SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers for “Opening Night,” the Season 3 finale of “Only Murders in the Building.”
Season 3 sees Mabel (Selena Gomez), Charles (Steve Martin) and Oliver (Martin Short) work together to uncover who may have wanted to kill Ben, and the list is long.
Ben, the star of Oliver’s new Broadway play, was hated by a lot of people. As it turns out, that includes Charles, who punched Ben across the face right before opening night. It also includes Loretta, played by Meryl Streep, who is secretly the biological mother of Ben’s manager and adopted brother, Dickie (Jeremy Shamos). And there’s Dickie himself, the overshadowed creator of the movie franchise that made Ben famous.
But as is revealed in Season 3 finale of “Only Murders in the Building,” titled “Opening Night,” it’s the producers of Oliver’s play — a mother and son — who are revealed to have done the deed. Their motives: Having snagged an early copy of an influential review, Donna DeMeo (Linda Emond) realized that Ben’s performance was tanking the play, which would mar the first Broadway producing credit for her son, Cliff (Wesley Taylor). And suffering from Stage IV lung cancer, she knows she won’t be around long enough to ensure his career recovers, so she sprinkled rat poison onto Ben’s cookie. “I wasn’t trying to kill Ben, I just wanted to knock him on his ass,” she tells Charles, Oliver and Mabel.
Ben does bounce back the same night, and figures out that it was Donna who tried to take him out. As he tried to stop Ben from calling the police on his mom, Cliff accidentally pushed Ben down an elevator shaft. Donna tries to take the fall for both crimes, but Mabel, upon observing Loretta’s fervent whispers that she’d “do anything” for her son, realizes that Donna would do the same and puts it all together.
The cops come take Donna and Cliff away after Oliver successfully re-opens his show, and the gang finally gets to celebrate. Of course, this is “Only Murders in the Building,” where every party is interrupted by the murder that sets up the following season (which Hulu greenlit on Oct. 3, the day the Season 3 finale was released). This time, Charles’ long-time body double, Sazz (Jane Lynch), heads up to Charles’ apartment to grab a bottle of wine. A bullet likely meant for Charles rips through the window and hits Sazz in the gut —the fourth murder in the building.
“Only Murders in the Building” co-creator John Hoffman spoke with Variety about mothers, sons and how far they’ll go for each other.
At what point did you know that Cliff was the murderer and that Donna had attempted murder too?
The writers always wonder, when we leave the end of a season, “Tell us! Who did that!” It was an early call. Sometimes it comes quickly; sometimes it doesn’t go like that. At the end of Season 2, there was a huge unspooling of things that were underneath the whole thing you were watching in the last couple of episodes. But some of them were challenging for people to get, like, “How could we have figured that out?”
So in this case, I wanted to give a little more so that the clues felt like something people could put together. The approach this time was that you might have three choices, and you picked one of them, and you have a little victory “I knew that!” But hopefully the surprise is the manner with which something occurred. Ben Glenroy talking to a cookie — you may have wondered about that early on and guessed it, and might have felt good when that was the case. But hopefully, the scene that played out was deeper, more upsetting, but also funny and keeping you on your toes.
There were some great red herrings with Loretta. As a viewer, it’s obvious that you’re not going to bring in Meryl Streep unless she has something important to do, but it takes awhile to figure out what that means. Did you consider making her the murderer? What would that have looked like?
We consider everyone. And yeah, you want to give Meryl Streep some really good stuff! So it meant if she wasn’t going to be the murderer, we were hopefully still fulfilling the honor of having her in our show for a season — and hopefully a bit more? We’ll see! Maybe. I hope. But the onus was on us to do something that subverted that expectation that an audience would have: “Meryl Streep’s in the show; she’s most likely going to be the murderer.” She had the same impression. She kept on asking: “Am I the murderer?” Because we don’t tell people immediately.
But in this case, that chemistry that was happening with her and Martin Short was so beautiful. We were rooting so hard for that that it was very hard to have it be another Jan-Charles situation from Season 1. We care about them, and I like the continuation of that romance for him.
At what point do you tell your actors who the murderer is? Do they all find out at the same time?
