[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Love & Death.] Written by David E. Kelley, the Max Original limited series Love & Death tells the true story of Candy Montgomery (Elizabeth Olsen), a churchgoing housewife in smalltown Texas whose extramarital affair with Allan Gore (Jesse Plemons) ultimately had deadly consequences. Candy is as charismatic as Allan is passive, making the two a very unlike pair, but their mutual need for intimacy and connection that leads them to look outside their marriages and to each other, also finds them caught up in a murder investigation that starts to unravel all the lies and deceit.
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During this interview with Collider, co-stars Olsen and Plemons talked about how Candy felt like a woman on the edge of exploding, whether her work embodying the perfect housewife in WandaVision influenced Olsen’s performance, understanding someone as passive as Allan, and the experience of shooting the most brutal moments.

Collider: Elizabeth, you’ve been exploring fascinatingly complex women since Martha Marcy May Marlene. Candy seems like a woman who’s always just on the edge of exploding. Was that something you intentionally wanted to bring to her? How did you decide to measure that?

ELIZABETH OLSEN: Yeah, I did. I enjoyed you saying that. I just thought of her as this Energizer Bunny, who just had such a tight grip on everything she was trying to do and really cared about it seeming effortless, and that was fun. That was almost an external choice. It came from a place of trying to understand the choices she makes that seem confusing, and how they could all align from a value system that was hers. The way people speak about her, which you see in the trial and this book that we used as a source of information, was that they thought of her as being so easygoing and lovely and such a great part of their community. You try to take that, but I can’t imagine there’s so much ease when something snaps like that. So, I thought of it more as gripping.

Image via HBO Max

Did your work in WandaVision help you at all, in embodying what we think of as a perfect housewife and how they project themselves?

OLSEN: I don’t know. That show was incredibly physical, which was an amazing tune up, as an actor. It was physical, for so many different reasons, because of all the decades that we were conveying. Maybe for a couple of episodes, there’s an overlap of how one presents themselves in society or what’s culturally appropriate, at the time. But I think that’s really it. I think just any time you go from a long job to another long job, if you’re able to take a break and recover, you feel like your screws are all tightened in a way that I liked. And so, I felt like, in that way, it prepped me, but I never really drew many or any parallels, or connections to the parts.

Jesse, how did you approach this guy? He’s someone who is so passive. What are the challenges in playing that and figuring out how he got himself into this situation?

PLEMONS: That was the challenge. He seems like a guy who is just easily blown in any direction. The book was a really great resource with really good detail about his childhood and his family life and the period of time when he was getting to know Betty. He was very much work-minded and a workaholic. Like a lot of people, he had this checklist that culture and society told him he needed to check off, and he had pretty much done it when the story starts, but there was just something missing there. I think he was going through the motions, to a degree. And Candy coming in with this very surprising proposition awakened something.

Image via HBO Max

Elizabeth, because this is a real life story, we know that this murder happened and that it was very brutal. Yes, you’re acting, but what’s it like to shoot something like that and to experience it, physically and emotionally?

OLSEN: It was a pretty awful couple of days of the shoot, especially because the choreography came from the way the trial explains the lacerations on the body, and that’s pretty awful to imagine and reverse engineer. That wasn’t fun at all. There were a couple holes in the trial. There were some where I just couldn’t actually understand how else certain things would have happened, besides what was explained by Candy. And then, there were other things that maybe seemed like there was a gray area. The way it shows itself is that we’re doing flashbacks from the words she’s saying in trial, and it was the intention to create those images based on her words. That’s how it was scripted. That was the story we were sharing. We were really trying to take it from the words that were spoken at the trial.

It’s definitely one of those stories where, if it wasn’t a true story, no one would believe it.

OLSEN: Yeah, that’s what’s so strange about. I think what draws people to this story is, if you wrote it, you’d be like, “There’s no way The Shining came out that week and that it was there when the body was found.” There are things like that, that just feel like weird circumstances. The truth is stranger than fiction.

Love & Death is available to stream at Max.