All Her Fault Creator On Why Neither Husband Cheated — SkimNews
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- Megan Gallagher, creator and showrunner of 'All Her Fault,' said at a Women in Entertainment FYC screening at The London in West Hollywood on Sunday that she deliberately avoided giving either husband an extramarital affair, calling a spouse who keeps their partner miserable 'so much worse' than cheating.
- Gallagher singled out Richie (Thomas Cocquerel), Jenny Kaminski's (Dakota Fanning) husband, as the case where she most wanted viewers to reconsider marriage dynamics, saying his refusal to help Jenny despite her daily pleas was more devastating than an affair would have been.
- Peter Irvine (Jake Lacy) let his wife Marissa (Sarah Snook) shoulder blame for the disappearance of their son Milo — a role he played in — for most of the series, fueling a plot in which Gallagher said she wanted to show how women 'internalize this guilt' even when they are blameless.
- Gallagher said she wrote Marissa as 'an incredibly accomplished career woman who wasn't necessarily a lovey-dovey mom' with 'a real edge,' pushing back against the 'wilting flower' archetype for mothers.
- Jenny's arc — a 'people pleaser' who Gallagher says has 'a very steely core down there' — culminates in a scene where she 'finds that moment of no' with Richie, which Gallagher described as the character's turn from being underestimated to asserting herself.
Why it matters: Gallagher's choices challenge a long-standing thriller convention — using affairs as shorthand for spousal villainy — in favor of depicting the subtler harm of emotional withholding, reframing the genre's portrayal of wives and mothers as full, flawed people rather than symbols of guilt or sympathy.
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