Fault lines
All Her Fault writer Megan Gallagher speaks to DQ about adapting Andrea Mara’s novel for the screen, working with star Sarah Snook and why she’s confident the eight-part thriller sticks the landing.
“So many thrillers let you down in the end,” says screenwriter Megan Gallagher. “So many thrillers suck you in with this cool premise, then they just seem to be churning the same content for a little while, and at the end, it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s that person?’ It doesn’t work.”
Thankfully, Gallagher certainly doesn’t believe that description applies to Andrea Mara’s novel All Her Fault, which she has adapted as an eight-part series for US streamer Peacock and Sky and NOW in the UK. “I’ve had the pleasure of working with some fabulous books, but Andrea really has given us a gift of a thriller,” she continues. “This one just had such a whopper of an ending, I was delighted to get to adapt it. I considered myself quite privileged to do so, sincerely.”
Featuring an ensemble cast headed by Succession’s Sarah Snook, it begins with every parent’s worst nightmare. When Marissa Irvine (Snook) arrives to collect her young son Milo from his first playdate, the woman who answers the door isn’t a mother she recognises. She doesn’t have Milo and has never heard of him. As Marissa begins her own investigation into Milo’s disappearance, new questions expose deep secrets, revealing cracks in her family’s seemingly perfect world until everything is left shattered.
Gallagher is creator, writer and an executive producer of the series, which also stars Jake Lacy, Dakota Fanning, Michael Peña, Sophia Lillis, Abby Elliott, Daniel Monks, Jay Ellis, Thomas Cocquerel, Duke McCloud and Kartiah Vergara. It is produced by Carnival Films (The Day of the Jackal), with Minkie Spiro (3 Body Problem) as lead director. NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution is the distributor.
Gallagher is no stranger to adaptations, having previously brought Mo Hayder’s Wolf to the BBC. She also worked on Suspicion (the English-language remake of Israeli series False Flag) and Harlan Coben’s Lazarus, as well as creating Norwegian crime drama Norseland. What Mara’s novel gave her – “and not all of them do” – was an “incredible amount of twists and turns” that proved to be enormously helpful in plotting out the series.
“It’s really about looking at it as an accordion. It’s about taking what you’ve got and expanding it, and saying, ‘OK, this twist here and this twist here, and this is in [episode] four, and this is in six, and this is in eight.’ Then how do I fill in gaps?” she says. “With such a long format, eight episodes of television, it’s just more content than most books have, so it’s about supplementing. A lot of it is not about changing, but about ‘adding to,’ so that was really what the process was.”
Gallagher has been “very lucky” in that “I’ve never had a bad experience” working with authors on adaptations of their novels. On All Her Fault, Mara was “particularly lovely,” she says, describing the author as “so overjoyed and so positive” about her book being brought to the small screen.
“She seems to just be tickled pink that this whole thing has happened to her, as if she doesn’t deserve it, which she firmly does,” Gallagher says. “She was wonderful, just an absolute delight. We text and talk all the time, and she came to set. She was in Melbourne. She’s an extra in episode seven. She’s a positive force, and everybody is delighted to be working with her material and her as a person, because she’s just great.”
All Her Fault was filmed in Melbourne – which doubles as the show’s Chicago setting – far from Gallagher’s home in the Norwegian capital, Oslo. And while the writer did make two trips down under during production, she decided early on that she couldn’t be on set every day, not least because she was still writing the final scripts as production began.
“If you want to be on set every day for block one, it means you’re not doing block two. It’s pretty much how it works, or at least in my world it’s how it works,” she says. “So I’m always having to make the choice of, ‘Am I on set every day, or am I doing scripts?’ Every time, I make the decision to steer towards scripts.
“I genuinely love writing, I really do. I absolutely was on set when I could be. I made two long trips over there, and I was there for about three weeks each time, so I was definitely on set to see plenty of great content and to be a part of things, but it was all balanced with the writing. It’s the same choice I would make again.”
Those scripts don’t waste any time, either, planting viewers straight in the middle of Marissa’s unfolding feelings of dread and anguish as she faces the prospect that Milo has been kidnapped – and comes under scrutiny from the police and her friends.
“We absolutely hit the ground running,” laughs Gallagher. “The book starts that way as well. We just wanted to start off with a bang.”
As well as instantly gripping the audience, the show’s dramatic opening allowed Gallagher to tease out the characters and their relationships in a less linear fashion. “If a child is kidnapped, we’re not going to have a conversation about our marriage,” she explains. “I’m not going to have my ongoing argument with my brother. It’s going to stop and we’re going to come together because there’s an emergency.
“So because we formatted the show straight away on the emergency, we get the joy of watching their relationships slowly emerge in [episodes] two and three and four, and especially five, [when] you realise, ‘Oh, this is what was going on before the kidnapping started.’ It’s really a delight to get to know the characters.”
Gallagher also praises the show’s cast for “elevating” her scripts. “It’s really such a pleasure to be writing content – especially the back half of the series with these gigantic, emotive, massively dramatic, crying, screaming kind of scenes that were huge – knowing that I had a cast that would totally pull it off,” she says. “There wouldn’t be any kind of silliness or over-acting.
“All these actors are so skilled and experienced that they would find the truth to it and they would ground it and they’d make it all authentic. It was really nice to be able to write those scripts with the confidence that the performances would be absolutely stellar, and they are.”
Of course, the cast is led by Snook in her biggest on-screen role since leaving behind Succession’s Shiv Roy in 2023. She also took on additional duties as an executive producer alongside Gallagher, Nigel Marchant, Gareth Neame and Joanna Strevens for Carnival Films, Spiro, Christine Sacani and Jennifer Gabler Rawlings.
“She’s just delightful, genuinely. But she’s also incredibly intelligent and additive to the process,” Gallagher says of Snook. “We had several Zoom calls because we were in different countries, with Sarah and Minkie, talking through the material. For her to talk through how she would approach a scene, or what she felt was missing or a beat she wanted to emphasise or de-emphasise, it was really helpful the whole time. She’s such a nice person to work with, and a very collaborative spirit. I feel like I learned a lot from her.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Lady in the Lake: Baltimore, 1960s. When a young housewife and aspiring investigative journalist becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a young girl, she risks everything to uncover a deeply buried web of secrets.
The Survivors: A family returns to their coastal Tasmanian home 15 years after a tragic incident, but the discovery of a body forces old secrets and haunting memories to resurface.
Missing You: A detective whose fiancé vanished over a decade ago gets pulled back into her trauma and deadly lies when she spots him on a dating app, launching a search for truth and closure.
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tagged in: All Her Fault, Megan Gallagher, NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution, Now, Peacock, Sky