The Good Daughter First Look: Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy on Playing Southern Sisters and Their Show’s Shocking Start

Survivors often don’t fully process a traumatic event until another one comes along and illuminates the impact of the first, says Emmy-nominated filmmaker Steph Green, who focused on victim-centered storytelling for The Good Daughter. “We never want to be gratuitous or put the spotlight on the assault,” she explains. “For example, there’s a moment where a character is being verbally assaulted. In a lot of productions, you would point the camera at the person being verbally assaulted and the person saying those aggressive words. I was with Rose at the monitor and we decided we don’t want that shot. We are just going to focus on the person those words are being thrown at.”

Production worked with organizations including Brady for the show’s depiction of gun violence, and RAINN for scenes involving sexual assault. To prepare for her role, Byrne, who is also an executive producer on the project, met with a physical therapist who specializes in treating trauma victims like her character, Samantha.

As kids, Samantha, the elder Quinn sister, in an effort to protect Charlotte, the younger sister, appears to take the brunt of an attack from the masked men who killed their mother. Sam eventually escapes her assailants and seemingly stops Charlie from further harm. But she suffers a traumatic brain injury as a result of the attack and remains permanently injured, requiring assistance with sight and walking. “The physicality of it was a great entry point. Anything to take yourself out of your conscious, intellectual side of performance,” says Byrne, who was in the thick of awards season for her Oscar-nominated turn in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You when she began filming The Good Daughter on location in Georgia. “I can’t believe it was last year—someone’s lying,” she says with a laugh. “Like any working parent, it is a lot to balance.”

Fahy was initially sold on The Good Daughter because Byrne got involved. “I started without Rose, and when she came, the whole show really lifted because of our chemistry as sisters,” she says in a separate interview. “I was really able to click Charlie into place.”

“I’ve been totally in love with her for my entire career,” she continues. “So I was going to do it even if I didn’t like the show. But I did!”

Byrne was initially drawn to the steelier qualities of Sam, who, in adulthood, is a big-city patent lawyer with disdain for Charlie’s choice to reside in their hometown as a defense attorney working with their father. “It was almost like a character a man would typically play,” Byrne says, “in the end, Charlie is the tougher of the two in many ways and the harder to crack. And Meghann is so extraordinary.” She can’t help but indulge in some sisterly-feeling praise. “The danger is that this story can become so dark that you don’t want to engage,” says Byrne. “And she just has such a natural effervescent joy in her. She shouldered this story in many ways.”

The fittingly-named crime novelist Karin Slaughter—a moniker she inherited at birth, long before ever picking up a pen—speaks a little like one of her wisecracking Southern characters. Upon receiving a call from megaproducer Bruna Papandrea, who created a TV genre unto itself with Big Little Lies, which she co-produced with former producing partner Reese Witherspoon, Slaughter thought, “Oh fuck, what did I do now?” she recalls with a wry smile. “I’m not enamored of Hollywood. I love the shows that have been done on my stuff,” including police procedural Will Trent and Pieces of Her, a 2018 Netflix limited series starring Toni Collette. “But I don’t know that I could be that kind of writer.”

But after making Pieces of Her with producing partner Steve Hutensky, Papandrea was convinced that Slaughter could be. The author dismissed the idea of writing an original film, as she “promptly told us she was too busy writing novels,” Papandrea says over email. “Two weeks later she called and said I’ve adapted a book of mine called The Good Daughter.” Slaughter describes a two week “fever dream” that involved completing six full scripts, spending twelve hours a day writing.

Then came the all-dreaded pitch meeting. “It’s very difficult to write about bad things that happen to women from an only-female perspective,” says Slaughter. “It just scares the shit out of men who read it. We got really lucky that Peacock is basically a lot of women and some really well-informed men who weren’t put off by that.”

Consider Oscar nominee Brendan Gleeson one of the enlightened. He and Green initially met for a coffee that turned into a three-hour lunch in Los Angeles to discuss the role of Rusty, a bombastic Southern defense attorney. “Brendan really wanted to understand at each juncture why he had made the decisions he had as a father,” the director remembers. “He wanted to hear about my father and what a female child needs.” There was already actual history between Gleeson and Byrne. “I worked with Brendan when I was 23 on Troy. I’ve worked with his son, Domhnall Gleeson, on the Peter Rabbit movies,” Byrne says. “I have a natural connection with Brendan, so it was really lovely to reunite.”

Jessica Biel was originally cast as Sam in 2024. “Then I couldn’t be mad because she went to my friend Alafair Burke’s show, The Better Sister. Then the writer’s strike happened, and things slowed down, I went back to Bruna, like, ‘Jessica’s out. You gotta get me Rose Byrne.’” While her commitments to the Apple TV drama Physical had previously prevented Byrne from joining another series, once on board, “I had this front row seat every day to see this extraordinarily talented person take my words and turn them into something even more amazing than what I thought I had written,” says Slaughter.

As for Fahy, Slaughter refers to her as a “Swiss Army knife” for the actor’s ability to embody conflicting emotions in one breathless moment. “And I don’t know if it’s that jawline, the way she locks it in,” says Green, the show’s sole director. “She can be a tangled mess in horrific pain and making a joke the next second and we want to go through it all with her.”

Or, as Slaughter puts it, “I was like, ‘If Meghann does this [show], I’m going to have to alter the script because, in the original iteration, Charlie was a bit more thirsty—and no one will believe Meghann is thirsty.”

But at the heart of it, Slaughter’s mission is empowerment. “Something like 83% of all novel fiction readers are women. And I just want them to feel what I feel when I see characters like this,” she says. “This sense of hope. Because I’m telling the stories that have happened to women. Women who have suffered the loss of a parent, gun violence, domestic violence, you name it. We get up, brush ourselves off, and go on because that’s what women do every day.”

When Slaughter wrote The Good Daughter novel nearly a decade ago, she had no way of knowing that the number of yearly school shootings would rise in the United States. “Let’s just talk about how awful it is that’s the case, and I say this as a gun owner, who keeps my guns safely stored at all times and makes sure I’m proficient with them. Most of the year I’m living in the mountains,” she continues, “so I’m more likely to stumble on a bear than I am a bad guy. But I grew up around guns. That was just part of my childhood. And it was always expressed to me how to be safe with them. It’s why Charlie has a trigger lock on her gun. I was like, ‘You gotta show it. She’s a victim of gun violence and she has a gun. She would absolutely safely store it.”

With instances of gunfire on school grounds at a higher rate in 2026 than they were in 2017, “I can write a book now, and a school shooting is a secondary plot. Because it’s so ingrained in us,” says Slaughter. “One thing I did back then that is even more important now is to show a victim of gun violence. We all hear the statistics—two people were killed, but 20 people were injured. Well, that doesn’t mean they just got up and walked away.” To show the lasting effects of Samantha’s physical trauma, at times Byrne would “touch the scar on her head when she’s feeling vulnerable,” says Slaughter. “I would say [to her] this is later in the day for the script, so she would have more of a pronounced limp in her walk to reflect that. That kind of thing I’m very proud that we were able to capture.”