Who Killed Merritt in The Perfect Couple?

This article contains major character or plot details.

The Nantucket wedding of The Perfect Couple Benji Winbury (Billy Howle) and Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson) is supposed to be the #weddingoftheyear — if the mother of the groom, Greer Garrison Winbury (Nicole Kidman), has anything to say about it. But instead it’s over before the ceremony even starts, due to the untimely demise of one of the guests. (If you don’t want to find out who was killed and who did the killing, stop reading right here. Seriously, head to the beach instead.)

On the eve of the ceremony, the bride’s best friend and maid of honor Merritt (Meghann Fahy) is found dead, washed up on the beach of the Winbury residence. But was it an accident? Was it murder? 

In Elin Hilderbrand’s bestselling beach read The Perfect Couple, Merritt’s death is, in fact, accidental. But director and executive producer Susanne Bier tells Tudum she likely “wouldn’t have done the series had it not been intentional.” Similarly, showrunner and writer Jenna Lamia says that in her first meeting with producers Gail Berman and Hend Baghdady, when asked if there were any changes she would want to make for the series, they “all agreed right then and there [that] there needed to be a murderer, and there needed to be a motive for that murder.”  

A longtime reader of Hilderbrand’s books, Lamia found the novel’s ending to be completely moving. In the last pages, the cause of death is revealed in a scene in which Merritt, searching the waters for her ring, accidentally drowns. But “in a book, you can be inside a character’s head in a way that you can’t in a television show,” she says. And Lamia didn’t think a voice-over describing what really happened would satisfy fans’ thirst after piecing clues together over the course of six episodes. 

So if it wasn’t an accident, then who did it?! And who does Amelia end up with, if not her husband-to-be? Bier, Lamia, and the cast answer all your burning questions after finishing the finale below.

Seacia Pavao/Netflix

Who killed Merritt in The Perfect Couple?

“The first thing that attracted me to this project is that I got to be the dead girl,” joked Fahy. By the end of the first episode, viewers learn the wedding has taken a fatal turn. But they don’t know what happened or who Merritt’s potential murderer is until the last few minutes of the finale. Surprise! It’s Abby Stokes Winbury (Dakota Fanning), the pregnant wife of Benji’s brother Thomas (Jack Reynor). 

In Bier’s first call to Fanning, whom she previously worked with on The First Lady, Bier asked, “Do you want to play a really calculated murderess?” The answer was an immediate yes. “Dakota can go from really kind and really sweet to very wry and very tough … like that,” says Bier, snapping her fingers. “She’s a master of it.” Throughout the series, Abby comforts Amelia as she mourns. Fanning loved playing the “secret villain,” she told Netflix. “There’s a sick part of me that loves Abby and hates what she did, but also, you can see these moments where she’s cast aside by her husband, ignored by her mother-in-law — she’s desperate for their attention [but] perceived as a bitch. You know what I mean?”

Seacia Pavao/Netflix

So why did Abby kill Merritt?

Well, each of the three sons of the Winbury family stands to inherit a massive fortune from their father Tag’s (Liev Schreiber) side of the family once the youngest, Will (Sam Nivola), turns 18, a few weeks after the wedding. And Abby and Thomas could definitely use the money, since he’s in some serious debt and they have a kid on the way. But after it’s revealed that Merritt is pregnant with Tag’s baby (!), it becomes clear the new member of the family’s arrival would mean the inheritance is split four ways instead of three, and — more urgently — it would take another 18 years to be bestowed. That simply won’t do for Abby. 

At first, Abby’s intentions might be relatable. “She’s this woman who’s like, ‘Who’s taking care of me?’ She doesn’t feel like there’s anyone taking care of her and who’s keeping her safe and who’s putting her first,” said Fanning. After all, her husband is having an affair with Winbury family friend Isabel Nallet (Isabelle Adjani) and fumbling their finances as she’s about to give birth. 

But those feelings of neglect take a bloodthirsty turn. It gets to the point where Abby puts herself first to the extreme, vowing, “I’m going to secure my future and secure my child’s future,” said Fanning. “And she just kind of gets extraordinarily lost on that path. … Does that make me sound like a murderer sympathizer or what?” 

Seacia Pavao/Netflix

How did Abby kill Merritt?

Well, unbeknownst to Amelia, her mother, who has terminal cancer, brought three euthanasia pills to the Summerland estate as a contingency plan. Thomas, who loves playing “prescription roulette,” aka stealing guests’ pills for his own recreational use, took one of the pills and stuffed it in his bedside table drawer. Abby finds it and crushes it into a glass of orange juice, offering Merritt a nightcap as they sit on the beach. 

As they talk, Abby says, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself,” right before she asks Merritt if she wants to go for a night swim. As they get deeper in the water, Abby forces Merritt’s head underwater. Woozy from the drug and unable to to fully fight back, Merritt drowns. Abby leaves her lifeless body in the water, where Amelia finds her the following morning. You know, the morning of her wedding day. Pretty brutal, to say the least. “When I was cast as Merritt, I prepared by floating face down in a lot of different pools because I knew I was going to have to do that in the ocean,” said Fahy. “I think that was the most important prep work that I did.”

