[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for the finale of The Couple Next Door.]

Summary

Easy cast chemistry was crucial for the success of the drama series ‘The Couple Next Door.’

The emotional spiral that both Pete and Evie experience was enjoyable for co-stars Alfred Enoch and Eleanor Tomlinson to portray.

Shooting the most intimate moments required planning and collaboration with an intimacy coordinator.

In the drama series The Couple Next Door, which aired in the U.S. on Starz, an idyllic suburban neighborhood is hiding secrets that will ultimately test the love of traffic cop Danny (Sam Heughan) and his yoga instructor wife Becka (Jessica De Gouw), as well as new neighbors Evie (Eleanor Tomlinson) and Pete (Alfred Enoch), who have moved with the dream of starting a family. As the two couples become friends, sharing intimate details and their deepest desires, it seems to awaken something in Evie that ultimately leads to a moment of passion with Danny. But when it becomes clear that his feelings for her are not reciprocated, her obsession develops dangerous consequences that lead to a showdown that reveals painful truths, and the couples must decide if their love for each other is enough.
After watching the season, Collider got the opportunity to chat with Tomlinson and Enoch about how lucky they were to have such easy cast chemistry, Pete’s rapid downhill spiral, shooting Evie and Danny’s scene in the rain, working out Pete’s most difficult demand of Evie, shooting all the wild moments in the season finale, and that final smile from Evie.
Collider: I feel like the moral of this story is that maybe you should reconsider becoming too friendly with your neighbors. Do you feel like you guys will look at any new neighbors you might get a bit differently from now on?
ALFRED ENOCH: That’s a horrible thought. This show might be responsible for the disintegration of our social fabric.
The Cast of ‘The Couple Next Door’ Felt Lucky About How Quickly They Became a Family

“It was just great fun from the start.”

To pull off a series like this, you need four actors that are really all in and fully committed because things get a bit wild. It’s not just about your individual character arc, but it’s also about the couple and who they are together, and then about the different dynamics with the neighbor couple as well. When did you guys meet each other? Did you have any conversations or rehearsals to figure out what those dynamics would be, or did you just get really lucky that the chemistry was that good?
ELEANOR TOMLINSON: We did have rehearsals.
ENOCH: We had a week.
TOMLINSON: We all met and luckily, and also very rarely, we all just really got on. It was fantastic. Immediately, it was a family with Dries Vos, our director, as our head. It just made each day a joy, really. There are actually only very few scenes, overall, together. It was just great fun from the start.
Alfred, what were those shifting dynamics like for you, as Pete is the one that’s deteriorating the entire time?
ENOCH: Deteriorating is a great word. Pete has probably been deteriorating even before it starts, but then he really goes rapidly downhill. That was a really fun journey to play. It’s fun to play someone that is that repressed, and then suddenly does something that’s inevitably because he’s been so repressed. That was a really fun arc to play, and all the more so in the excellent company of Eleanor [Tomlinson], Sam [Heughan], and Jessica [De Gouw]. We had a ball. We were also shooting in Belgium and Holland, and that was wonderful because we were away from home in a new city and it was like a fun summer camp.

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“That scene was stolen from ‘The Notebook,'” says Heughan about the moment in the rain that he shares with Eleanor Tomlinson.

Eleanor, whenever things get really sexy in a TV show or movie, there’s the inevitable scene in the rain. It also feels like the actuality of shooting a scene in the rain is way less sexy than the actual outcome of the scene. How challenging is it to shoot a scene like that when you’re getting pummeled with rain and still trying to be sexy through it all?
TOMLINSON: What you don’t see is the reset. I think we had two lots of pajamas, so we had two takes at it. But then, you’ve got a good hour where you have to go and get dry, have your hair dried, and have your makeup redone. It was really fun to do. Sam and I are great mates, so we just really laughed about it. But I’m not gonna lie, I look like a wet rat when it rains, so the makeup team did a brilliant job of trying to make me look smoldering and dreamlike. I was standing there going, “It’s really cold. It’s a night shoot, and I’d quite like to go home now.”
ENOCH: When you asked that question, I thought, “I don’t think Sam and Eleanor need to try to look sexy in the rain.” They get it for free.
The Cast and Creative Team of ‘The Couple Next Door’ Felt It Was Important To Make Each of the Intimate Moments Unique

“We weren’t repeating the same beats with any of the couples.”

