Amanda Knox reclaims her story in Hulu’s ‘Twisted Tale’ series

The story of former University of Washington student Amanda Knox, accused and convicted of killing her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, while studying abroad in Italy before that conviction was overturned, has been told before with (Netflix documentary “Amanda Knox”) and without (Lifetime’s scripted “Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy”) Knox’s involvement.

For Hulu’s eight-part scripted drama, “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” the current Vashon Island resident was heavily involved.

“I’m a producer and a collaborator on the story,” Knox said via Zoom last month. “I’m not just a victim of the storytellers and at the mercy of the storytellers.”

Grace Van Patten (“Tell Me Lies,” “Nine Perfect Strangers”) stars as Knox and Sharon Horgan (“Bad Sisters,” “Catastrophe”) plays Knox’s mother, Edda Mellas, in a story that spans 16 years as Knox works to set herself free, physically and emotionally.

Related

More

Knox says the Hulu series, streaming its first two episodes Wednesday, came about at the suggestion of her friend Monica Lewinsky, whom Knox describes as a “mentor” she met in 2017. They’ve since bonded over their shared trauma of sensational media coverage and efforts to reclaim their individual stories.

“Shortly after I gave birth to my daughter, I was really concerned with coming to terms with my own story and not wanting the worst experience of my life to hang like a dark cloud, not just over my head for the rest of my life, but also over her life,” Knox recalls. “It’s at that moment when Monica reached out and said, ‘I saw this New York Times profile about you, and I really think that we should work together to tell your story the right way.’ Really, Monica was the engine that got this whole thing started.”

Lewinsky is an executive producer on “Twisted Tale,” with TV drama veteran K.J. Steinberg (“This Is Us”) as the lead writer and showrunner.

Steinberg says she initially discussed the prospect of the show with Lewinsky, focusing on Knox the person versus Knox the warped figured created by Italian authorities and amplified by the media.

“It was very clear to me as soon as I met Amanda, read her memoir, but mostly looked into her eyes in our meeting and connected with her, that that warped version was a travesty unto itself,” Steinberg says.

Regarding the show’s title, “Twisted Tale” fit best, Steinberg says, because, “Amanda Knox in the public imagination is a scandal.”

“But Amanda is a person,” Steinberg continues. “It’s really important to me to communicate the simplicity and the humanity. And then, Amanda Knox is a fascination, for better or worse. … The tone of the series is both grave and absurd. ‘Twisted’ speaks to that.”

In addition to giving notes on scripts, Knox visited the writers’ room, was on set for five weeks and co-wrote the last episode with Steinberg.

There’s a wraparound story, set in 2022, that plays at the start and end of the limited series, when Knox went back to Italy and met with the man who prosecuted her. Knox says that really happened, although rather than hiding under a blanket in the back seat of a vehicle en route to the meetup, she hid under a larger hat to avoid being recognized.

“Twisted Tale” deploys magical realism, like when a juror removes and then reattaches his ear or when stuffed animals applaud. Steinberg says that choice came from the fact that Knox watched the French film “Amelie” on the night of Meredith’s murder. Using magical realism was another way to differentiate “Twisted Tale” from true-crime stories that begin with the murder.

“We always wanted to start with the humanity,” Steinberg says. “The homage to ‘Amelie’ was a great way to have the audience be introduced to Amanda, the person, before she became defined in the public imagination as the warped version.”

“Twisted Tale” shows the many ways the Italian police zeroed in on Knox as a suspect, often due to cultural misunderstandings. A text message Knox sent her boss — “See you later” — was interpreted as a plan to meet up rather than as the colloquial signoff Knox intended.

“Twisted Tale” filmed in Vancouver, B.C., (playing Seattle) and Italy with interiors shot on a stage in Budapest, Hungary. Production designers created what Knox calls an apartment “shockingly similar” to the one she shared with her roommates when the murder occurred.

“Walking in, it was, actually, oddly therapeutic,” Knox says of the apartment set. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, those are my socks that are hanging up to dry.’ These are all the things that I never got back. And I had this strange impulse to want to gather my things and take them home with me. The prop department was really kind: They wrapped a few things up for me and sent them home, because I never got my things back.”

Unlike many true-crime series, “Twisted Tale” spends a lot of time with characters beyond Knox, telling episodes from the point of view of the prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli), and Knox’s boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito (Giuseppe De Domenico).

“One of the things that I’ve really grieved over the course of these many years was how this terrible tragedy came to define so many people’s lives in a really limiting way, including Meredith,” Knox says. “Meredith was a real person, who had her whole life ahead of her, and then she became a blip, a footnote in a tabloid scandal story about me. That’s horrible.

“Or take Raffaele: One of the things that we explore in this series is it’s not a love story (between Knox and Sollecito), it’s a love lost story,” Knox continues. “Even the police and the prosecutors who suddenly are defined and diminished in this story, this story is seeking to raise people up and honor people in ways that this story has always diminished them.”

“The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox”
The first two episodes of the eight-part miniseries premiere Wednesday on Hulu, with new episodes dropping Wednesdays through Oct. 1

More