How A Murder at the End of the World Created an Iconic Detective for Today
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The post How A Murder at the End of the World Created an Iconic Detective for Today appeared first on Consequence.
The premise of A Murder at the End of the World invokes thoughts of authors like Agatha Christie, as a group of relative strangers find themselves isolated at a remote Icelandic hotel in the midst of a murder mystery. But in one specific way, the show’s creators were inspired by John Grisham — because somehow, Consequence was the first to ask Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling if the cunning girl detective at the center of End of the World was named after Darby Shaw from The Pelican Brief. “No one else ever mentioned that,” Batmanglij says as he confirms the inspiration point (feeding Consequence’s ego immensely). “Anyone’s read the script, anyone who’s worked on the show… no one has ever caught that.”
“Love Grisham, love The Pelican Brief, love Darby Shaw in that story — the sort of dogged detective that she is,” co-creator Brit Marling adds with a laugh.
It’s just one of the many, many references and pop culture tidbits found in the FX limited series, which stars Emma Corrin (The Crown) as Darby Hart, a hacker, amateur detective, and true crime writer who attends a luxury retreat hosted by tech mogul Andy Ronson (Clive Owen). Included on the retreat’s guest list are notable thinkers of the day, including Andy’s retired hacker wife Lee (Marling), as well as artist/hacker Bill (Harris Dickinson), whom Darby was close with several years beforehand.
End of the World technically contains not one but two mysteries, as flashbacks take us back to when a teenage Darby and Bill were first connecting online over cold cases — one of which would unfold into a bigger investigation. Batmanglij says that “I think we were interested in a mystery in which the detective would have to solve the mystery inside herself, in order to solve the larger mystery at play, and how we could weave those two threads together and and cinch them at the end.”
In developing the story, Marling says that the first piece of the puzzle was the idea of a billionaire’s tech retreat. “There was something about that space that seemed like very ripe for a whodunit, because whodunits are often about the seat of power,” she says. “They used to be set in old English manors, because that was the center of power, and it felt like the new center of power is Silicon Valley, and these kind of tech fiefdoms that come out of it.”
In exploring this kind of murder mystery, though, Marling observes that “there is always something that feels a little farfetched about [the genre] — it has a quality of being a little unreal. And I think we were trying to find a version of a whodunit we could do that would feel really grounded and very real, so that it could be a whodunit that was more a thriller than kind of tongue in cheek. But certainly, we borrowed so much from all the things in the genre that came before it. We were very influenced by those works, and then also tried to turn them on their head.”
A Murder at the End of the World (FX)
It’s Darby which Marling believes is key to End of the World feeling different from other stories of this genre. “We are conscious of the part where sometimes we’ll take a genre and we’ll put a new kind of protagonist inside it, and as a result, it changes or rewrites all of the tentpoles of that genre,” she says. “When a young woman comes to a crime scene, she just inherently operates in that space differently, I think, and so the scene kind of writes itself from that place. Then I think there’s a lot of stuff that just happens unconsciously.”
Adds Batmanglij, “I think that once you change the gender and age of the detective, and once you remove the badge or the uniform, which does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, the story will naturally just change and evolve. Darby is just a really grounded character. We really looked around in 2019 and we felt like there was chaos everywhere and chaos imminent. And we thought, oh my God, who’d done it? Who’d done all this chaos? So we thought the whodunnit would be a natural fit to talk about the time we were living in. It’s uncanny and a little sad that it’s only gotten more chaotic four years later, as we’re getting ready to release this story. Darby was a way to sort of counteract that chaos, but also as a way to ground a genre that feels true and crucial right now.”
Emma Corrin tells Consequence that they initially tore through the scripts, finding the story “completely unpredictable,” before meeting with Batmanglij and Marling over Zoom for “this really long chat about Darby and childhood and storytelling and why we tell stories.”
The storytelling aspect was important, Corrin notes, because unlike other detectives featured in fiction, Darby Hart writes her own book about her experiences — no Dr. Watson required. “That is obviously how the whole series is framed and why she writes. She’s very much taking ownership of this story, and she’s very much a voice for the voiceless.”