Image via Starz

Eleanor, the first encounter that Danny and Evie have is something that Becka knows all about, and Danny is the one that’s guiding Evie through it. But then, when they’re together again, she’s the one that takes charge of that moment. Did those scenes feel very different to shoot? How did you figure those out? Did you guys just have a lot of conversations with each other and the director?
TOMLINSON: With a show that has so many of those scenes in it, you have to plot everyone’s scenes, so that they’re all a bit different. There’s even the scene between Jessica and Alfred’s characters, and that had to be taken into consideration, so that we weren’t repeating the same beats with any of the couples. For the first scene, he definitely leads the way. That’s the whole point of the scene. And then, the second scene is her taking charge because she thinks that’s what he wants. And also, at that point, she is infatuated with him and she’s spiraling and she’s really lost her way. That was really fun. Sam and I worked closely with Vanessa [Coffey], our intimacy coordinator, who just made it a very safe space. We were able to just experiment and bring it to life, and also really discuss the scenes beforehand at length, so that we knew exactly what was happening. We knew we had this scene doing this, and we had this scene doing that, so that they’re very different and we can see a growth for the characters as well.
Alfred, Pete really goes through the emotional wringer in this. This couple has lost their child, he can’t go through with things with Becka, and then he falls apart because he feels like he’s losing Evie. What was that spiral like to figure out?
ENOCH: It was fun. In a way, it was surprising how enjoyable it was because he’s so much on the back foot. He’s always reacting belatedly and insufficiently as events are far ahead of him. He’s scrambled. The fun thing really is that turn where suddenly he’s like, “I know what I need to do.” I’m not sure he does know, but at least he’s made the decision and he’s doing something about it, which is the first time we see that in any meaningful way. That’s his place of decisiveness, although that’s not necessarily an advisable course.

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Season 1 starred Sam Heughan and Eleanor Tomlinson.

I found Pete to be sympathetic until the moment he demands that Evie terminate her pregnancy. She’s obviously doing things that are not good for their marriage, but that moment still made me recoil a bit. What was your reaction to reading that? How hard was that moment to shoot?
ENOCH: I read it and was like, “I have no idea how to do this,” and that thought stayed with me for a good, long period of time. That felt like a real slippery, maybe not inevitable, but unstoppable decline where he gets dragged down to the pits. That felt like a real moment for plumbing the real emotional, moral depths for Pete. It was satisfying to go there. Playing that scene was great. We talked about it a lot and worked it a lot. The crackle of actually doing it and reaping the rewards of what we had done in preparation for it was really gratifying. That’s the point of no return.
Eleanor Tomlinson and Alfred Enoch Embraced How Warped ‘The Couple Next Door’ Finale Got

“There was something nice about getting to the end.”

Image via Starz

So much goes on in the last episode, from the moment that Evie calls Danny to say that she’s in danger, to Pete showing up with a gun, everybody running through the woods, and having this big final confrontation. What were the most memorable moments for you, out of everything that happened in the finale? Were you ever like, “How did I get here?”
TOMLINSON: There were definitely quite a few moments like that, on this job. Everything from the minute she turns up at her parents’ house and starts saying, “You’re really gonna like him,” it’s just so warped. She’s so gone, by that point. Just plotting her mental decline was really fun. There were so many days when I just stared at the script and was like, “Help, I don’t know what to do here.” But then, you see what the others are doing around you. Alfred is so brilliant. Him turning up with the gun was genuinely terrifying. Seeing what that brought out in Evie was really exciting. There was so much of that whole sequence that stood out.
ENOCH: For me, it felt like it started with that discovery of what he feels he’s sure Evie done, and then that confrontation, and it all goes from there. The most satisfying thing was probably that scene in the restaurant. But shooting the finale in the woods, there was something nice about getting to the end. It wasn’t the end of our shoot. It was towards the end. But there was something about the flashing lights, and Evie on the stretcher, and Danny and Becka.

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Who was responsible for the resounding gunshot?

Eleanor, what did you think of that little smile from Evie at the end?
TOMLINSON: That was something that Dries, our director, and I played with because we wanted to leave it open but then hint about her feelings in that moment. It was just something we tried on one of the takes and Dries really liked it. I was like, “Okay, well, great. Let’s go with that.” What was really fun about this is that we were quite free to take the characters where we wanted them to go and to make suggestions. We had quite a lot of agency with the scripts, which was great. It was fun.

The Couple Next Door

Release Date

2023 – 2022

Showrunner

David Allison

Directors

Dries Vos

Writers

David Allison

The Couple Next Door airs on Starz. Check out the trailer: