[Editor’s note: The following interview contains major spoilers for “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen,” including its finale.]
If there is one lesson in Haley Z. Boston‘s Netflix series “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen,” it’s this: Don’t marry the wrong person. Just, don’t. Otherwise, well, you know how this goes: Something very bad is going to happen!
Over the course of eight twisty, twisted, funny, flinty, scary, and sometimes quite sad episodes, the limited series tells the story of a particularly bad pre-wedding week for the ill-fated Rachel (Camila Morrone) and Nicky (Adam DiMarco). When the show opens, the happy pair is headed to Nicky’s family’s summer house to say their I-do’s, and their off-kilter journey (complete with creepy podcasts, deeply rank roadside bathrooms, a seemingly abandoned baby, and one helluva weird local watering hole) only hints at the weirdness to come once they land at the Cunningham casa.
But for all its twists and turns, Boston and her cast, writers, and directors never let up on the promise of the show’s title and the skin-crawling sensations the pilot’s opening scenes (of Rachel and Nicky’s wedding and its insane, bloody aftermath) giddily pile on.
Ahead, Boston unpacks the finale of her Netflix limited series, including who lives, who dies, and just how much blood they really needed to cover the floor of the world’s worst wedding reception. (You can also catch up on our previous interview with Boston, which dives deep into everything else you’d like to know about the crazy new show.)
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
IndieWire: So much of this is about myth-making and how much of someone else’s myth you are willing to believe and buy into, good or bad.
Haley Z. Boston: That’s true. It’s taking two people with different perspectives on something like marriage and seeing how that plays out. I think they’re both right. The tragedy of the finale is that Nicky, if he had just listened to her four years ago or even just a week ago, it would’ve been OK, but he couldn’t get out of his own head. What’s important to me was that he was not all bad. He makes the wrong decision, but he’s trying to do the right thing.
When Nicky and Rachel are saying their vows, they note that they wrote them before the events of the show, so their meaning is very different now. At what point did you know what the content of the vows was going to be?
A lot of what we talked about was [around how] Rachel is going to drink this concoction and decides not to. So a lot of the content of the vows was like, “This is kind of great for me in this narrative that there’s a built-in way to use a bunch of exposition and have her explain exactly what she was thinking.”
The question of getting Rachel to the point where we believe her and she believes Nicky is her soulmate and we understand why, it’s because of this conversation they had right before she made the concoction. She finally has decided to not fall into the supernatural trap and just go with her heart. So that was sort of a tool to explain her emotional story. For awhile, I knew what her side would be.
For him, I wrote the vows while I was writing the finale and I was in Toronto prepping the show. I wanted his vows to feel a bit generic, because that’s what I think he would’ve written, just thinking about what would this guy have thought was the most romantic thing. And then, of course, he does what he, in the moment, thinks is the most romantic thing.
But it was tricky to kind of figure out, at what point does Nicky decide he’s going to make his ultimate move? In that conversation in Episode 7, which we in the writer’s room referred to as the most important scene in the show, they need to be both honest with each other, but you don’t realize until you watch Episode 8 that they were actually not seeing the same thing. When she says, “You believe me about the curse.” And he says, “I do, I understand,” he’s thinking something completely different.
He’s thinking about what he thinks the curse is, which is his own curse of his parents’ happy marriage.
Mm-hmm.
So when did you realize that Nicky had to pull the ultimate move and announce, “No, we’re not getting married”?
That was something we talked about early in the writers’ room that we were trying to figure out. I knew I wanted a bunch of people to bleed to death. That was really when I came up with the idea for the show, I was like, “What if when you get married and you marry the wrong person, you just start bleeding?” And then everything else followed that.
So I knew I wanted a bunch of people to bleed to death, but I did not know what to do with Rachel and Nicky at that point. It was a lot of like, should he also die? Should she walk away unscathed? If Rachel’s journey is believing he’s her soulmate, which is ultimately quite romantic, then how do we get all these people to bleed to death?
It became something we had to figure out and construct. It made sense from a character perspective that, the whole time we’re in Rachel’s POV and we’re watching her make these decisions and we’re on her side, and it’s like almost you forgot that there’s a whole other person going through their own emotional journey. I wanted it to feel like the “Drag Me to Hell” moment where, at the end of that movie she thinks she won but discovers that wrong button and that she did it wrong. Here’s this piece that was sitting there the whole time that you didn’t expect to be the wrench in the plan.
When did you realize that Rachel would have to say no when they attempt their vows again?
It was about making sure she had the final say and the agency. That was a very important moment, and I went back and forth on it, because I also was like, morally, is everyone going to hate her because she caused all these people to die? We talked about that a lot where it was just like, have we made her sympathetic enough? Do we root for her enough that we just want her to live?
We make it very clear that she was willing to sacrifice herself in the beginning of the episode, but by this point, she isn’t going to do that anymore and she is not going to betray herself. A lot of that was also inspired by the Good for Her Cinematic Universe. There was a bit of, well, if we are driving away with her and we’re like, “Yeah, fuck this family, fuck Nicky, and good for you,” how can we make that happen?
I think it’s really beautiful that [Nicky’s brother and sister-in-law] Jules and Nelly live. When did you decide that?
That was sort of late in the writing process, when we were like, “OK, someone’s got to live.” And there is actually also, it’s a bit of an Easter egg, but there is a lesbian couple that lives.
Oh, they live? Yay!
That was my secret agenda of the show really being about how heterosexuality is a trap.
It felt like, obviously, it should be [Nicky’s parents] Victoria and Boris because they’re in love and whatever, and then once we figured out the twist and Nicky’s whole worldview is shattered when he finds out his mom cheated on his dad, then it felt like, “Well, fuck them.”
It felt like a really nice statement about honesty and seeing each other. That was ultimately what I decided was what makes someone your soulmate, is if they see you. It was a bit of a last minute thing, but as we were deciding everyone’s fate, I went back and rewrote them a little bit to make sure that that was earned.
You do see that they see each other, but it’s also like, “Oh, these two assholes.” But it’s also these two assholes in love who see each other.
Exactly. Because the idea of a right person? It doesn’t mean that they’re perfect. Who is the right person for you? They talk about it even. He says to her in Episode 3, “You want someone who challenges you. You couldn’t date Nicky, he was too nice.”
Do you know how much blood you actually used in Episode 8?
I don’t know how much, I just kept going around and saying, “More, more blood, more blood.” We ended up adding a lot more in VFX also, so who’s to say? But it was really cool, because we also had these rigs where there were tubes when they were bleeding from the eyes. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
I assume it must not have felt like enough blood on set if you kept asking for more.
The blood did cause some problems. I wanted the whole floor of the wedding room to be covered in blood, and the special effects blood was so sticky that it became a hazard and it ruined all of our sound, so we had to clean it up and then clean up the pathways people were walking through. Then it had to be added back in VFX.
I feel good for Rachel at the end. I genuinely do. I’m not worried about her. I am a little worried about Nicky.
I think Nicky has changed in that he has figured out that his whole thing of doing “the right thing” all the time was misguided. I think he’ll get married again. I think he’ll try again, but he knows he has the curse now and, unfortunately, Rachel will have to be there, which is fun.
It is fun.
Fun for him to have his ex witness his wedding. That’s a great question, no one’s ever asked me about what happens to Nicky.
You go out feeling pretty good for Rachel, but, oh, Nicky’s just back there clutching his teddy bear.
As he should! But I think he’ll grow.
All episodes of “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” are now streaming on Netflix.
