[This story contains major spoilers from the series finale of Imperfect Women.]
If you’re a fan of prestige television, then your antenna was probably raised during the first few episodes of Apple TV’s Imperfect Women, as House of Cards and Billions alum Corey Stoll took a backseat. But it soon became clear why an actor of this caliber was needed.
“They gave me the first four episodes, which was just a real tease; there wasn’t that much,” Stoll tells The Hollywood Reporter after the finale of the limited series. “Then they sent the next few episodes, where it was clear this was a fun, challenging role. The character has to do some pretty crazy right angles, and with another cast, in another situation, it might feel a little scary to do that where I’d feel sort of exposed. But this was such a strong cast, I knew that they would all go for it and not be shy about making these bold moves.”
Based on Araminta Hall’s 2020 novel of the same name, Imperfect Women opens with the murder of socialite Nancy (Kate Mara). In the aftermath, her longtime friends Mary (Elisabeth Moss) and Eleanor (Kerry Washington) search for answers, including the identity of the mystery man who Nancy was having an affair with and who she’d begun to fear.
Episode five, “Louise,” finally brought Stoll’s Howard to the forefront. Mary’s husband and father of their three children is a professor and author who has been out of work, and, essentially as a favor to Mary, Nancy hires him to provide historical information for the program notes of the ballet production that she’s helping put on. An unexpected bond begins to blossom between Nancy and Howard, eventually turning into a steamy affair.
After Nancy’s death, Mary’s suspicions arise when she finds a passage from Howard’s book in her late friend’s belongings, realizing it’s the same one Howard gave to her when they had an affair during Howard’s first marriage. She tears the house apart and stumbles upon Nancy’s ring, prompting her to seek out Howard’s ex, Jenny (Sandrine Holt), who said he’d been abusive to her. Just as Mary is suspecting Howard is Nancy’s killer, she gets a call that her young daughter is in the hospital, having swallowed some of Mary’s illegally obtained Adderall. It becomes clear to Mary that Howard purposely poisoned their child to ruin Mary’s credibility and keep the kids in his custody. As she sneaks into the house to get more evidence, Howard successfully manipulates her, denying the accusations involving Nancy and offering to take Mary back into their family.
Mary relents, only for Eleanor to pull strings to have Howard brought in for questioning. But, in the opening of the finale, “The Bridge,” he’s released when footage shows Scott Reid (Wilson Bethel), the former boyfriend of Nancy’s mother, near the scene of the murder. Upon being arrested, Scott asks to see Eleanor and Mary, telling them that Nancy called him because she was afraid of Howard and wanted Scott to rough him up. But Scott showed up too late, catching a glimpse of Howard standing over Nancy’s body. “Your husband killed your best friend,” he says to Mary, “what the f— are you gonna do about it?”
In an emergency custody hearing, Jenny speaks out against Howard, and the judge rules that children will not be allowed with either parent. Howard responds by kidnapping Mary, planning to stage her death as a depressed woman who killed herself after losing her kids. As they reach the same location under a bridge where Nancy died, the episode flashes back to the murder. Howard wants Nancy to be with him, arguing that she’s never been more alive than with him. She says things between them are over, and she’s going to tell Mary. When Howard contends that Nancy doesn’t care about Mary, Nancy slaps him, and he responds by shoving her into a cement wall, and the hit to the back of her head kills her. “She would be alive if it wasn’t for you,” he tells Mary back in the present. A struggle ensues, and Howard stabs Mary in the shoulder and then strangles her. Likely believing she is dead, he goes to grab the knife, but he’s then run into by Eleanor’s car. He manages to get up and engage in a fight with Eleanor, until Mary comes back into the picture and repeatedly stabs him to death.
“The final episode and final scenes were written and rewritten so many times,” Stoll now reveals. “It really wasn’t until we shot it that we knew what it was. [Creator] Annie Weisman was really open to our opinions and respected what we had to say about what is believable for this character. From the beginning, the idea was that it was this crime of passion and that the coverup was worse than the crime.”
With Imperfect Women’s whodunnit mystery resolved, THR chatted with Stoll about his unexpected research and the iconic film character that Howard’s evil reminded him of, below.
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I knew early on that something had to be up with Howard because you don’t hire Corey Stoll to be the random husband who pops in every now and then! Was it interesting to be slow played at the beginning?
I feel like every job should be like that. A nice slow on ramp where you get to come in, learn everybody’s name on set, see what the vibe is and then slowly build up. So it was actually a really great situation.
How was the character first pitched to you? Did they tell you right out of the gate that you were the killer?
They gave me the first four episodes, which was just a real tease; there wasn’t that much. But I was intrigued, and I was excited to work with Kate [Mara] and Elisabeth [Moss], and a little bit with Kerry [Washington], and with Leslie Linka Glatter, who was directing the pilot, and who I had worked with before. Then they sent the next few episodes, where it was really clear this was a fun, challenging role. The character has to do some pretty crazy right angles, and with another cast, in another situation, it might feel a little scary to do that, that I’d feel exposed. But this was such a strong cast that I knew that they would all go for it and not be shy about making these bold moves. I was hooked.
Nancy (Kate Mara) with Howard (Corey Stoll) in Imperfect Women.
Apple
You’ve played plenty of guys who live in the grey, but, in going this dark, did Howard seem like something new for you?
It did. It’s interesting because he’s more soft and low-status than a lot of characters I play, and that was really attractive. Especially in episode five, where he’s really kind of this dork. Then your job as an actor is to be the main advocate for your character, and that was being challenged as it went on. When it came to poisoning my child to frame my wife, I was like, this is the most evil character I’ve ever played. It brought to mind William H. Macy’s character in Fargo, who is culturally sweet and friendly, but when he’s cornered, every choice he makes is selfish and stupid.
