Meghann Fahy Gets Why You’re So Obsessed With The Perfect Couple ’s Dance

COURTESY OF NETFLIX

Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Perfect Couple.

Meghann Fahy knows how to do self-care right. For example, while spending days shooting an admittedly very tiring scene for her new Netflix murder mystery show, The Perfect Couple, in which her character was—spoiler—drowned in the ocean by Dakota Fanning’s character, the two ladies made sure to sneak in some R&R.

“They had this blow-up hot tub…so between takes we were just sitting in our costumes in this inflatable hot tub in some empty high school,” Fahy tells Glamour of filming the scene. “It was really funny.”

Many fans fell in love with Fahy for her perfectly nuanced portrayal of trophy wife with a soul Daphne in the second season of The White Lotus, and while her character of influencer and maid of honor turned murder victim Merritt Monaco in The Perfect Couple is very different, the women are similar in that they both have a lot more depth underneath than what they seem on the surface. Fahy joins a stacked cast that includes Nicole Kidman, Fanning, Liev Schreiber, and Eve Hewson, and said working with so many talented actors is one of the reasons why she likes doing these large ensemble shows.

“I love working with a bunch of different kinds of people,” she says. “I love how having scenes with a bunch of people in them and interweaving storylines can affect the energy of a show. From a personal standpoint, it’s really fun to get the opportunity to work with lots of different actors.”

Fahy chatted with Glamour ahead of the premiere about how the show differs from the Elin Hilderbrand book it’s based on, what drew her to the project, and of course, all about that dance.

Glamour: A lot of people will be interested in the show because they love the book and Elin Hilderbrand’s work. Had you read it before you signed on?

Meghann Fahy: My mom had read the book, so she was super excited. I hadn’t read it before I heard about the project. It was just really cool to step into this world that she created, and they did such a beautiful job of translating it. I know the ending of our show is a bit different than the book, but I don't think it’s one that will be disappointing to the fans of the book because it stays true to what the story really ultimately was about. I think more than anything, it’ll be nice that it’s a little bit of a different twist on it.

One thing I loved about the show is while there are men main characters, the plot is really about the women. Did that appeal to you as well?

Well, one of my favorite components of the show is the journey that we watch Amelia (Hewson) go on in terms of these huge life decisions she’s having to make about whether or not she feels like she’s about to marry the right person. That’s a super-relatable phase for a young woman or person in general to be going through. I loved that in the end, she makes the choice that’s best for her and decides to invest in herself. That’s satisfying because it’s very brave to get that close to making a decision like that. I think it’s really cool.

It's really interesting that Amelia, Merritt, and Abby [Fanning], these three women, and then also Greer [Kidman], are all sort of navigating their romantic relationships and putting them under a microscope and thinking about what they need and want out of these things. They all approach it very differently. It’s cool that the show spans such a large space of what that can be.

Yeah, absolutely. I’m just thinking now about how all these women were driven to do things by the men’s behavior. So, it was all kind of the men’s fault at the end of the day.

[Laughs.] Yeah.

I just watched the finale and found the drowning scene, where your character gets murdered by Dakota Fanning’s character, to be very visceral. What was it like filming that?

From a technical standpoint, it was really fascinating for me. I had never really done anything like that before, so I was really interested in the process of that. It was definitely a little bit trickier and a little more arduous than I was imagining, and more than it might even look when you see the show, because it’s just these quick pops of this stuff. But when you’re shooting that, it’s hours.

We shot stuff in the actual ocean, and then we shot stuff in a pool and had a special tank so we could get a thing under it. We shot it a lot of different ways, and it was really tiring. But Dakota was awesome to work with, and we were both super game, so it was a really fun experience.

Now I’m just picturing you guys having a great time while she’s pretending to drown you in the ocean. I’d love to hear more about what it was like on set. Obviously, there were so many really just prominent and talented actors working on the project. It seems like you guys were having a lot of fun.

We actually shot in Cape Cod because you can’t shoot on Nantucket, I don’t think. I’m from Massachusetts, and I grew up and still go to Cape Cod with my family every summer, so it felt very familiar to me. It was really cold at the beginning, so that was kind of interesting; it was a little bit of a ghost town during the winter months, but it warmed up. Some of the cast knew each other before, and some of us were just meeting for the first time, but we had a lot of bonfires. Everybody had little rental homes, so we would just bop around to different people’s houses and cook dinner and stuff. It was a really communal experience.

So I have to ask about the opening credits dance. It’s totally going to be a moment.

It’s definitely going to be a moment based on the interviews that I’ve been doing today. Everybody wants to talk about the dance. I get why. It’s a really unique take on opening credits, especially for a show like this where it feels a bit like a departure from the characters and the stories and everything. It’s really fun, and I totally get why people are obsessed with it. We were sort of wary of it at first, and then toward the end we ended up just fully loving it and having so much fun.

I think you probably have to recreate it for TikTok or something though, right?

I would have to relearn it. I have not retained any of those moves, but I’d be down.

Originally Appeared on Glamour