Jake Lacy, ‘All Her Fault’ creator talks about why Peter is the show’s villain

Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers for all eight episodes of “All Her Fault,” now streaming on Peacock.

In the final moments of Peacock’s twisty limited series “All Her Faults,” Peter Irvin dies while still alive, mistakenly believing he is still the family hero.

Over the course of eight episodes, the series from creator Megan Gallagher, based on Andrea Mara’s 2021 novel, contradicted itself by slowly but deliberately absolving its central women of perceived failures in their families, regardless of who was actually at fault. Marissa (Sarah Snook) is accused of child neglect after her son Milo is kidnapped during a playdate they had casually scheduled via email. Jenny (Dakota Fanning) is charged with impaired judgment on the job by failing to properly examine Carrie (Sophia Lillis), a nanny who used her family to gain access to Milo. Meanwhile, Carrie is demonized for her apparently deceptive quest to reunite with her biological son in the world that chased them away. But ultimately, their stories were deeper than the accusations thrown at them. Instead, the responsibility for a botched kidnapping plot, shocking revelations of long-held family secrets, and a soapy baby swap all fall on the shoulders of Marissa’s husband Peter (Jake Lacey), the lynchpin of it all.

In fact, by the end of the season, a number of farces are laid at Peter’s feet. First, it is revealed that the root of the whole kidnapping incident was a car accident five years ago, the night he and Marissa were bringing their newborn son home. As Peter was driving, their car collided with a car carrying Carrie and her newborn baby. The Irvins’ son dies in an accident, and Peter takes advantage of a mysterious location on Chicago’s most desolate street to switch bodies with Carrie’s healthy son while the two women lie unconscious. Years later, Carrie realizes what happened and kidnaps Milo in the hope that by forcing Peter and Marissa to reveal the truth, she might be able to get her son back. However, after a series of (further) unfortunate events, Carrie’s plan falls apart thanks to her own unpredictable father, who kills Peter after failing to collect the ransom and then orchestrates Milo’s miraculous survival. All this happens while Peter plays the role of a concerned but aloof husband at home. Further complicating matters, the strain Milo’s disappearance has placed on Peter and his siblings, Brian (Daniel Monks) and Leah (Abby Elliott), has exposed a wave of family secrets. Just as Peter desperately tries to hide their shared history with Carrie, Brian and Leah realize that their family’s original sin, when Brian was injured and permanently disabled as a child, was not actually Leah’s fault, as Peter had always led them to believe. Rather, he was the one who accidentally hurt his brother and told a lifelong lie that led to Leah’s drug addiction, Brian’s struggle to live an independent life, and Peter’s clearly needy and controlling behavior that turned murderous.

When the smoke finally clears, Peter has killed Carrie in front of Marissa in order to silence her. A family friend, Colin (Jay Ellis), who was secretly sleeping with Leah, is also shot and killed (by Carrie) in the struggle. And Peter is forced to continue (unsuccessfully) gaslighting his family to believe that he is a good man, having shed blood in the name of protecting his family. It’s a huge amount of guilt to impose on one character, but for once Gallagher likes to mire a man with needy emotional baggage.

“A lot of times we see female characters that are scary or bad because, as women, they’re attached to relationships or they need love in some way,” Gallagher told Variety. “We’ve never seen a male character, our bad guy, act from a position of needing love. So I was very excited to portray a male character in this series who is the root cause of our problems. And all of his decisions and bad decisions in that case come from a need to be loved and people need him. He can’t function without it.”

Lacey finds that the layers of lies that Peter accumulates over time provide a fascinating portrait of not only narcissism, but also the struggle of a compulsive liar to keep up the facade of life despite one self-inflicted tragedy after another.

“He completely believes in his own existential innocence in each of these situations, and that lack of willingness to accept responsibility or accountability is ultimately what’s really most egregious,” Lacey says. “He can’t see or hear anyone else’s point of view other than his own, and I think that’s what drives Marissa to murder. There’s no way forward in life with this person, and his reality and her reality become more and more divergent.”