In Hilderbrand’s book, Abby is also responsible for Merritt’s death, but only accidentally. She puts a barbiturate in water that she thought her husband’s mistress (called Featherleigh in the book, but Isabel in the show) was going to drink, in hopes she’ll pass out before she sleeps with her husband. 

Seacia Pavao/Netflix

Are there any Easter eggs in The Perfect Couple that hint Abby is the killer all along?

Oh, yes. Lamia was set on making sure it felt like they played fair with the audience and that all the red herrings were explained and went somewhere. There are clues sprinkled throughout to help viewers (maybe) piece the mystery together. “I’m very interested in those really fun little Easter eggs and details,” she says. “So they’re there!”

In the first episode, you’ll see Abby thoroughly washing a glass in the sink when the police interview her. Why would this girl, who screams for the Winbury’s housekeeper Gosia (Irina Dubova) to assist her every five minutes, be washing her own dishes? “There’s also a dishwasher right there, and she doesn’t put it in it,” said Lamia. 

And after reaching the finale, we learn that Merritt drank out of that very same glass, and it had traces of the barbiturate in it. “We have [Abby] calling to Gosia more than once,” says Lamia. “This is not a girl who just helps out. So it should stick out, but just enough for the eagle-eyed murder-mystery veteran.”

Viewers might also want to zoom in on Merritt’s toxicology report, which we see when Greer grabs a drink with Chief of Police Dan Carter (Michael Beach) in Episode 4. “If you look long enough, you’ll notice that her pentobarbital levels are way high,” says Lamia. But, there’s also tallow, a key ingredient in Abby’s expensive, illegal tummy butter from her sorority sister’s mother that was in Merritt’s hair. 

In the finale — before Abby joins Merritt on the beach — she’s rubbing the tummy butter into her hands while standing on the porch, watching Thomas and Isabel drunkenly stumbling on the beach and Merritt accidentally cutting her foot. “If you were, I guess, Hercule Poirot, you might put together that someone probably held Merritt’s head underwater,” says Lamia. “And tallow, which is beef fat, is not water-soluble, so it would still be on the hair shaft.”

Where did the idea of Greer being an escort in The Perfect Couple come from?

The idea for that big reveal belongs to none other than Nicole Kidman herself. “That’s a big twist, right?” Kidman teases Tudum. She suggested the backstory on a Zoom call with Bier and Schreiber. They all agreed that the scene where she divulges her past to her family in the finale needed to be comedic, rather than melodramatic. “I think Nicole really enjoyed that, because she’s been playing quite a lot of very dramatic parts, and even The Undoing [which Bier and Kidman also partnered on] was very dramatic,” says Bier. “And we had so much fun playing! At some point, the sound engineer came up to me and said, ‘Will you please not laugh in the take? Because you’re actually ruining the take.’ ”

The scene really serves as a moment for Greer to reclaim ownership of her narrative, rather than have Tag make veiled threats about her past. “The fact that she would come into her own and unapologetically embrace her power and independence within the marriage at the end of the show was definitely something I was always intending to do,” says Lamia. 

Seacia Pavao/Netflix

Do Greer and Tag stay together after the finale?

Greer tells Tag that she’ll go back to New York to write her novel, while he’ll stay at Summerland in Nantucket. Bier thinks that Greer is straight up leaving Tag. “There’s too much water under the bridge,” she says. “There’s too much unfaithfulness — and by the way, I don’t think he’d ever be able to be faithful.”

Whether his parents stay together or not, Nivola thinks Will falls in line with the family MO of entitlement going forward. “I think he learns to play the game of being this rich person, and he probably gets more and more used to pushing people around and being an asshole. That’s how it goes,” he tells Tudum.

Liam Daniel/Netflix

So why is Greer’s book about Amelia?

As Greer tells her agent, she intended to write a book about herself as a young woman and her time as an escort. But “in going over that time in her life, she starts to realize why she really always felt tension with Amelia, why she really never accepted her, why she felt judgmental of her, and truly, honestly competitive with her,” says Lamia. “It’s because she’s utterly jealous of how ‘herself’ Amelia always is.” Bier agrees that Amelia’s authenticity strikes a nerve with Greer, who’s always had her priorities in the wrong place.

So when Greer admits this to herself, she shifts the focus of the book. “She probably does still talk about her [own] past, but in the context of what just happened in the summer and this incredible young woman who was going to be marrying her son,” says Lamia. Greer comes to realize how much she actually admires Amelia and how it’s changed her for the better to see how Amelia responds to grief, trauma, betrayal, and disappointment.

“It’s almost as if Greer wants to be more like Amelia and is hoping to get there,” says Lamia. To Lamia, the book, really, is about female friendships and how they don’t need to be inherently competitive — “how the best kind of female friendship can be loving, supportive, and reflective of all the best qualities in [each person]. And there are a lot of people who’ve gone their whole lives never really learning that.” Lamia sees Amelia and Merritt’s friendship, really, as “the perfect couple.” “That’s the truest love story of the whole show.”

