'11.22.63' Postmortem: Channeling Hitchcock for 'The Truth'

Warning: This story contains spoilers for the fifth episode of 11.22.63.

Hulu’s new series, 11.22.63, is technically based on a bestselling book by Stephen King. But when you watch the latest episode, “The Truth,” you’d be forgiven for thinking you had suddenly stumbled into an Alfred Hitchcock film. Midway through the fifth installment in the eight part series, our time-traveling hero, Jake Epping (James Franco), is summoned to the home of his girlfriend, Sadie (Sarah Gadon), and discovers a grisly scene. Sadie is being held hostage by her estranged — and enraged — husband, Johnny (T.R. Knight), who challenges her would-be rescuer to a modest proposal: drink the glass of bleach in front of him, and no more harm will come to her. Well… no more harm than the deep gash he’s already carved in her lovely face, of course.

The power dynamics at play around Sadie’s kitchen table as each of the three characters jockeys for the upper hand is vintage Hitchcock, and 11.22.63 showrunner Bridget Carpenter confirms to Yahoo TV that she and Franco (who also directed the episode) are eager pupils of the Master of Suspense. How well do they know their Hitchcock? Well, the legendary director famously used the example of a bomb under the table to illustrate the difference between suspense and surprise. And in this sequence, there’s a broken glass bowl under a table that provides plenty of suspense. “That’s definitely what we were going for,” Carpenter says of the scene’s Hitchcock flourishes, adding that one of her dream projects is adapting the legendary director’s 1948 real-time mystery Rope into an episodic series. “Nobody will let me do that, but I want to!”

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For now, at least, she’s content to give a vintage King moment the Hitchcock treatment. In the book, Sadie’s hostage situation is far more vicious and gory. But Carpenter says that the possibility of violence tends to scare her more than actual violence, and reconceived the scene accordingly. “To me, the most everyday things tend to be the most horrific. I’m not necessarily afraid by a dark cave, but I am afraid of a guy with a knife in my kitchen in broad daylight.” Thus in her version of the scene, Johnny became that guy with a knife, a characterization that fit the way Knight had chosen to play the role. “He’s not a madman [like in the book]. We wanted him to be very grounded; a three-dimensional human being who you believe Sadie would have married and then the layers of the onion would unpeel.”

Even the idea that Johnny would force Jake to quaff a glass of bleach — as opposed to simply killing him outright — was tailored to fit his character’s established history. “We knew he was a clean freak, because he’s always telling Sadie to wash and his phobia about sex. So we decided that he would be a soap salesman, which would mean he had a lot of bleach at his disposal. There’s a thematic element there that we wanted to work with.” His obsession with cleanliness also allowed the writers to slip in a Stephen King shout-out: Johnny calls Sadie a “dirty little birdy,” a line made famous by Kathy Bates in the movie version of Misery. (Franco also nods to Misery in the series premiere, describing himself as Kennedy’s “number one fan.”) Carpenter says that the writers’ room kept a running list of King references that they could pepper into 11.22.63, and the author himself has challenged viewers to spot them all.

Related: ‘11.22.63’: Stephen King Answers 4 Burning Questions

To complement Johnny’s re-tailored personality, Carpenter also made some small but subtle tweaks to Sadie’s behavior throughout the scene. On the page, she’s nearly out of her mind with terror, which is understandable given that half her cheek is hanging off her face. Gadon’s Sadie has a similar wound, but manages to keep a level head, even using her intimate knowledge of Johnny against him at a key moment. “We wanted Sadie to be a co-protagonist,” Carpenter says. “She and Jake are partners in this triangle, and they’re both in danger. And she knows Johnny better than Jake, so there’s an element of power that she has.”

Much time was also spent deciding just how bloody her face should be. Not enough blood, and the danger wouldn’t be as pronounced. Too much blood, and the viewer might be unpleasantly distracted. “It was an art and a science,” Carpenter says of the special makeup effects work that went into Sadie’s wound. “We had the grossest discussions: Should the skin be flapping? Should we show bone? We also had a little tube that was pumping blood out so she could be bleeding continuously, so we had to talk about how fast the blood would go. We didn’t have any major [effects mistakes] during the shoot; our issue was more like, ‘Is this dress too bloody now to do the next take?’”

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Behind the camera, Franco and Carpenter made the decision to keep the audience in a state of high anxiety by filming extended takes with few cutaways. For example, the scene where Jake first enters the house and finds Johnny and Sadie in the dining room was shot as an unbroken five-minute take. “It was heavily rehearsed and choreographed,” she says. “There was constant movement, not just for the actors, but also the Steadicam operator. So there were not a lot of hijinks between takes, especially in the final part when T.R. is blinded by the bleach. The set was so quiet, you could hear a pin drop. He was channeling extraordinary rage.” To put it in Hitchcock terms, you might say that he was in a Frenzy.

11.22.63 airs Mondays on Hulu.