There’s a new true crime series on the 2025 TV schedule, and it’s a deeply personal take on a highly publicized case from the early 2000s. We’re talking about the story of Amanda Knox. In Hulu’s The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, which she executive-produced, we see the story behind this woman’s experience of being wrongfully convicted of murder in Italy. It explores how she felt, and it shows the impact it had on not only her but also her family. So, when CinemaBlend interviewed the actress playing her mother, we discussed how Knox influenced her performance in the series.
While there have been other adaptations of Amanda Knox’s story, for this new streaming series, she served as an executive producer and interacted quite a bit with the cast. When CinemaBlend spoke to Sharon Horgan, who plays Knox’s mom Edda Mellas, she discussed how being a mother herself and these interactions helped shape her character. She started with the personal side, saying:
I don't know that I immediately knew who Edda was on the page initially, because it was just one script, the opening script. I mean, her kind of natural anxiety, you know, the scene that starts the show where they're in the car and they're going back to Italy, and her anxiety and her fears, that's who I am as a mother. I mean, I'm just driven by my fears of something going wrong. So, I felt like that gave me a route in and a handle on her.
However, what also helped her connect with the character was meeting the team behind the show, and Amanda Knox specifically. She explained that the Zoom meeting she had with the series creator, KJ Steinberg, and the producers, which included Knox, was illuminating.
Amanda Knox’s words about her mother and what they went through specifically helped the Catastrophe star, as she said:
It was really how she talked about her mother, you know? And despite the fact that she was the one who was incarcerated for all those years, she maintained how much worse it was for her mother. She got very emotional talking about it.
Considering how intense and long the process of getting Amanda Knox exonerated was (she was arrested in 2007 and cleared by Italy’s highest court in 2015), this makes total and complete sense. It also highlights how impactful this experience was on her whole family, and specifically her mother.
You can see all of that in the show, too. The panic both Amanda and Edda feel in the first two episodes of The Twisted Tale (which you can now stream with a Hulu subscription) is palpable, and both Grace Van Patten, who plays Knox, and Horgan’s performances were remarkable.
Horgan also said that being a parent of a teenager and a 21-year-old helped her understand what Edda went through and the fear she felt. She explained:
And that, coupled with the fact that my youngest is 17, my oldest is 21, I kind of understood the emotions behind that relationship entirely. You know, how they were with each other and how that sense of you'll do anything to protect them and fight for your loved ones. That's all – I kind of have that like for free in me, you know? So, it was kind of a mixture of a few things.
The actress noted that she did research online and watched interviews as well. However, meeting Knox and her mother “in real life” was deeply influential when it came to her performance. She noted that Knox is “a regular, ordinary, lovely lady who had this terrible thing” happen, and seeing how she “coped and came out the other side” was impactful.
Now, if you’d like to see Sharon Horgan’s performance as Amanda Knox’s mother, you can stream the first two episodes of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox right now. Then, make sure to tune back in every Wednesday for new episodes of this Hulu series that's off to a great start, because things are about to get very intense.