In fact, Marissa kills her husband in the final episode, not because she is as cruel as him, but because she had no other choice. She knows that telling the truth about why Carrie kidnapped Milo could result in Carrie being taken away. However, by not handing Peter over, he becomes somewhat complicit in Peter’s opportunistic murder of poor Carrie, allowing him to hang Peter with Marissa if she tries to leave him. Having no other choice, Marissa takes advantage of Peter’s weaknesses, especially his soy allergy, as many others have done. Just touching her lips from Colin’s funeral hors d’oeuvre causes her to have an allergic reaction. And wouldn’t you know it, she just happened to have an expired EpiPen. In Mara’s book, Peter’s death is revealed in a newspaper clipping coda at the end of the story. But Gallagher couldn’t bear to deprive the audience, and Marissa, of the satisfaction of his downfall.

“It’s too big a moment to be off screen,” she says. “Marissa is the heart and soul of the series, and ending the book with a newspaper clipping is a really great way and I love it. But in the series, we want to see that and we want to be with her during the decision-making. We don’t know what happens. You know, we just don’t know what’s going to happen before it really happens. That’s what’s fun about it. After eight episodes, you love this character so much, and you know she’s not an irrational person or a bad guy.” “But she’s still going to do this because she’s really up against the wall. The fact is, I want to be with her. This empathetic woman is doing something that’s so boring to us that I wouldn’t be able to bear to do it in her shoes.”

To the end, Peter not only fights the soybean that tightens in his throat moment by moment, but also the loss of control he has desperately clung to since childhood to clean up his terrible mistakes. Lacey points out that up until that moment when he has to undo his tie and face reality, Peter is still playing the role of diplomatic husband, telling Marissa it’s okay to touch soy or forget her EpiPen. Only in her silent, wordless gaze directed at him as he choked did he realize the trap he had fallen into.

“Peter knows this is the end,” Lacey says. “I mean, obviously he’s dying, but I think to his last breath he’s confident that he’ll find his way back. The doctors will come and put a paddle on him, and he’ll come back. I don’t think that ego or that belief in his infallibility will ever go away or that he’ll succumb to it. He’ll fight to the end, and there’s anger in him for the people he believes in. He’s done all this for the people who are trying to kill him right now. ”

Those who read Mara’s books before watching the series may find Lacey’s Peter even more unforgivably cruel because of the additions Gallagher and her screenwriters have added to the story. The biggest change is the deepening of the Irvine brothers’ story, especially with the addition of Brian’s disability. From a character perspective, Brian is put in a situation where he cannot refuse Peter’s constant selfish supervision because he needs support. Peter has trapped his brother in a vicious cycle of need, with the goal of somehow getting forgiveness for his secret.

“Peter’s goal is to get Brian on his feet,” Lacey says. “Whether it’s experimental surgery or painkillers or whatever it takes to get him back on his feet, that’s Peter’s goal because it represents some kind of quote-unquote normalcy that somehow undoes the damage he’s done to his brother.”

From a storytelling perspective, Gallagher saw the necessary expansion of Mara’s book as a unique and personal opportunity to express the scope of disability. In addition to Brian’s story, Detective Alcaraz, played by Michael Peña, is trying to get his son, who has severe learning disabilities, into a specialized school.

“There was room to develop the Irvin brothers a lot more, so having the storyline there really tells us a lot about Peter and who he is and what he’s capable of,” says Gallagher. “But the deeper emotional thing behind it all, especially when it comes to Michael Peña’s storyline, is that I have a child with a disability. This seemed like the kind of story that would allow me to bring two different kinds of disabilities to the screen. One is cognitively impaired, and my son is dealing with it. And then as a parent, you have to deal with how you go about your work and how you protect your child that you’re going to need for the rest of your life. And with Brian’s disability, you just have to try to express the truth about all of that in a way that makes sense and get it right. In other words, it comes from my heart. ”

Beyond representation, the deeply drawn story of living with a disability is ultimately just another means of indicting Peter’s character. Not only blaming your family for your actions, but using that prison of guilt and shame to reap love from your family at your own discretion is a different kind of heinous crime. That’s all Peter knows, which is why he tries so hard to get hold of it when Carrie finally confronts her family inside the house in episode eight. For Lacey, Carrie’s death (which unfolds “off-screen” in the book) is the moment that sealed Peter’s fate.