[This story contains major spoilers from the season one finale of Your Friends & Neighbors.]
“You don’t deserve it,” Jon Hamm’s Coop in the Your Friends & Neighbors finale.
In the first episode of the Apple TV+ series, a death was revealed in the wealthy, fictional Westmont Village, leaving a mystery of who could be a murderer among these elites. Who killed Paul (Jordan Gelber)?
Sam’s husband was the victim, making Coop a prime suspect when the police later found out about Coop and Sam’s secret relationship. Coop ended up getting arrested when the murder weapon, a gun, was found in his car — a murder weapon that was planted there by Sam to frame Coop.
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But in the season finale, which released Friday, viewers discovered that there was never a murder. Paul died by suicide — while on FaceTime with Sam — and she staged the scene to make it look like a murder so that she could receive Paul’s life insurance money, as she was in the process of divorcing him. When Coop gets out on bail and confronts Sam, one of her reasons for setting him up is because Sam, who comes from a blue-collar background, doesn’t think Coop, a former hedge fund guy, deserves the life he has. “Ultimately, the show is a social exploration. It’s a little bit of a satire, and thematically it’s all about what makes these people tick,” season two.
Your Friends & Neighbors marked Munn’s first on-screen project following her breast cancer diagnosis. She’s previously opened up about how she was nervous to film sex scenes with Hamm because of her cancer scars. Last month, the actress told THR at the show’s premiere about how their chemistry was something that came naturally. “He and I get along so well it’s just really easy to play,” she said.
Below, Munn talks to THR about how money and privilege are the real villains in the series, explains how anyone could relate to Coop and Sam’s on-again-off-again relationship and teases what’s next for Sam in season two, which is currently filming.
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In episode six, we started to see a different side to Sam when she told off a salesperson when buying skincare. Knowing what we now know, was that a clue that there was more to Sam than we might expect?
What I loved about that scene was that Sam is on the precipice of losing everything, and that’s where we meet her in episode one. And by that point in the show, she’s at the apex of that. Everything that she is desperate to hold on to is literally at the very end of her fingertips, and in that moment, everything just explodes. That salesperson is the unfortunate recipient of all of that. But in that moment, it’s all the energy she’s put into not only holding on to it but to have created it. She’s had so much ambition and drive in her life to get to the top of the social mountain and have this incredible wealth. Not only has she been desperately trying to hold on, but she’s watching this just disintegrate in her hands.
Before the twist is revealed, Sam broke things off with Coop. Why did she decide to let him go? Then it seemed like he was trying to make their relationship more than a friends-with-benefits situation.
It wasn’t said in the script, but it’s something that [Jonathan] Tropper [creator/showrunner] and I talked about a lot, and when I went into the season I was thinking about: “What’s the part of the story that we haven’t seen before we meet all these characters? And what’s been going on with Sam and Coop?” They both entered their relationship in similar places but very different emotionally. He was looking for a soft place to land when he was struggling so much to want to keep his family together, and my character is hoping that this flourishes into something more. So, I thought a lot about what other conversations they were having that we don’t see on screen. When he got to that point where it seemed like he wanted more, the reality was that he said that so many times. There’s a point where you have to just wake up and realize you’re in this cycle of: “Yes, he wants more. OK, no, he doesn’t. Yes, he wants more. No, he doesn’t.” There’s a point where she just has to say, “Enough is enough.”
Now, about the ending, what was your reaction to reading in the script that Sam made her ex-husband’s suicide look like a murder?
I absolutely loved it. (Laughs) Tropper did a really great job of this unflinching exploration of human nature and ambition, and the lengths people will go to make and retain their wealth and status in society. This part was like the Shakespearean equivalent of showing what all that leads to: When you see what happens when blind ambition and the desperate need to maintain your social status and wealth come up against losing it all. At that moment, on the surface, it seems like she just wants the insurance money, and to the length that she’s going, it’s so extreme. But it’s the need. It’s a timeless story of people thinking that money buys happiness, and putting all of your self worth and your entire life into the idea that if you have money, then everything is going to be OK. So for her, there was no other way. That was the only path forward.
When Coop asks her why she framed him for Paul’s murder, she responds, saying, “You should have been kinder to me,” and notes that he doesn’t deserve the privileged life he has. However, that could apply to a lot of people in that neighborhood, so why was Coop the one to pin Paul’s death on?