Howard is described at one point as being “insidious” and a “sociopath,” and you mentioned him literally poisoning his own daughter. How did you try to get inside his head?
I was reading this book about MDMA and the whole history of it, and for people who are real proponents of psychedelics, there’s this sense that, if I gave everybody this drug, everybody would just love everybody else. But that’s not really how it works — there are groups of neo-Nazis who take MDMA! What it does is it just gives you love within the prescribed circle that you consider your family. So, for Howard, he felt so threatened that his circle got so small that it only included himself.
Terms like “narcissist” or “sociopath” aren’t so helpful for an actor. Because those are ways to describe something from the outside, and I have to be able to identify it, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have narcissistic personality disorder or sociopathy. So instead of trying to not have empathy for other people, I tried to find how I could do it. Everybody is capable of evil, we see that throughout history. It wasn’t about a lack of love for his children, it was an overabundance of love for himself and his own safety.
We hear in Nancy’s voiceover that she never thought much of Howard before the events of episode five, but do you think he’d long been intrigued by her? We know that Howard and Mary were roleplaying as Robert and Nancy.
I don’t think so. I think he saw Nancy as so unobtainable and out of his league that he didn’t imagine they could have any sort of future. That was how I played episode five. It really did take him by surprise. And what took him by surprise was a real connection. This wasn’t a coldhearted seduction or ulterior motives. He was really most excited about having a job!
The way he begins spiraling, leading to the violent end, do you believe that was because he was truly in love with her, or more about the rejection and what that did to his ego?
I was playing it that he was in love with her. Yes, the rejection is what drove him to violence, but he could view this whole other life [for them], and he was already sort of planning it out — and it was deluded.
What do you think it is about Howard that appealed to women? Obviously he used his influence as a professor and author on someone like Mary, but he also had these relationships with Nancy and his ex-wife. We do get his Jenny saying, “Howard has this way of charming you through repulsion.”
He’s very smart and curious. His academic life comes from being really turned on by ideas, and, for the more academically-minded women, there’s an obvious connection. Then for Nancy, who has entered this world of status and image, she encounters a guy who is really turned on by ideas who takes her seriously. At first, I think Howard didn’t take her seriously. He sees her as this dilettante who is acting as an intellectual or an artist, and then he sees that she really does have this sensitivity and talent, and he reflects that back to her. And that is really irresistible because she’s not getting that at home.
Howard (Stoll) with Mary (Elisabeth Moss).
The scene at the house late in episode seven between Howard and Mary is really when Howard clinched his position as the ultimate gaslighter. What was it like tapping into that kind of manipulation and figuring out how this guy would operate and try to salvage what he could in this situation?
That was a really challenging scene, and one of the most fun to play. The plan originally was to shoot it day for night inside the house and block off windows, and then the director was like, “No, I think we need to be able to move through the house in these long shots, so we’re going to shoot this at night.” I thought that was a really smart move. It was a great location for this cat and mouse game, because there were all these ways you could cut off her exit. So we got to really use the space and block it like you would block a scene in a play. There’s the intellectual threats and the implied threats, and then there’s just my physical presence and how I use that to intimidate her or lure her in. And Lizzie is just so game. She’s such a natural actor, so we could really just work off each other.
A couple years ago I wrote a story titled, “When will we stop terrorizing Elisabeth Moss?” And that’s because she had been so good in roles like Handmaid’s Tale and The Invisible Man, and here we go, another man is terrorizing her. Now having had a front row seat, what makes her so good at being put through the wringer?
She has a very thin membrane between herself and her emotional life, and she has very easy access to it. It doesn’t appear that she’s working herself up to it; she really just imagines the situation and is there. And then you say “cut” and we’re laughing, and she doesn’t seem to hold onto it in that way. So it makes it really fun to play, because I think actors have to have both a very adult, responsible consciousness, where you hit the mark and you say the lines, and this incredibly open and childlike frame of mind, where you can play and unexpected surprising things can happen. And so she has an incredible balance of those two things.
What was your reaction to finding out how this was all going to come to a head in the final moments of the finale?
The final episode and final scenes were written and rewritten so many times. It really wasn’t until we shot it that we knew what it was. But I felt I was part of that. [Creator] Annie Weisman was really open to our opinions and respected what we had to say about what is believable for this character. From the beginning, the idea was that it was this crime of passion and that the coverup was worse than the crime. I haven’t seen the last episode, so I can’t remember what we ended up with at the end, but I just remember lots of emotion and fighting.
There’s a moment where Mary tells Howard to just let her go and make a run for it, and it feels like he briefly considers it. Did you want to convey it that way?
Yeah, if he thought that that would work, he would take it. I think the only thing that stops him from doing that is the realization that he will be hunted for the rest of his life, and he just can’t accept that. Not that the choices that he makes are that sensible. At this point his judgment is completely fried by his own terror and self-loathing. I think part of him wants to get caught and be punished.
There’s a lot of stunt work in the climax, between Howard getting hit by a car and him tussling with each of the three women.
We had stunt people doing a lot of it, especially me getting hit by a car, which was an incredible stunt. The stunt guy only did it once, and then, like he’s supposed to do, after he fell, he just stayed still. And there was definitely a moment before they said “cut” where everybody was like, “Is he going to get up?” It was a really hard impact. And I was very glad that he was the one who did it and not me. But everybody was really game with this show, and there was a real sense that everybody was excited to play.
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Imperfect Women is now streaming all episodes on Apple TV.