No, it’s terrible, because you put the onus on the actors that are playing the killer. That person I do need to tell before we start shooting. I had a Zoom with Wesley, and then Linda, and with Jeremy Shamos, who plays Dickie, to let them the big reveals coming so that they could underpin a little bit without giving it away. But you have to tell them, “You can’t tell anybody in the cast. This is your secret to know. Let’s keep it hidden until we’re ready to tell Meryl about what was really driving her to be at that audition at the beginning of the season.”
And I love the opportunity to make a show where people can go back and rewatch it now that all the secrets are revealed and feel like, “Oh God, there it is!” It’s beautiful to watch. She’s saying she’d do anything for the sake of the child, and it has much more weight when you understand what her story really is. It’s not just hoping to get a job.
So for everybody else, they just find out the big reveals when they get the scripts for those episodes?
Pretty much. Paul Rudd was scheduled to be in London for “Ghostbusters,” and there were two last things we needed for him: This magnificent duet that he sings with Meryl — it’s going to be on YouTube tomorrow, because we’ve got a much longer, brilliant version — and the scene at the elevator with Cliff. The climax of the entire mystery, and because of our scheduling challenges, we were shooting it six weeks earlier than we were shooting the finale. There we were, around all of the crew, and before rehearsal started, I was like, “What are we shooting? Oh my god, it’s this?” I had to stop everything and go, “Everybody! I need you to, in your head, sign an NDA like you’ve never signed an NDA.”
Oliver makes it pretty clear at one point that he’s willing to lie and tamper with evidence to protect Loretta when it looks like she may be the killer. What were you trying to say there?
Oliver’s story is so poignant this season — the desperation around it. This opportunity feeling like his last, both for love and for his career and artistic expression. He is pushed to the brink both physically and emotionally, and makes some bad choices. It feels like a different look at him. I’m not afraid of it. If you’re in a long game with your characters, I like seeing them do things that make us upset. It doesn’t make them unlovable; it makes them human. In Season 2, not wanting Bunny to come join them at a party they want privately for themselves is not a good look. But it also creates this responsibility for the characters we love to say, “I need to do this for a deeper, personal reason now because I feel unbelievably horrible that we might have been able to save her and we didn’t.”
Instead of being a motive for murder, Loretta’s love for Dickie ends up acting as a mirror to Donna’s love for Cliff. This show has previously dealt with fathers a lot — Charles’ complicated relationship with his father, Oliver’s complicated relationship with his son, Mabel’s father dying when she was little. How did focusing on motherhood change things this time around?
I lost my mother a year ago. Being tasked with putting a big story like this together each season, I need to feel confident in what the story is, understanding it both emotionally and intellectually. Emotionally, there was no way around the connections I was feeling [to the story]. The intensity while creating stories that were focused on [motherhood] felt personal, whether I was conscious of that or not. Sometimes, I realized it while we’re in the middle — “Oh my god, I know what this is about.”
And I love showing different sides of a theme: Donna and Cliff, and Loretta and Dickie, and then the story in the play of a nanny trying to protect these children. And what it means to protect and nurture and be the person that is there no matter what. That all felt like great fodder that I understood emotionally.
The main trio spends a lot of time apart this season after two seasons of building a very specific group dynamic. Did it feel strange to write that way? And did bringing them back together teach you anything new about how this show functions?
It certainly did. It was hard, and sometimes we missed it, so we’d create moments to keep it alive. And did we want the audience wanting that too? Absolutely. We just got picked up for Season 4. So the room where we are now, having earned this understanding of themselves and what the trio means to them, feels like a great springboard into next season where they are back together fully on the case — and for good reason, because it feels pretty close to home.
When we spoke about the Season 2 finale last year, you said that Season 3 would focus on the cost of success and how far people will go to get it. With the Season 3 finale revealing that Season 4 will center the Sazz’s death, I’m curious about why you chose her, and what themes that may bring up.
As creative people, these three have made a podcast, and they put it out into the world and it’s taken off. But there’s no real sense of what people out there are thinking about your thing that is taking off, and that thing you created could come back in a way that that feels threatening and unexpected for you. Something you couldn’t see coming — and what that does to you and how you want to spend the next years of your life. Be careful with the thing you create, basically.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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