Tell Me Your Secrets finally premieres its first season through Amazon Prime on February 19, and it’s ready to unlock several tantalizing mysteries. The series, written and produced by Harriet Warner (Call The Midwife), follows three troubled individuals whose present intertwines as they seek closure for the past.
Emma Hall (Lily Rabe, American Horror Story) is in witness protection after being accused of aiding and abetting her serial killer boyfriend, but Mary Barlow (Amy Brenneman, The Leftovers) will stop at nothing to track her down if it means finding her missing daughter once and for all. To accomplish this, she hires the services of John Tyler (Hamish Linklater, Legion), a supposedly reformed serial predator whose baser instincts may not be totally extinct.
Warner spoke to Screen Rant about the real-world inspirations behind her conception of the series, the casting process that led to some of the most magnetic stars onscreen, and the way filming in New Orleans informed the atmosphere of the show.
How was that concept for Tell Me Your Secrets? What inspired you to write it?
Harriet Warner: I was really wanting to explore a relationship where someone could love someone and yet not know these huge truths about them. And I was fascinated by certain cases you would hear of, where somebody had done something, and their mother had never believed that of them or their lover or their daughter. I thought, “Is that possible, that you can have intimacy without real knowledge?” It’s our capacity as people for secrets. I thought, “God, I really want to write about that.”
It was really taking that theme and putting it through the prism of a character who is starting life again in witness protection, and she’s reinventing herself while trying to make sense of her past. I thought that was really interesting territory, and I wanted to explore that.
When I started watching, the first thing that came to mind was Memento, but of course that’s not how the story plays out. Were there any inspirations that helped you as you were writing, though, or stories you paid homage to?
Harriet Warner: I love the feel of what I as an English person would call Southern Gothic. I think I’m very driven by atmospheres and books I read when I was a kid; American writers I have read through my life.
But the irony is that I watch so little, I don’t get the time. I’m longing to sit and watch things, but I don’t think there was anything conscious as an inspiration. I think it really was looking at a situation that fascinated me in real life. There were certain criminal cases that happened that I thought, “Wow, is that really what we’re capable of as human beings?”
I think that is my inspiration: looking at human nature, and then putting that into my work. I’m thinking, “Okay, if you have a mother who has lost her daughter, what isn’t she capable of?” Give me people that I can be inspired by, so I can draw facets of those characters into a story. “If that happened, and that person was there, what do we have?” I guess that gives us our unholy trinity of characters.
Emma’s narrative is laid out in such an interesting way, because she doesn’t remember or even know herself. Her backstory comes in pieces to the audience until everything pulls together at the end. How do you put her story together to then take it apart?
Harriet Warner: That’s a brilliant question. The work on that side of events, I looked at it as a film within a film. The backstory was all shot as a separate narrative, and we were able to then pass all that out across the script.
It was shot like that, and I wrote it that way. I needed to know: “when did X meet Y? How long have they been together? When did this happen? How old was that person?” It was a thesis on the past, and sort of mind-warping, because you wanted to be able to answer any question that an audience had. Questions that I would have had myself and that I did have. How do I answer those questions, and really deliver for a character that is trying to piece together that past?
For Lily Rabe, you must stack up. She’s a hugely challenging artists of her own work and her character, and she needs to know. I need to know as the creator, because it’s got to work and it’s got to satisfy. When you try to work it out, you felt like, “Please, can I go now? Do I have to keep going on this?” But I was very proud of it.
Lily does amazing work. Emma is so magnetic that everyone is drawn to her, whether they’re a serial killer or a 14 year old girl? How did you hit on Lily to play her, and how did she embody that quality?
Harriet Warner: That’s a great question. For me and my wonderful producers, we saw in her this amazing capacity for strength and love, and this huge depth of humanity. But also someone who was hiding so much; there is such an interior world that – certainly this is my projecting onto her – felt so tangible.
If there was a chance to land this very difficult character to write and sometimes to connect with, you needed someone with such a huge world of strength and humanity to then bring out this very intangible past. I’m so in awe of what she does and who she is as a person. She gave us everything, and she was just Karen/Emma from day one.
There is another very central character who is almost the opposite, in that we rarely see her eyes. Theresa is so central to this story that starts and ends with her. How do you approach writing a character that neither the audience nor even the characters know much about?
Harriet Warner: She is like a haunting presence, and it’s really difficult to write. It’s really difficult to write her so that you can give this feeling of an absent person that is the missing heart of the show. She lives through Mary, and she lives through Emma’s recovery. But it’s very difficult, and it’s an amazing credit to Stella who plays her.
I think it’s also because I knew everything about that character. We see her for those instances, but she was real character with a real life. I knew her as a fully formed character. If you know the house that you built, you can take the roof off and the doors out, and you can still see it’s a house. You can deconstruct it and show as little as you need to.
But it was a challenge to have someone that we could care about, and yet feel the absence. Again, credit to Amy [Brenneman] for her performance, because you never stop thinking of her as a mother with a huge maternal loss.
Mary’s character was so fascinating, and her dynamic with John in some ways echoed Emma’s with Pete. There are so many relationships on this show based on mutual need combined with mutual distrust. Are those conscious parallels or do they arise naturally from the plot?
Harriet Warner: It’s a really good point, because it is the central theme of the piece: how do we trust, based on the story we’re given or based on a deep instinct? I think we tell ourselves, “I know who a good person is, because I feel it. I’d feel it if there was something wrong.” Then you hear people saying, “I always knew there was just something weird about that person,” but I don’t know if that’s true. We do respond to the facade we’re given, although it’s not always a facade.
I wanted a world where we lived in those spaces, where we meet Pete, who he is Emma’s guide through witness protection and guide to the present. And yet he’s someone who really is struggling with control issues and boundary issues, and his own need for dependence while this woman is trying to become independent. I wanted to create characters who provoked each other; who were, on the surface, exactly what the other person needed – and yet who really go to the weak spots and therefore change the other person because of that.
I think it was conscious yet really unconscious as well, because those characters just fell into the show in a weird way, in my sort of thinking. It felt like they really were the right universe of people.
Meanwhile, Tom is almost the light of the show. What did he bring to Emma’s story for you?
Harriet Warner: I think I always wanted this character of Tom to represent the innocence in the show. He is a good person; he really is the character who is a good guy. If Emma didn’t have all the baggage that she has, he’s her happy future. He represents the future and the possibility, if we can let go of the past. I think that one of the themes of the show is how the past does corrupt the present, and I really wanted to explore that.
Emma in a way is destined to walk alone. I always sort of conceived her as the monster of Frankenstein: she wants to be human, but those connections are a real struggle because of the past. But Tom was a wonderful innocent in a world that is increasingly corrupting around him. He sees the truth of his town as well, and that was always very much part of the present-day story in St. James.
Speaking of the town, you filmed in Louisiana rather than on a sound stage. Did you receive any feedback or inspiration from filming there that manifested in the series?
Harriet Warner: Yeah, particularly with the pilot. Because we filmed that pilot a good portion before the season and, exactly as you’re saying, having been there and living there for that duration helped me see a different place to the version of Louisiana I had conceived in my bedroom. It was amazing and fascinating.
I think it’s the resilience of the people there, and the sense of nature always being very present and a constant threat to the world, because you’re might get a hurricane or a flood. And there is this dark legacy there as well that really does come through in the landscape. It’s hard to look away from history there, and I learned a lot about that place that really added depth going back for the season. It’s an amazing place, from the people there to the landscape, the history and the food.
Tell Me Your Secrets premieres February 19 on Amazon Prime.
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