Fahy completely agrees. “That was one of the things that really attracted me to the project initially, just that true friendship between the two of those women,” she says. Hewson sees the show as a love story between Merritt and Amelia. “A beautiful story about friendship, but grief,” she says.

Seacia Pavao/Netflix

Do Amelia and Shooter end up together?

In the book, Amelia and Shooter (Ishaan Khattar), Benji’s best friend and best man, are going to elope on her wedding day. In the show, we see them kiss after the wedding is called off. “The difference between a book and a TV show is that, because things are much more concrete in a TV show, morally compromised characters are somehow less forgivable than they are in a book because we can’t, to the same degree, describe the thoughts as you can in a book,” says Bier. “So for somebody to go this far with a wedding, and then at the same time [be] planning to elope, made for a hugely unsympathetic character.”

Bier thinks Amelia should have untangled herself from her engagement to Benji sooner. “She’s a 30-year-old who can’t figure out what she really wants, and who is maybe getting married for the wrong reasons because she wants to make her mom, who’s very ill, happy,” she says. So making Amelia more confused and more innocuous felt right, as did ending the character’s arc with her alone in pursuit of self-discovery. “I don’t think she’s going to end up with Shooter. At this point, she doesn’t know who she should end up with,” says Bier. “I’m sure she’s going to bump into [the right guy] any day now, but at this point, it didn’t seem like it was the right thing to do.”

Hewson sees “some penguins and some lions and some tigers and some bears” as Amelia’s companions in the next phase of her life. And “hopefully a good guy, someone less complicated,” she tells Tudum.

“Shooting the final scene at the London Zoo!” says Lamia.

Courtesy of Jenna Lamia

Do Greer and Amelia ever grab that dinner?

After Greer runs into Amelia working with her favorite animals (penguins) at the London Zoo, she asks her to read the manuscript and suggests they go to dinner. Fittingly, the book is titled Your Move, and the ball is in Amelia’s court. Bier and Lamia both think she definitely goes. “There were so many [people] wanting to get rid of that scene, and I was like, ‘No, no, no!’ It’s so satisfying to see them meet, and maybe that is a story that can come out of that meeting,” says Bier. 

Lamia also sees the full-circle moment as a coming-of-age for Amelia. “A lot of people learn more about themselves than anything in their first or second or third serious relationship — you have to do that in order to pick right,” she says. “She’s in her information-gathering stage, and she did say yes to Benji’s proposal when she probably shouldn’t have. It wasn’t an unkindness of hers; it was just a mistake, and she knew she wanted her mother to get the chance to see her walk down the aisle, and that’s so understandable.” Throw in the death of her best friend and Lamia “can’t blame her for anything she does.” Lamia continues, “So who knows, she could come back around to Benji even or Shooter, but it’s not going to happen right away, that’s for sure. She needs to be on her own, be with those penguins, have dinner with Greer, and find herself.”

While Kidman is “not answering” yet on whether Amelia and Greer grab a bite, Hewson is firm on her stance. “No. People have asked me that, and I’m like, ‘No!’” she tells Tudum. “I just think she’d be like, ‘Thank you. That’s the end of that experience of my life. It sucked. Moving on.’”

Seacia Pavao/Netflix

What would have happened if Merritt hadn’t died?

Bier thinks Benji and Amelia probably would’ve gotten married. “It would’ve lasted a few years, and then Amelia would’ve left him,” says the director.  But Lamia thinks Amelia might have left Benji at the altar. “She’s really in crisis, and so torn because she is really — I don’t use this word — horny for Shooter,” she says. “I mean, you can tell. They’re not in love, they’re in that stage of total lust.” Even in Episode 1, Amelia confides in Merritt that she doesn’t feel “addicted” to Benji (but she does feel that way about Shooter). “I’m not saying she would have run away with Shooter, but she would have had a crisis of conscience.”

Hewson proposes that another person would have helped her evade her (death) march down the aisle. “Merritt would have been like, ‘OK, we’re getting out of here! I’ll take you in a getaway car. You’re not marrying this guy,’ ” says Hewson. 

Not to mention Merritt’s pregnancy … “The whole family would’ve exploded into bits, which might have been a fun story as well,” says Bier. 

Fahy thinks that if Merritt hadn’t died, she probably would have had the baby alone. “In the dream version of it, I want her to be alive and happy and thriving and to have succeeded in creating a family for herself, because that’s what she so desperately wanted,” she tells Tudum. “More than anything, and I think that’s part of what led her astray.” 

“Showing Elin the scripts!” says Lamia.

Courtesy of Jenna Lamia

One more thing: Why did Amelia’s name change from the book?

The bride-to-be is named Celeste in Hilderbrand’s novel. “The bride was named Celeste through many, many drafts of the script,” says Lamia. But Kidman notably played a character called Celeste in Big Little Lies, and the team didn’t want to confuse the audience. “She’s so iconic in that role,” Lamia says. Instead, the showrunner named the bride after her niece.

Additional reporting by Keely Flaherty.

Watch The Perfect Couple now, only on Netflix.

Watch the trailer here: