Everything the Cast of “The Perfect Couple ”Has Said About That Opening Dance Scene: 'The Group Chat Was Exploding'

Seemingly all of the cast, except for Liev Schrieber and Eve Hewson, were vehemently against creator Susanne Bier's idea to open the limited series with a dance

The Perfect Couple has everybody talking — and the murder mystery at the center of the limited series is not, in fact, what's on fans' minds.

The Netflix series, which premiered on Sept. 5 and is based on Elin Hilderbrand's 2018 book, begins each episode with a somewhat bizarre sequence that features the entire main cast — in character! — dancing to Meghan Trainor's song "Criminals."

It's not only a choice that has fans wondering, it was also controversial amongst the cast itself after showrunner Susanne Bier delivered the news.

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"We got a mysterious email from Susanne saying, 'Guys, over the Christmas break, you have to learn this dance.' Everybody started having a mental breakdown over it, calling their agents," star Eve Hewson, who plays Amelia Sacks in the show, said in a video shared by the streamer.

"The group chat was exploding with, 'I'm never gonna do this, I'm not gonna do this, I don't dance, I don't do it.' I, personally, was absolutely thrilled. I was like, 'This is gonna be the best thing I've ever done.'"

"All of us were a little nervous about it. Maybe not Eve — Eve picked it up rather quickly," Meghann Fahy, who plays Hewson's onscreen BFF Merritt Monaco, said.

Dakota Fanning, who plays Hewson's soon-to-be sister-in-law, Abby, explained in the video that Bier's "intention" behind opening each episode with the dance number was to establish "this surreal world that we've kind of created in the show."

"And so I think it primes the audience that you're gonna see something different than you might expect," she said of the number.

Fanning was right. Bier told Netflix's Tudum that the dance, which was choreographed by Charm La'Donna (who has worked with Trainor for 10 years), "puts the show in a very definite space of, ‘This is a slightly heightened reality and as an audience, you can allow yourself to have fun and enjoy it.’ There was something very joyful about having everybody doing it."

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Aside from fears regarding the principle of not wanting to dance, several of the stars wondered how the number would fit into the overall story they were telling.

Ishaan Khatter, who plays Benji's best friend Scooter, told Variety that none of the stars "could make sense of doing this choreography in these characters. We’re like, ‘Wait, where does this fit into the scheme of things? This was not part of the assignment!’”

That's where star Nicole Kidman's reluctance came in, too. "I didn’t feel like Greer would dance! I felt like Greer would watch," the actress, who plays the cutthroat matriarch, told Variety. "But I danced as Greer. I think it’s great and I’m so glad they got us all to do it. ‘Cause there’s some joy in it."

She also told the outlet that the whole cast was in the group chat talking about their hesitance about the dance — everyone except for Liev Schrieber.

Schrieber, 56, who plays patriarch Tag Winbury, knows he was the only one who was game for the number. "The entire cast had a mutiny about this idea except for me. I was already in my trailer practicing the dance moves," he told the outlet.

Sam Nivola, who plays the youngest Winbury son, told Tudum that the whole cast was "so intimidated" by the dance but "made a mutual agreement to just say, ‘We’ll figure it out on the day.’ And then we did, and it was so much harder than we thought it would be!"

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Jack Reynor joined the chorus of his castmates who expressed their initial opposition to the dance, as he told the UK's Radio Times, "I was a big naysayer on that one."

Like Nivola, though, Reynor, 32, who played resident troublemaker Thomas Winbury, admitted that "by the end of it, everybody actually kind of had fun."

Dancing aside, The Perfect Couple sees Amelia (Hewson) and the Winbury family — "one of the wealthiest families on Nantucket" — devolve into chaos after a body turns up on the beach on the morning of Amelia and Benji's (Billy Howle) wedding.

"As secrets come to light, the stage is set for a real-life investigation that feels plucked from the pages of one of Greer’s novels," per the official synopsis. "Suddenly, everyone is a suspect."

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The Perfect Couple is now streaming on Netflix.

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