The Hunting Wives fans had one of their burning questions answered after Katie Lowes debunked a major theory about the murder at the center of the show’s murder after some major book changes.
In a big change from the book it was based on, the hit Netflix series made Abby’s killer Margo (Malin Åkerman) instead of Jill (Lowes). Following the reveal, viewers were still stuck on why Abby was limping before her death and Jill had blood on her car. Some theorized Jill might have hit Abby before she was murdered by Margo.
“Oh, no. I don’t think Jill hit Abby with her car,” Lowes, 42, exclusively told Us Weekly. “I don’t know why Abby is limping, but it’s not Jill’s fault.”
Lowes found all of Jill’s suspicious behavior to be intentionally misleading for the audience, adding, “I think Jill clears the history in her car and on her phone just because she was there that night looking for Abby. [She wanted] to scream at her and probably threatened her, but I don’t think she would have killed her that night. I really don’t.”
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The actress had a specific idea about what Jill did — or didn’t — do the night her son Brad’s (George Ferrier) girlfriend was murdered.
“You should think she would have [killed Abby]. But after playing her, I don’t think she would’ve,” Lowes noted. “She cleared all of her history because her son is involved in a murder investigation and she doesn’t know where they’re going to be looking into. So she’s just covering her tracks.”
The Hunting Wives, which premiered in July, follows Sophie (Brittany Snow) as she finds herself wrapped up in socialite Margo’s (Akerman) orbit. Sophie befriends Margo’s circle of housewives, but their dangerous secrets lead to a shocking murder where Sophie is the prime suspect.
The Hunting Wives took inspiration from May Cobb‘s book of the same name, but the show strayed from the source material. The biggest change was the identity of the killer, but Jill’s death also came out of left field.
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“I knew when I auditioned that Jill was going to die, so I really leaned into it,” Lowes told Us. “I’ve gotten to die a bunch of times, so I just was psyched. I was like, ‘I [gotta] go big or go home.’ I [got] to have one amazing season of Jill being as unhinged as I could do it and I loved it.”
Lowes enjoyed the challenge of telling her own version of Jill even though the character already existed in Cobb’s universe.
“I started reading the book and I quickly had to put it down when we started shooting. I was starting to get confused over the Jill that existed in the book and the Jill that Rebecca Cutter was putting on the show,” she recalled. “I had to put the book down and just really focus on this story and the job that I was doing with this version of Jill.”
Lowes continued: “Knowing that Margo was [now] going to be the killer and Jill was going to die, I was like, ‘OK, let’s just focus on the TV show and get that done so that my brain doesn’t get confused.’”
The Hunting Wives is currently streaming on Netflix.
