowing Anna to take anything from her. That’s the fear she’s living in, that this world she’s worked so hard to create is going to be taken from her and she’s going to end up where she started. People have awful sides to them, and I feel for Lexy because I think her plan is really just, how do I keep what I have, including my husband? And she ended up getting caught up in this thing that wasn’t her fault.
Jon Bernthal and Tessa Thompson in His & Hers.
Netflix
The relationship in the show that I might be the most fascinated by is the marriage between Lexy and Richard. What did you make of that dynamic?
I feel like they are ships passing in the night at this point, which is not good for any marriage. I do think she’s desperately afraid of losing him, and it’s not even about their relationship as much as it is about her own internalized fears. Lexy’s got this armor, these sparkly tweed suits and perfect hair, and it’s very reminiscent of someone who’s currently in the White House in the way that she dresses. But it’s an armor for this perfect exterior, and I think underneath all of it is fear, fear, fear. She’s thinking about Richard as something she must not lose at any cost, because it would mean that she is who she’s afraid she is.
How much did the flashbacks inform your work in the present? Did you seek those out?
I asked Will to watch them, because I was like, “I need to feel what this feels like.” And they made me feel very sad for her, as well as Anna. I mean, Lexy absolutely made the wrong choice, but when you’re afraid, you can make bad choices like that. One of the really interesting things about the show is how these bad things happen and how unfair they are, and it’s a fact of life that you have to figure out how to move forward without it letting you destroy you as a person, or making you become a terrible person.
Do you think she meant to kill her sister when she used up the inhaler?
No. I think she was being a dick. She knew it was bad, but I don’t think she thought, oh, if I don’t bring this, she’s definitely gonna die, and that’ll be great. That’s the type of thing that happens when you’re young… I mean, it didn’t happen when I was young. (Laughs.) But people make really, really bad mistakes sometimes when they’re young because they don’t have the experience to really think through the worst-case scenario. Then that affects who you can become as a result. Because she probably felt like she was a bad person after that, and she then had to figure out how to feel like she wasn’t a bad person, and people can go in so many different directions after an experience like that. She went in a, “I’m going to completely try to reinvent myself and become somebody else.” I think becoming someone else allows her to not deal with the feelings about what happened, and, in a way, take her sister’s place. The psychology is so complicated.
The finale fight scene between Anna and Lexy was filled with both humor and brutality. Lexy throwing the pool balls made me laugh. What conversations were had about staging that faceoff?
Tessa and I did as much as they would allow us to do — so I came out of the cabinet, but I didn’t get thrown into the cabinet. We had to just figure out what felt real and visceral. At first, there were a lot of words and we were like, “This is such a crazy fight to be talking so much.” I’ve never done stunt stuff like that before, so for me, it was really, really fun.
The onscreen relationship between Tessa and you evolves throughout, so what was it like finding that interplay and chemistry?
Tessa has such a deep internal ocean going on that you can see behind her eyes, which is such a dream. She throws you one look and it feels so complex. It’s an interesting dynamic, because her character hates me as the person who replaced her at work, but she doesn’t know who I am, and I know all of it. So, playing Lexy, I always felt like there was a sense of trying not to look at her too much, trying to avoid being seen by her.
You get a pretty epic death scene.
Getting shot in the center of your forehead is pretty intense. For me, that stunt was the hardest thing, because it really had to be me, and it’s like a head snap. From a stunt perspective, I was like, oh my gosh, this is actually hard to do without hurting myself. It’s surreal to die in something; I don’t think I’ve ever been killed in something before. Oh, that’s not true, I died in Handmaid’s Tale, but not on camera.
I think this is still the first then.
Yeah, that doesn’t fully count. This is the one.
Was there any part of you that was bummed not to be the killer?
Absolutely. That was my initial instinct, and then as I thought about it, I was like, wait, it’s so much easier for me as an actor to empathize with this character. I felt like it allowed me to have a more human experience with the performance, because she was bad, but I also felt bad for her. I mean, she’s not a good person, but she’s not a psychopath.
There are worse ways for someone to describe you than, “Not a good person, but not a psychopath.”
(Laughs.) It’s funny being an actor because you somehow have to find a way in to love your character so that you can be real with it.
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His & Hers is now streaming on Netflix.