Annette Bening and Sam Neill Peel Back Complicated ‘Apples Never Fall’ Layers of the Delaney Parents | Video

At the core of Peacock’s “Apples Never Fall” sits a family that seems alright on the surface. However, their buried secrets, resentment and other emotions bubble beneath, needing only so much to set them off.

“Nyad” actress Annette Bening anchors the dysfunctional family in the adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s best-selling book, which came out in 2021, from showrunner Melanie Marnich. Bening portrays matriarch Joy, who ran a tennis academy with her husband Stan (Sam Neill) while their four children — Amy (Alison Brie), Troy (Jake Lacy), Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner) and Brooke (Essie Randles) grew up.

“As the story begins, what’s at [Joy’s] core is that she’s lost and doesn’t know where her center is. She feels unknown to her family. She feels unknown to herself. And so she’s at a real transition point in her life,” Bening told TheWrap. “She doesn’t know how she got to this moment. She didn’t expect to be in this moment, and is looking for the next step to take.”

Stan and Joy have just retired from running the Delaney Tennis Academy, where Stan mainly coached and mentored athletes while Joy ran the business side of things and kept the accounts straight.

“Retirement has come to them as more of a shock. They were looking forward to time together and, what happens to a lot of people when they retire, they realize that their [children] have left home psychologically and physically,” Neill told TheWrap. “They have no job to go to in the morning. So it’s just kind of the two of them and that can be boring.”

“Stan’s a bit of a cockroach in that respect,” the actor noted. “They’re in the house, you can’t get them out of the house, they’re slightly dirty, and they’re always sort of under your feet.”

Neill added, “He loves his family, ferociously, particularly Joy, who he is utterly devoted to, but he gets stuff wrong. He is a flawed character and can be terribly single-minded. There’s Stan’s way or the highway, and that can often lead to unhappy results. He’s a flawed human being, but some of his flaws are worse than others, and the short temper doesn’t help.”

Meanwhile, Bening described Joy’s parenting style in a similar way: “If anything, probably a little too protective.” But one thing she struggled to protect her children from was her husband’s temper.

“There’s a lot that happened with Stan when the kids were little that the kids don’t know about, but he did have a temper. It was a problem as they were growing up, that he had this tendency to lash out,” Bening said. “I think I always tried to protect them from that and felt very helpless and felt I couldn’t stop him from from doing it. I ended up feeling some guilt about that. Some of those things that happened need to be addressed in order to get to a place of health in the family, I think.”

Joy’s disappearance one day sets the rest of the story in motion. The four Delaney kids band together to try and track down their mother. A prime suspect turns out to be a mysterious young woman Savannah (Georgia Flood), who stayed with Joy and Stan several months before Joy went missing.

“Savannah helps Joy in a moment where she’s lost and doesn’t know what she needs, and Savannah’s presence is so simple and so friendly, and [she] doesn’t have any needs of her own,” Bening explained. “[She’s] available, and kind, and trusting and trustworthy. It makes sense to Joy to go with it, but at the moment, she’s quite vulnerable. It’s just a way of surviving in the moment that seems easy.”

“Apples Never Fall” starts streaming March 14 on Peacock.

The post Annette Bening and Sam Neill Peel Back Complicated ‘Apples Never Fall’ Layers of the Delaney Parents | Video appeared first on TheWrap.