An unexplained disappearance. A dysfunctional family. A bizarre twist ending. And Tenniscore. At first glance, Peacock’s Apples Never Fall feels like a paint-by-numbers Liane Moriarty adaptation. The author’s already seen two of her best-selling books – Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers – receive the small-screen treatment, but her latest mystery melodrama is a bit more mundane. We’ve swapped multi-million dollar mansions on the California coast for a kitchen in need of renovations. Wellness spas doubling as psilocybin-pushing cults transform into aging retirees struggling to parent their flailing adult offspring. It’s the banalities of life that prove deadly here.
Despite the more grounded setting, the show – filled with a staggering level of talent that includes Annette Bening and Sam Neill – is just as thrilling and confusing as the rest of Moriarty’s work. It focuses on the Delaney family — dad Stan (Neill), mom Joy (Benning), and kids Troy (Jake Lacy), Amy (Alison Brie), Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner), and Brooke (Essie Randles) — each confronting the harsh realities born from a life of never measuring up to their impossibly high standards. When a stranger disrupts their fragile ecosystem and Joy suddenly goes missing, the Delaneys turn on each other – suspecting those closest of the worst sins and digging deeper into a closet packed with skeletons.
For Brie, who’s been so good in comedies like Community and GLOW, the prospect of wading into new genre territory, playing a wayward dropout unfit to share the court with her overachieving siblings, was enough to convince her to head to Australia for a few months to shoot the show. Something else she’s now convinced of – tennis is simply not her sport.
Uproxx chatted with Brie about sibling group texts, weird wellness trends, and why directing might be her next gig.
You’ve been writing and producing with your husband, Dave Franco, more in recent years. Does a show have to be special, or exceptional in some way to sway you back to acting?
You know what? Yeah, I guess it does. But also, I think at this point in my career it’s not just about only acting versus acting and producing, or creating and having more control. I feel like I’ve earned a position of getting to choose a little bit … the things that I work on. So anything that’s going to mean time away from my husband, my family, my cats. Most importantly, it needs to be pretty wonderful and also just different and interesting. That’s what this was. I’ve never worked in the mystery genre before, so that was exciting. And there were so many facets of Amy Delaney as a character that felt really new to me in terms of the roles I’ve played on screen. That felt scary actually, in a lot of ways, which is how I knew I should do it. I really want to run at anything that makes me a little bit uncomfortable.
The show is as much about twisted family dynamics as it is about murder and this mysterious disappearance. Who is Amy and what about playing her scared you?
I think of Amy as being the black sheep of the family. It’s funny because Jake pointed out that all the Delaney siblings think of themselves as the black sheep. They’re supposed to be this perfect family and yet all of the kids feel like outsiders within that family. I think that Amy has rebelled against her tightly wound tennis goal-oriented upbringing by not making a lot of decisions in her life, by really going with the flow, being guided by her emotions, really living in the moment and not focusing so much on an objective. And I think it has actually served her well. She might be one of the happiest Delaneys prior to their mother going missing.
She’s surprisingly okay with the fact that she’s still figuring her life out, even while pushing 40, and is living with a bunch of grad students and doesn’t have a real job. It’s like she is living life to its fullest and she is doing a lot of self-exploration, which is not something anyone in the Delaney family really does. And I think everyone else looks at her like she’s totally irresponsible, everything is flight of fancy, her emotions aren’t real, she’s a drama queen. But she’s actually just more in touch with her internal self than any of the other Delaneys. And she’s a constant communicator. They think she’s riling things up, but she’s just trying to express herself and draw some self-expression out of her family members.
Reiki. Hot tub origami vigils. Positivity circles. She’s into a lot of New Age practices. What’s the wildest wellness trend you’ve tried?
I’m trying to imagine because I certainly try it all — all types of massage and different types of spas and facial treatments. I’m sitting with a red LED mask light on, and my husband comes into the room and is like, ‘And is this forever now? This is the new thing?’ I mean, I do really like cryotherapy or cold plunging. I love that stuff. At the same time you’re sitting in ice-cold water just like, ‘Why am I doing this to myself?’
What’s the Delaney sibling group chat like?
The last text in the siblings group chat was just from a couple of hours ago and it was Jake Lacy saying, ‘Hey, idiot, we’re all hanging out on the second floor. Get down here.’ I knew immediately he was talking to me.
There’s definitely a line drawn between the older and younger siblings. Why are the eldest Delaneys so quick to suspect the worst of their dad?
We talked a lot about this in our rehearsals as we were dissecting the family and figuring out the dynamics between everybody. I just think that the two older Delaney siblings, Troy and Amy, had a different experience of their father than the younger siblings had growing up. I think they experienced a lot of raw anger and aggression. I think all of the siblings experienced conditional love based on their performance in sports. But Troy and Amy have seen more of the cracks because they’re a little older. There’s a lot of wounds from back then. And within the family, there’s a lot of distrust and also a lot of strong bonds. I do think that the Delaneys love each other. That’s what always makes things complicated in a family because you do love each other so you’re able to get under each others’ skin like no one else. You’re able to say really horrible things to one another and then two seconds later go to lunch.
You’ve checked the writing, producing, and acting boxes. When are you going to get into the director’s chair?
I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, honestly. It’s just such a large time commitment and energy commitment and I couldn’t do it if it weren’t something that I was so passionate about, so I think that’s the thing. I’m waiting for that spark and I’m not sure if it would be something that I would write myself or if that is something I feel like I even have the energy to do at the moment. But I have been feeling the itch to direct again recently so it’s certainly something that’s on my mind. My husband and I are acting together in a project right now that we’re co-producing coming out of Apple… it feels like a fun, ease-back-in, to being on the other side of the camera and having a little more control behind the scenes. And it feels good.
If you’re directing, what’s Dave doing?
Maybe he’s the star. He’s directed me a couple of times. I could return the favor.
Apples Never Fall is now streaming on Peacock.