Ryan Murphy and John Landgraf Believe in Grotesquerie’s Big Twist

Niecy Nash’s alcoholic detective is in for one rude awakening on the latest episode of Grotesquerie. The seventh episode of Ryan Murphy’s latest FX horror series takes a major turn when Nash’s Detective Lois Tryon finally cracks the serial-killer case she’s been working on all season. It turns out that her right-hand woman, the seemingly innocent, true-crime-reporting nun Sister Megan Duvall (Micaela Diamond), has been the mastermind behind the murders all along, using them to gin up attendance to her church—and an audience for her reporting.

But that’s not the only twist Murphy has in store for Grotesquerie fans. After a violent showdown in her kitchen, Lois seems to be done for, stabbed to death by a vengeful and cornered Sister Megan. But right when it seems like it’s all over for Lois, the camera cuts to her husband, Marshall Tryon (Courtney Vance)—who is miraculously out of his coma and at dinner with their daughter, Merritt Tryon, (Raven Goodwin). What’s more, Merritt is now a leading cancer researcher instead of an aspiring reality TV star. Her estranged husband, “Fast Eddie” Laclan (Travis Kelce), has transformed from a charming male nurse to a deadbeat mullet-rocking cheater. We then find out that Lois is actually suffering the same fate Marshall once was: She’s actually been unconscious in a hospital this whole time. All of the events that transpired during the first six and a half episodes of Grotesquerie were a vivid, morbid dream Lois was having while in a coma.

For Murphy, the dual reality Lois experiences in Grotesquerie mirrors his own experience living in the world today. “What we’re trying to talk about in this show is something we’re all feeling, which is: No matter what side you’re on or who you are, the question is, is this really happening?” he tells VF. “Is this really our world now? Is this real? How did we get here? What is it?”

Below, Murphy and FX chairman John Landgraf talk about the bold choice to completely upend the show, and what’s in store for the remaining episodes of Grotesquerie.

Vanity Fair: So we think that the big twist is that Sister Megan is the murderer and Lois dies. And then—bam—we find out that actually, the entire time, Lois has been in a coma. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you broke that story?

Ryan Murphy: I wanted to do something that I had never done before, which was just write something for myself. I wanted to write a whole season of television about things that I was feeling. So with my collaborators, Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken, we started writing this thing very, very quickly. It was based on everything that we were feeling collectively as a group: What’s happening around us? Are we in a simulation? When are people going to wake up? Everything just seems so unhinged.

So, I called John. I told him I was working on this thing, and it was an experiment and I’d never done anything like it. He was, as always, encouraging of me and my artistry. He said, “Okay, well, send up a flare when you want me to read something.”

We finished it really, really quickly. Then I sent it to John. The whole season was written–It was nine of ten [episodes], I think, and I had an outline for 10. John read it, and he called me after four and he said, “Oh, this is really interesting and really good.” And I said, “Oh, you haven’t got to ‘The Thing’ yet,” which is what I called [episode] seven. I said, ‘keep going, keep going.’ He called after he read it. He’s like, ‘Wow, I really love it. I think it’s about something that we’re all feeling in our culture right now, and if you want to do it and you believe in it, I believe in it.”

I loved doing it because I loved the puzzle of it. We were always writing towards the big twist, and I think if you go back and look at episodes one through six, there were all these Easter eggs in there. We called them “coma Easter eggs.” From the very first frame of episode one, which was the curtain on fire, to the cherries that Lesley Manville’s eating in one—which are blood clots—I have a list of a hundred things.

John Landgraf: Ryan has a way of translating a feeling about the world we live in into television shows, like Nip/Tuck, which is the only show I’ve worked on with Ryan that I wasn’t involved in the development process. It was so prescient— it caught the wave of an emerging culture that has taken over.

For me, this show captures the surreal reality of the present moment—how I feel about living in the world today. It feels like being in quicksand and not finding firm ground—not knowing how far that goes. And so, of course, it feels like a coma dream, right? It’s one of those things where—as crazy as the idea is on a literary and a poetic and a dramaturgical level—it feels exactly right.

Fans really get into solving mysteries, and sometimes when it turns out that it was all a dream, they get upset. Are you both prepared for people to be potentially upset that what they’ve been watching isn’t the reality of the series?

Murphy: I would say no. I was very aware when we were writing it, like, ‘Okay, well, you’re going to have liked a lot of things that were in the first six episodes as a fan.’ Those things remain, if not become stronger, in the last four episodes.

It’s not like we’re abandoning the ideas and the characters and the constructs that we set up. If anything, we’re deepening them. We certainly twist them on their side, but they don’t go away or disappear. We’re not leaning into the idea of, “Oh, it was all a dream. The end.” The dream continues in some way, and there’s even more mysteries. That’s what I like about it. I like that the show plays on three different levels. It’s a dramatic horror show, it’s a very strong family drama, and it’s also a whodunit. Who is committing these crimes? None of those elements that you love go away moving forward.

Landgraf: If it had been the finale, then yes, absolutely. But it’s not the finale; it’s the seventh episode. And, as you’ll see, [Lois] is wobbly for a while in terms of trying to figure out why she created that ultimate reality in her dream. The audience gets to help go with her on this journey of parsing out the real reality she lives in, versus the false reality that she was dreaming and the why behind that. But then reality itself begins to explore those very same questions that were being explored in her dream.

That’s something I love about this show. It uses that idea of “it was all the dream,” but it uses it in a totally different way than I’ve ever seen before. That’s because it’s not the answer. The answer isn’t, “It was all a dream.” It’s an intermediate part of the mystery that has more to go.

A lot of the relationship dynamics, in reality, mirror the dynamics in Lois’s alternate reality. Did the actors all know about the twist before they signed on? How did it affect their performances and character arcs?

Murphy: It was interesting, depending on the actor. Every actor who we cast who was a series regular knew about a duality. Everyone knew that they were playing two characters. Niecy, of course, read all the scripts, so she knew what was coming and she knew how to backtrack it. Courtney read all the scripts. He knew how to backtrack it.

And then when we got to Lesley Manville. I’ve wanted to work with her since we had a general meeting in 2010, and every year it’s been like, “How do we work together?” So when I told her about this part, she knew that she was going to be this uptight British lady, but in the case of Lesley, she loved working on the voice of the webcam queen. How do we get the voice to be that flat, Midwestern thing? And then what do I do with the hair and what do I do with the clothes? A lot of time was spent on actors having agency, saying, “I want her to look like this,” or, “I think in the second role, I want to look like this,” and that was really fun. And Raven goes from being a reality [TV] joke wannabe to literally a crazy-brilliant scientist.

I’m shocked that none of it got out, to be quite honest. Some people did sign NDAs, some people did not. We talked to the crew and the cast, and we begged them to please not reveal the twist. But every day I would wake up thinking, “Oh, today’s the day it’s going to get out.” I’m astonished that it was so wonderfully kept a secret, because secrets are hard to do in our culture. That was the joy of it: that everybody loved the material enough, that nobody leaked it or blabbed it. I’m thrilled about that.

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