‘All Her Fault’ Star Jake Lacy Breaks Down Peter’s Sad, ‘Beautiful Delusion’ At the Heart of Peacock Kidnapping Drama

Note: This story contains spoilers from “All Her Fault” Episode 8.

When Jake Lacy first signed on to star in Peacock’s “All Her Fault” opposite Sarah Snook, he didn’t know the extent to which his character, Peter, was involved in the kidnapping saga involving Peter and Marissa’s (Snook) son, Milo — a twisted web of deceit that unravels in the finale.

Even by the time he arrived on set, Lacy didn’t have access to all eight scripts when he met with director Minkie Spiro, who directed the first four episodes of the series. Spiro revealed to Lacy that Peter was lying, in some way, shape or form, and offered Lacy the choice to know the extent of the lie, or just to play the first batch of episodes as a father whose child is missing. 

“I chose to … know all the parts, so I [could] build something comprehensive as best I can as an actor,” Lacy told TheWrap, adding that deciding not to know “felt like a shortcut maybe or that I’d be missing out on on something where you could start to play with things or make choices.”

As the events of the rest of the season were revealed to him, Lacy learned just how pivotal his character was in the kidnapping: when Peter and Marissa got in a car accident on the way home from the hospital, their baby died and, while Marissa was unconscious, Peter swapped their dead baby with Carrie’s alive one, laying the groundwork for Carrie’s plot to take back Milo, her birth child.

Once Lacy learned the full story, there was a “constant discussion” of how much of Peter’s complicity to slip into his performance whether “in a look or in tone,” as well as in Peter’s approach to Marissa, the police or even his siblings. That said, Lacy notes Peter is playing at being “as much a victim of this crime or these circumstances as Marissa is.”

“My fear early on was that playing too much to his victimhood made him meek, and I wasn’t very interested in this overly soft, meek version of Peter, but we also had to be careful that his frustration with the police or with the circumstances, or his desire to control or be in charge of this situation, and that his defensiveness could read to an audience as guilt,” Lacy said, noting that he didn’t want to be read as “guilty husband” too early on.

Lacy pointed to a moment early on in the series, when Peter scolds Marissa for not checking the number in Episode 1, when you could see some of his “simmering resentment” come through. “Even he knows, as soon as he says it that that’s an ugly thing to say, and he regrets it and tries to take it back or smooth it over,” Lacy said. “It’s in front of people, and he’s at the end of his rope, and Marissa is exhausted and scared and but you just see this little bit of anger come out of him.”

As Lacy carefully layered Peter’s complicity into his performance, he also felt responsible for understanding Peter’s actions, and why he’s told himself he did such an unforgivable thing.

“I really do think there’s a sad, kind of beautiful delusion in Peter thinking that he has saved his wife from the grief of losing a son,” Lacy said. “He really thinks that
that was the right thing to do — she didn’t have to go through the pain of that and that he did [and] he has carried the knowledge for the last five and a half years that his son is dead, and he has this boy who he will love as a son and give everything to.”

While Lacy notes that Peter’s actions are “controlling and f–ked up,” saying “you can’t really let someone avoid pain like that — you’re not God,” it reflects just how far Peter would go protect his family. “I think Peter will go to any length for his family — It’s just that that length is not sane,” Lacy said.

Peter’s so-called commitment to his family is tested once again when Carrie shows up armed at the Irvine house in the finale, when Milo is returned safe and sound to the family. Carrie makes her intentions clear that she doesn’t want to take nor harm Milo, and only wants to tell Marissa about the evil in Peter that prompted him to swap the baby in the first place. With Lacy noting Peter is backed into a corner once the secret begins to spill from Carrie’s lips to Marissa’s ears, Peter attacks Carrie and shoots her, though he later argues that he did so in an act of self-defense.

As the scene, which Lacy noted was quite fun to film, came to life, the small stature of Sophia Lillis, who plays Carrie, only served to add another layer to Peter’s delusion. “Sophia is a wonderful actor as well, and is so small and then plays the character so sort of scared and small and unsure, but then to have this man just grab at her is really, I hope, affecting,” Lacy said. “This claim on the backside of the shooting that Peter says, ‘She wouldn’t let go, I had to shoot’ … it rings so hollow, but he commits so fully to that story — I think that’s unnerving.”

What’s even more unnerving to Lacy, however, is Peter’s actions after the dust from the shooting, which also saw the death of Marissa’s close friend (Jay Ellis) settles, as he believes he, Marissa and Milo can move forward per usual.

“That is maybe scarier to me than the choice he makes in the chaos and probably in shock of being in this car accident, of losing his son, of seeing … this newborn that he believes has no future [whose] mother has died,” Lacy said. “I can find a way to understand how he made this choice and now refuses to back off of it, but the part where he’s like, ‘Well, thank God that’s all over’ — that’s crazy, that’s nuts.”

It’s anything but accepted by Marissa, who goes along with Peter’s cover story to the police only to take things into her own hands and poison him with an allergen via a kiss, and “forget” his EpiPen. By the time Peter dies in the finale, Lacy said Peter doesn’t have any regrets, largely due to his narcissism.

“He is fully, in his mind, justified in all these choices, and if someone disagrees with him … they don’t have the full scope of understanding that he does,” Lacy said. “His position in the world which will get you very far, but it also ultimately isolates you from other people — there’s no way to actually be loved or loving if your point of view is that you’re always right and everyone else is coming up short.”

“All Her Fault” is now streaming on Peacock.

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