That line: “You should have been kinder to me” is something that Tropper told me in our first initial call. I thought about that for so long, and I love that line so much. And that’s a great question: why him? But it’s because of having been so intimate with him and having this close relationship. I think that we’ve all had those relationships where you feel like you’ve really given your heart to somebody and really exposed yourself, and you’re being very vulnerable and very loving and it’s just being taken. Nothing is being given back to you. You’re left feeling really empty at the end. For Sam, that is part and parcel of what that entire world is like. People take and take and they feel no need to to replenish anything.
What I really loved about that scene in particular was that there has been so much dialogue in the world about privilege, and I’ve had to have many conversations with friends about it just over the last five years where it’s been at the apex of discussion in the world. I had a conversation with one friend who was asking me to explain it to him and I didn’t mind because he really was earnestly wanting to know. He’s like, “But I work really hard to get to where I’m at. So why are people saying that I don’t deserve it?” I was like, “Look, you know, I’m a first-generation American. This is my mother’s 50th anniversary of fleeing Saigon to come to America as an immigrant. No one is saying that people with inherent privilege don’t work hard or haven’t faced their own battles and slayed their own dragons and worked really, really hard. What people fail to realize is that on that same mountain, they have been given the cheat codes, maps and keys to the gates along the way.”
So, yes, they have to climb the mountain, but it’s all been set up for them to make it through to the next level, the next stage. So they’re on their way up and they’re working hard to get to the top, while the rest of us have this Sisyphean task to keep trying to get up this mountain. But we don’t have the cheat codes. We don’t have the maps in front of us. There’s no one that we know at that next gate that says, “I’ll let you in.” I know your dad; I know your mom. Oh, that’s great we went to Yale together, come on in. The rest of us are still struggling to get up the mountain, while on the other side, people with privilege are making their way up the mountain.
That moment in the foyer of Sam’s home, that’s what Sam is saying: “Yeah, you worked hard, but I worked harder because it was not set up for me to be here.” Everything was set up for Coop. When Tropper first talked to me about this, [he mentioned] it’s a lot based on his life. He lived in Westchester and had a whole other life before his life now. He goes: There is this world of people whose families are wealthy and their families went to Harvard or Yale, and so their children get to go to Harvard or Yale. And then, because the dad had a hedge fund, or knew this hedge fund guy, it’s set up for his son to then go into this hedge fund, and then it’s set up for him to run the hedge fund. Then, there are certain goals they set off for themselves, and they achieve them. Get your first mansion, get your second mansion, get your vacation home, get this plane, get that plane and then it’s this accumulation of wealth and things. And then something happens that unravels it all, and you realize that everyone has been putting all their attention and energy onto something that’s so external. When the internal cracks even the slightest, it just exposes the fragility of that entire world.
During your monologue, Sam setting up the crime scene reminded me of Gone Girl. Was that an inspiration at all for Sam’s storyline? Did it inspire your performance?
I never thought about that, and Tropper never brought that up, either. So, I never thought about that. But I think of Gone Girl as sociopathic. (Laughs) She’s very sociopathic, and I think that Sam is a very nuanced, complex character who came from a blue-collar upbringing who has found herself at the top of this social mountain and has convinced herself this is what she needs to do to survive. She’s convinced herself that the only way to survive is to be in this social world and with this enormous wealth and that there is no other path in life to forge, which I always think is interesting because she didn’t come from money. She can go back into a life and figure out how to live without money. It’s not foreign to her. So why does she so desperately want to do anything to stay in this place with this friend group and have this house and this car and these purses and shoes?
I thought about that a lot. Money can corrupt the soul when you’re around a lot of people who put priority on things and not relationships; on the label and the Zip code. That kind of ideology is sticky, and it can stick to you and how you move in the world, and how you think about the world. I think Sam has really lost her sense of self and is focused on only the things she has seen that matter. The money and lifestyle have also corrupted Sam, and when something like that happens, you can’t really see any other way besides what you think is the only one in front of you.
Since you are currently shooting season two, how would you compare the first season to the second?
In the second season, what we’ve all seen in the world for hundreds of years, too, this is the same story. People with wealth and power can do horrible things, and yet you turn around and they’re sitting next to you at the dinner party, and they just keep finding their way back into these social circles and keep finding their way back into being accepted. It’s staggering and shocking for most of society who have a moral compass. It’s set up that way because they’ve got the key, those cheat codes. Everything is set up for people who have been born with privilege; life is already set up for them to falter and come back up. My character wasn’t born with privilege and yet, here she is. She’s fallen off the mountain, and yet she’s still in this world, and we’re going to see the struggle of trying to stay in that world, keep a place in that world, get back to where she was and how everyone is going to handle that.
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All episodes of Your Friends & Neighbors are now streaming on Apple TV+. Read THR’s finale interview with creator Jonathan Tropper.
