'Apples Never Fall' Star Jake Lacy on Making the Mystery

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."

From the outside, the Delaney family seems nearly perfect. That should be the first red flag. Apples Never Fall, the new limited series airing now on Peacock, tells the story of the Delaneys, a brood of Palm Beach tennis royalty whose carefully constructed façade begins to crumble when matriarch Joy (Annette Bening) goes missing and deep family secrets begin to be revealed.

While they're all trying to discover the fate of their mother, no one in the family of six is exactly innocent, least of all Troy. Played by Jake Lacy (The White Lotus), the eldest Delaney child is a former tennis phenom turned finance whiz who’s as successful as he is unhappy. He’s got the trappings of a perfect life—the incredible apartment, the nice clothes, a role as the most stable of his siblings—but scratch the surface and you’ll find a looming divorce, an exceptionally ill-advised affair, and a simmering resentment toward his father, Stan (Sam Neill), that colors almost everything he does. Nobody thinks Troy had anything to do with his mother’s mysterious disappearance, of course, but has he been too trapped in his own troubles to have been there when she needed him?

Here, Lacy lets T&C in on the making of Apples—which is, like Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, based on a book by Liane Moriarty—the cast member tennis rankings, and what makes the whodunnit so incredibly addictive.

This is a complicated family in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. What made playing Troy appealing?

First of all, I liked [writer and showrunner] Melanie Marnich’s writing. I liked this idea of a stabilizing factor being removed and you don't know it's a stabilizing factor till it's gone, and also watching the kids want to recede into themselves and their worst tendencies yet having to be together to figure out what's happened to mom. That dynamic and tension would be a lot of fun to explore. On the first Zoom call I had with [director] Chris Sweeney, Melanie, and [executive producer] David Haman, Chris said he thought part of what was so funny about the Delaney family was that all the men think that they are just crushing masculinity. I started cracking up because I was reading this script being like, Troy is killing it. Sure, he cheated on his wife, got a divorce, and is sleeping with his boss's wife, but other than that, this guy's like, ‘I love this life.’ There was something about relating, unknowingly, to this character and his faults that I was excited to be a part of.

The way the show works is that each family member is the focus of an episode, so we get to track the central mystery but also learn about their messy lives. How much of the story did you know going into the project?

I read the book when I agreed to come on board, so I was aware—as long as we didn't deviate totally from Liane Moriarty's book—the trajectory of everyone involved. But it was exciting to see the relationships as Melanie imagined them and the fallout from them and how they come back together. There's a different texture than what's in the book, so I was a bit like, oh cool, let's see how Melanie does this.

Tell me about finding your Troy. What do you do?

The public perception of the Delaneys is that they are intense and competitive, but also loving and supportive and engaged in their community—and that is true. They’re also hurting, broken people with a lack of tools to fix that. And Troy is both. I think he loves the view from outside; he has his big house, beautiful car, and nice clothes, he belongs to the right clubs and knows the right people and is sure that will all make him feel better. And it does for a little while, but isn't an answer to the question: Am I okay as a person inside?

These characters have a fractured family, but when all is said and done, they show up a lot more for one another than you’d expect—or maybe even they’d expect.

In my time working on this, I was living with the blinders of Troy and what he thinks the solutions are. There’s this is little silo that he exists in alongside the pain that he's combating, so to step outside of that and look back into the narrative structure as a whole is different for me. In the making of the series, it was much more a sense of for me of Troy feeling like he can't deal with one more thing.

WATCH APPLES NEVER FALL NOW

Who is the best tennis player of the cast?

I don't want to brag, but I took to it. I really liked it. Conor Merrigan-Turner [who plays Logan Delaney] is a close second, but I think he also would say me. The caveat is that I'm not good. I am maybe the strongest player of the six of us, but no one should mistake me for a good tennis player.

You Might Also Like

• 12 Weekend Getaway Spas For Every Type of Occasion

• 13 Beauty Tools to Up Your At-Home Facial Game