Sharon Horgan had a complicated history with Amanda Knox‘s high-profile trial before being cast as her mom, Edda Mellas, in Hulu’s The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox.
“[I knew] quite a lot actually because there I don’t know how it was in the U.S but it was really blanket coverage here [in the U.K.],” Horgan, 55, exclusively told Us Weekly before the scripted series premiered on Wednesday, August 20. “And I’ve got quite a strange relationship with the past me and how I sort of viewed it.”
Horgan pointed out “the bias toward” Knox, 38. “I remember it being so salacious but I remember reading it voraciously,” she explained. “It’s kind of horrible now when I think about it because that’s exactly what the [Italian] media wanted at that point. It was to build this bias toward this young girl and to sexualize it and hype people up.”
Knox (played by Grace Van Patten in the show) made headlines in 2007 when she was accused of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher while they were studying abroad in Perugia, Italy. Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison after she and then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were both convicted of the crime.
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An appellate court later found the former couple not guilty in 2011, but they were dragged back to court in 2013. Knox and Sollecito were found guilty again before the Italian supreme court cleared Knox of Kercher’s murder in 2015, and she was exonerated.
“Honestly, I think everyone feels like they know the story and they don’t. From that point of view, I am excited for people to watch the show because I feel like it looks at it with a completely different lens,” Horgan told Us. “Throughout the season there were elements of the story that I did not have a clue about that felt so huge. You couldn’t understand how it wasn’t public knowledge or focused on.”
The eight-part scripted series allowed for more insight into Knox’s family.
“The personal side of it, how it impacted the family and what Edda and Amanda went through as a mother and daughter and how much it tore the family apart,” Horgan shared. “So from my perspective as somebody who was playing her mother, that was all very much the draw for me to get an opportunity to portray that relationship and how much it impacted them.”
Horgan recalled listening to transcripts and doing online research to get into character.
“There isn’t a huge amount by the way. But enough to see how a woman from a completely normal background found herself in this extraordinary situation, how she conducted herself, how she managed to stay calm, how she managed to represent herself and her family under that glare,” she explained. “I was able to see how she responded to the circus of it.”
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The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox chronicles the period after Knox was wrongfully accused, her time in prison and her journey to freedom. In addition to Horgan and Van Patten, the show stars Patten, John Hoogenakker, Francesco Acquaroli, Giuseppe De Domenico and Roberta Mattei. Grace’s sister, Anna Van Patten, will play Knox’s sister.
“The original longer scripts had so much in there about Edda, about her past and how she and her family dealt with it when they were right in the eye of the storm. It covered how they coped when things supposedly went back to normal — not that they ever could. I felt like there was so much in the script,” Horgan recalled.
Horgan eventually met Knox’s mom on set after they had been filming for “a while.”
“You could really see how Edda is really young for her age,” the Bad Sisters alum continued. “She’s very sweet and she doesn’t seem battle weary. She was just a really good grandmother and a really good mother. She felt like anyone you’d meet — which in a way was very interesting and emotional. Because you realize that that could have happened to anyone. The tragedy of it all could have been any of us.”
Horgan found it “really helpful” to see Knox’s dynamic with her mother in person.
“tI found it incredibly helpful just being around them as a mother-daughter,” she told Us. “There was an element of pressure that came from it because if Amanda and Edda are on set and you’re about to do very emotional scene that’s directly from their lives, you feel like you don’t want to get it wrong and you don’t want to belittle what they felt at the time. But you also don’t want to overplay it and for it to feel overly dramatic. But for the most part I found it really helpful.”
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Horgan detailed her conversations with Mellas.
There was a lot of time where we were just chatting and then it would get very, very deep and very painful very quickly,” she said. “It just made me more and more aware of how — despite best efforts — it’s always, always, always going to impact her life and everything about her life as a mother as well as a woman.”
Looking ahead, Horgan hoped The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox would offer a more personal look at what the family went through.
“Obviously, Amanda was exonerated — the Italian courts exonerated her of the murder — and that’s just a fact. I want people to watch it because everyone thinks they know this story but they actually don’t really know the story,” Horgan shared with Us. “I hope viewers are going to be surprised by what they learn and that it’s a deeper story. It goes beyond Amanda and the headlines. So I’m excited for the public to watch because of that.”
New episodes of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox air Wednesdays on Hulu.