For Corrin, they love how Darby “felt really real and very human. There are moments where she feels on top of things and confident and like she can rule the world, and there are other times where she’s at the lowest of lows and doesn’t know what to do and is desperate and vulnerable and in need of help. And I found it really refreshing to see not only a character like that on screen, but especially in the context of a detective story. I think that Brit and Zal have written a really three-dimensional character with a real soul, that is very evident and very relatable.”
One important scene in getting to know both Darby and Bill comes early into the first episode, when a flashback depicts an angry moment between the two — anger that melts away with a little help from Annie Lennox’s “No More ‘I Love You’s” (a banger song choice).
“It was so much fun to pick that song,” Marling says. “Because we had this really interesting thing with setting up Darby and Bill in their past, and that we knew we only had like 15 minutes to do it before we had to set up the present. And so there was this feeling of like, ‘How do you connect people to this love story when you have so little screen time, and they’re in the middle of solving this case — what can you possibly show, other than the intensity of what they’re inside?'”
Trying to think of “an endearing way that Bill could get Darby to come out of her funk,” Marling landed on the idea of “putting on a song that was so discordant to the moment.” Then came Bill’s reaction, which was “to lean into that discord, in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way at first, but then with real devotion and commitment to the song. And I love that Annie Lennox song. I think Annie Lennox is an amazing performer, and it felt just so right for the two of them.”
The song choice was Marling’s idea, one they tested out with a quick rehearsal in the backseat of the camera car. “We had just gotten the El Camino rigged for the first time for all the camera equipment, and Zal and I got in the back and turned on our iPhone camera, and we were like, ‘Okay, so, rehearsal, can you guys just sing the song together?’ And Emma and Harris sang it, and there was so much energy and chemistry between them as they tried to make their way through the song, not knowing all the lyrics. And I thought, ‘Okay, we have it. That’s the song.'”
Batmanglij wasn’t sure about it at first, he says, but “I’ve worked with Brit for so long now and trust her so immensely that I was like, ‘I’m just gonna go with it.’ And boy was she right.”
A Murder at the End of the World (FX)
The tattoos Darby bears are largely Corrin’s own, which are normally covered when they play other roles. “It’s rare that you work with people who say ‘Just leave them, just use your own tattoos,'” they note. “It felt so right for Darby that I didn’t really question it that much. I think that it very much fitted into the fabric of her being this modern person who… It just fit, for some reason. I didn’t really overthink it.”
The one major tattoo that isn’t Corrin’s is Darby’s chest piece, a bold design featuring a woman surrounded by both nature and technology. The piece was designed by a friend of Corrin’s named Monty, which only appears on Darby during the present-day sequences, because, according to Corrin, “we wanted some larger tattoo that you would see when she’s older, but she wouldn’t have that when she was younger, to suggest some interesting character development.”
Some of Dickinson’s own tattoos are also seen as he plays Bill, though Marling confirms additional ones were added by the makeup team, and she also had additional ones applied as well, for her portrayal of Lee. “We saw the tattoo motif as something that linked Bill’s character and Darby’s character together with Lee, so that even though you’re meeting Lee in this other world, in this other zone, the tattoos on Lee are an echo of her more punk past. And both Darby and Bill see themselves as connected to that.”
A Murder at the End of the World is billed as a limited series, which guarantees a resolution to the mystery. But does Darby Hart have a future beyond the series? Says Corrin, “I miss Darby immensely. I lived with her for so many days, for most of last year, and I miss her a lot. And I think with that character, Brit and Zal wrote her so cleverly, because the piece can obviously exist perfectly on its own, but also there are so many unanswered questions about Darby’s past. I could always see her with somewhere to go. There are no plans to do that yet, but just for me personally, I’d love to play her again.”
Batmanglij notes that “I don’t think you can bring characters into the world anymore and limit them to one-offs, because you just don’t know, and there’s no timetable on it.” That said, Batmanglij believes that “Emma Corrin’s Darby is so resonant — as Brit once explained it, Darby has a light in the dark. And I certainly would like to see more stories with that character, just because I like the character.”
Adds Marling, “It’s about audience appetite, and also just the circumstances in the world. What will unfold? And does it need or desire Darby Hart to solve it?”
New episodes of A Murder at the End of the World debut Tuesdays on Hulu.
How A Murder at the End of the World Created an Iconic Detective for Today
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