“She shut off a lot of parts of herself after Bill left, and he left because she wasn’t open enough.”

Awards Daily talks to A Murder at the End of the World‘s Emma Corrin about why Bill had to be dead in order for Darby to be ready for a relationship with him.

For Emma Corrin, playing Gen Z super-sleuth Darby Hart on FX on Hulu’s A Murder at the End of the World was quite the departure after playing “the People’s Princess” on The Crown.

“Polar opposite,” said Corrin. “Although everyone has various similarities if you dig deep, but no, I think they’re incredibly different, which was really nice. It was also funny that it was the first thing I’ve done that had no research that was readily available. Diana had an overwhelming amount of resources, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and My Policeman were books. So it was fun, daunting, and freeing to do a series where you don’t have anything. There’s no blueprint apart from the scripts and [series creators] Brit [Marling] and Zal’s [Batmanglij] minds, which I had a lot of fun tapping into.”

Since Hart is in every scene of the show, Corrin, who uses they/them pronouns, felt a bit of pressure when nailing that first scene featuring Darby reading from her book The Silver Doe. It sets the tone for the entire series.

“Brit and Zal were both there on set, and they said something like, ‘This is the first time we see Darby,’ and that’s always the most terrifying thing to be told as an actor. Obviously, you shoot so out of order that you don’t think about it in that way. I think there’s a part of Darby in that moment that knows this is about to be the start of something. In a meta way, it’s the series, but for her, it’s the start of this experience. It’s from that reading that the retreat happens. There’s a part of her that senses something. Darby always has this spidey sense. She had it the first time she met Bill.”

Much of the first episode plays like a true-crime whodunnit, with Darby and Bill (Harris Dickinson) working a case as citizen detectives while also falling in love. An underrated component of this murder mystery series is its stunning, heartbreaking romance.

“I think this series is unique for so many reasons, the most obvious one being that it has a character like Darby at the helm of a murder mystery, but also the murder mystery is only able to happen in the way it does because of the love story. Brit put it really beautifully when she said Darby is unique because in order to solve the mystery, she has to be vulnerable, not hardened. In so many other detective stories, we see a detective go off the rails and have to close off certain parts of themselves in order to solve the case. For Darby to crack the case, she has to confront her past, her lack of emotional availability, and connection with people.”

The show zigs where other shows would zag. Based on the series title and the flashbacks in the first episode, other series might reunite Darby and Bill to solve a murder together—but no—it’s Bill’s murder Darby has to solve! If Bill doesn’t die, is there a universe where their Icelandic experience puts them on the path toward getting back together?

“No one has ever asked me that,” says Corrin. “I feel like it would be one of those situations in life where you encounter someone from your past, maybe a first love, and to get back together with them, you’d have to know 100 percent because you wouldn’t want to risk damaging it any further. I think there’s a world in which they do, but also there’s a world in which they both ultimately care about each other so much that they don’t want to jeopardize that. Because if they tried again and it didn’t work, it would be too much. Or maybe they’d encounter a mystery that was so insane that it forced them to reconcile in an epic way.”

While we don’t see the years without Bill, Darby has definitely changed since their time together, even if Corrin believes there’s still more growing to be done.

“With the present and the past, they’re two extremes. She has another iteration of her life. She needs to grow a bit more. She shut off a lot of parts of herself after Bill left, and he left because she wasn’t open enough. She gets more and more isolated. The one thing she feels she can rely on is the internet and the community there with these cold cases. It took Bill dying for her to be able to grow and for her to get to the place she needed to be all those years ago.”

Of course, Darby solves the mystery of Bill’s death, but one mystery that never gets solved is the one surrounding what happened to her mother. Even Corrin doesn’t know, but they believe that that’s one reason why Darby is obsessed with solving crimes in the first place (that and growing up around a morgue with her father).

“Brit and Zal refused to reveal to me whatever happened, but it was quite clever because I didn’t know, therefore Darby definitely didn’t know. I feel like her mom hangs over the series like this omnipresent cloud. There are the Jane Does she’s compulsively chasing and the case in Iceland she’s obsessed with, but then above all of this, she doesn’t want to talk about her mom. I really enjoy that aspect of psychology where there’s all this symptomatic stuff and then at the bottom, there’s this root cause of what’s driving this person’s actions. And sometimes it is so obvious and it makes so much sense. She’s lost this woman, her mother, and she doesn’t have an answer. She has this insatiable hunger for answers because she’s been deprived of this fundamental one.”