Tessa Thompson Says ‘His & Hers’ Is All About ‘Rage’

This post contains spoilers for the Netflix series His & Hers.

Tessa Thompson wanted to meet violence with violence. In the limited series His & Hers, she stars as Anna, a struggling broadcast journalist who races back to her tiny hometown of Dahlonega, Georgia, to report on a series of mysterious murders connected by one thing: All of the victims are her former high school friends. Though there are a number of potential suspects, including Anna herself and her estranged husband, Detective Jack Harper (the deliciously rangy Jon Bernthal), it’s revealed in the shocking finale that Anna’s mother Alice (Crystal Fox) was the killer all along. Why? Because that same group of Anna’s “friends” orchestrated and filmed her being sexually assaulted on her 16th birthday. 

“Obviously, what she does is motivated by a mother’s love,” Thompson says of Alice, over a late lunch at the Whitby Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “But I also think what she does is probably motivated by a fair amount of rage.” 

As Alice herself says in the finale, she’s overlooked as a potential suspect because she’s an older Black woman who primarily works cleaning houses in the mostly white town of Dahlonega. The show hints at the nasty racism she’s experienced; her daughter’s harrowing assault was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Her revenge is bloody and melodramatic, which Thompson, who also produced His & Hers through her Viva Maude banner, found cathartic. “I’m sure it exists, but I haven’t seen [a show] where a Black woman in her sixties who comes from the domestic-worker space is a fucking serial killer and takes down a bunch of white chicks,” Thompson says. “And to do it because she loves her daughter so much is radical.”

For Fox, the ending was a twist on multiple levels. She found it ironic that her character isn’t suspected because, statistically speaking, Black women don’t tend to be serial killers. As Thompson notes, Alice has been mistreated by the people of Dahlonega; yet, she’s entrusted with the keys to people’s homes, and with caring for and raising their children. Black women are looked down upon one second, Fox says, then tasked with intimate responsibilities the next. “The hypocrisy of it all,” she adds. 

The revelation that Alice was the killer came as a total shock when Fox first met with show creator William Oldroyd and showrunner Dee Johnson, whom she showers with praise throughout our conversation. At the time of the meeting, the actor hadn’t read the bestselling book the show is based on, written by author Alice Feeney. 

“Dee says to Will, ‘Do you want to tell her or should I?’” Fox recalls. “I jumped out of the seat… I was like, ‘Are you kidding?!’ They burst out laughing.”

Fans of twisty, elevated TV dramas might know Fox best for playing Elizabeth Howard, the mother of Zoë Kravitz’s character in Big Little Lies Season Two. But Fox has been acting for decades, debuting in the film Driving Miss Daisy in 1989 and adding a slew of titles to her credits from there, including stage performances of classics like Fences and A Raisin in the Sun, and a long-running starring role in the Tyler Perry series The Haves and Have Nots. Off-camera, Fox’s personal lore runs deep. Her aunt was the legendary Nina Simone, and she grew up spending plenty of time with the iconic singer. She’s also a longtime motorcycle rider, completing long distance rides across the country on her matte black Harley-Davidson Fat Boy Lo. And she “has a Jeep that has eyelashes,” Thompson notes, deadpan. “It’s an important thing to know about Crystal Fox… I just love her.” 

The love is mutual. When it came to joining His & Hers, Fox says she would have blindly said yes to the project just so she could work with Thompson. “The highest praise I hope I can give her, because this is how I feel inside, is I didn’t care what it was,” Fox recalls. “I knew that I could trust that she was attached to something that she believed in.”

For both Thompson and Fox, His & Hers marks a new era in their respective careers. The limited series debuted in early January and quickly amassed 20 million views (per Netflix’s own sometimes controversial ratings system), dethroning the final season of Stranger Things. It’s also generated chatter across social media, with viewers dissecting the bombshell finale, which ends with Alice confessing to everything, including that she faked having dementia-like symptoms. Of all the outlandish things that happened in the show, Thompson worried that that particular plot point might rankle viewers. “That’s a complicated thing,” she says. “My paternal grandmother died of Alzheimer’s. My maternal grandmother now lives with Alzheimer’s. My mom is her caretaker. I really understand that world and have a great sensitivity to depictions of it.”

For viewers who rewatch the first episode, Thompson points out that you’ll get a sneak peek of Alice writing an early draft of the letter. “Then she collects it and hides it,” Thompson says. After Anna reads the confession, she locks eyes with her mother. The two of them say nothing, instead just gazing at each other. Anna’s expression ranges from shock, to horror, to a kind of proud acceptance. 

That ending, versus the book’s more veiled treatment, wherein Alice doesn’t reveal herself to Anna, “was in the DNA of the series from the beginning,” Thompson says, noting that it was part of Oldroyd’s original pitch for the adaptation. Still, after reading the scene, Fox struggled to find a specific motivation for her character. 

“Why would I tell her that? Would it take her to a dark place?” Fox recalls of Alice’s risky decision. Eventually, she pinned it on the fact that her daughter is “a journalist. She digs for truth.” Alice wanted Anna to know it all. 

Thompson liked the idea of a wordless ending, expressing feelings through looks alone. The lack of dialogue also adds a level of mystery; the viewer can decide what they think Anna will do next. “There needed to be a certain amount of ambiguity embedded into what happens for Anna emotionally in that moment,” Thompson says. “If we had settled on any one thing in performance, I think it would have felt too neat.”

For some viewers, the conclusion is campy and far-fetched, a twist for the sake of being a twist. For others, it’s a satisfying testament to the unrelenting power of a Black mother’s love. Though Thompson typically avoids reading the comments, she couldn’t help but dig into the social media reactions to His & Hers, observing the good and the bad. “It has thickened my skin because I want to engage with it all,” she says, noting that her Viva Maude co-founder, Kishori Rajan, has been sending her tweets, Letterboxd reviews, TikToks, and more. 

She’s indulged in the critiques, including the frothier common refrain that Anna’s estranged husband Jack is a terrible detective, frequently outdone by his partner Priya (Sunita Mani). “Anna herself called him a bad detective,” Thompson says with a laugh. But she quickly notes that he worked homicide in Atlanta and had to have been skilled to do that. “I’m building a defense because I love Jon Bernthal!” she exclaims. Jack, in her view, is a good detective who’s just going through a rough patch. “I really love meeting characters when they’re out of character,” Thompson adds. 

Though His & Hers is a limited series, the finale does leave room for more storytelling. (Will anyone else ever discover the truth about the serial killer? Are Anna and Jack on a road to reconciliation?) The high ratings means there’s strong enough interest from viewers to revisit these characters, and in a post-Peak TV world, “limited” has proven to be a soft term. Though nothing has been formally discussed, Thompson is open to exploring His & Hers in the future. “We could continue in the same world and understand what happens with these characters later,” she posits. But, thanks to the style of the show, there’s “a world in which there’s a completely other ‘his’ and ‘hers’ that we explore.”

In the meantime, Thompson’s production company, though just five years old, has a long list of other projects in the works, including a film adaptation of the play Is God Is, written and directed by playwright Aleshea Harris, and a series adaptation of the bestselling novel Luster by Raven Leilani, settled at HBO. “It’s the first book, before the company was even really official, that we set out to adapt,” Thompson notes of Luster. It’s the sort of source material she describes as the creative “bread and butter” of the company. “I don’t mean financially,” she says. “I mean spiritually, energetically… There’s a kind of perspective that I’m interested in mining. To find really dynamic, unique, and singular characters that are either written by and for Black women — or like what we’ve done with His & Hers: take it, rebuild it a little bit, and put a Black woman at its center.”