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The following story contains spoilers through the end of Netflix's Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.
YES, SOMETHING VERY very bad does indeed happen at the end of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. Throughout the course of its eight episodes, the Netflix horror series from creator Haley Z. Boston masterfully ramps up the creepy vibes in the days leading up to a young couple’s wedding at the groom’s family cabin in the woods. We’re not the only one feeling mounting dread—the bride, Rachel (Camila Morrone) can’t shake an ominous feeling. It’s not just that she doesn’t really believe in the institution of marriage, but something even worse that she can’t put her finger on. It doesn’t help that the groom, Nicky (Adam DiMarco), despite seeming like an eminently good guy, has one hell of a creepy family.
By the time she walks down the aisle, Rachel learns that her family is cursed: Any member of her bloodline that gets married must get married to their soulmate by sundown on their wedding day, or else they die a gruesome death. The same curse killed her mother in horrifying fashion, and if she isn’t absolutely sure that Nicky is her soulmate, it’ll take her too. But by the time she finally makes it to the altar, it’s not something supernatural that kicks off the horror, but something more quotidian: cold feet. Nicky, learning that his parents’ “perfect” relationship wasn’t all that, finally comes around to Rachel’s stand on marriage. Being the “good guy” that he is, he decides to give her what she (no longer) wants: being together without getting hitched. In so doing, he activates a clause in the curse that sends it ripping through everyone in his bloodline, most of whom happen to be gathered at the wedding, and damning Rachel to become an immortal “witness” to the curse’s continuation.
It wasn’t DiMarco’s first time playing a guy so determined to be one of the good ones that he ended up being one of the not-so-good ones after all. “When people were watching White Lotus, they also thought that maybe Albie would have been the killer,” he says. “He still had a bit of a shift and a journey, but not as big as this one.” To him, the characters share a tragic flaw: They’re people pleasers who aren’t mature enough to realize that being candid and forthcoming is better in the long run. “I think as you get older, you have to learn to kill that part of yourself.”
In the aftermath of the show’s bloody finale, we talked to DiMarco about how they survived the gory nights of filming, what the hell Nicky was thinking, and how even he was spooked when he first read the script. “Don't watch the show during the daytime,” he says. “You have to watch it at night with the lights off.”
Courtesy of Netflix
MEN’S HEALTH: This show is so good at building up tension, releasing it, and building it up again into a crescendo. Was it as tense on the page as it was on the screen?
ADAM DIMARCO: I’d never really been spooked while reading a script before. But the writing was incredible. These characters, the story, it all had such a unique tone. It actually scared me when I was reading it. And Haley used all these cool, creative techniques in the way she formatted the script—like every time the word blood was mentioned, it was written in red. Sometimes reading scripts can feel like a lot of the same thing, but this made for a really fun, novel experience.
MH: Was there a scene that really hooked you?
AD: I remember reading Portia’s monologue about the “Sorry Man” in the first episode and just thinking, How are we going to justify this? What's the explanation going to be? The description of a man cutting a woman open from the inside and saying “I'm sorry” over and over with a downturn smile? I don't know! And then when I read episode 4, the way Haley actually made it make sense—shifting that imagery into a kind of emergency cesarean described through the eyes of a child who’s scared and confused, who exaggerates the details, but with the facts of the story mostly staying the same—it was all really freaky. After I read that, I had full trust in her.
MH: Portia’s monologue is a great example of how the Cunningham family can oscillate between being scary then normal, menacing then comforting, sniping then funny. How did you guys naturally weave through that dynamic?
AD: I was talking to a friend who's watching the show right now, and he said everyone's kind of in a different movie, no two people are playing the situation in the same way. Yet the way the show is shot, the lighting, and music, it all comes together and is tied cohesively by that creepiness factor. When I was on set with Jennifer Jason Leigh, I never really noticed her being creepy at all. When we were on set, she was just my very loving mother, at least in the scenes I had with her. And then when I was watching the show back, I thought, Oh, wait, you're really scary in this! I guess when I looked away, she became scary!
MH: The show also sends Nicky away just in time to miss some of his family’s more disturbing behavior.
AD: For sure. I felt like I was just in a relationship drama a lot of the time. I didn't really feel like I was in a horror—until the end.
Florence Sullivan
MH: The final episode is an absolute massacre. How long did it take to shoot?
AD: God, unless you were scratching numbers into the wall, it was hard to tell how many days it had been. It might have been two days or two months. There was a domino effect to the schedule where every day we would start later and end later because the previous day started later and ended later than the previous day. Time just passed really weirdly.
All the background performers were really the MVPs. They were covered with fake blood for days, and it was so uncomfortable. I have this memory of Jeff [Wilbusch, who plays Nicky’s brother Jules] going around with a spray bottle to help make the blood less sticky. I've never been around that much fake blood before. They shipped it in from somewhere. Europe, I think? It was so slippery at first, then it would get so sticky. Either you're slipping and getting covered in blood when you weren’t supposed to get bloody yet, or your shoe would stick to it and your sock would come out.
MH: It’s no surprise, given the name of the show, that the audience is always nervously waiting for another shoe to drop. When Nicky bails on his vows, how did you approach making it both a twist and a natural move for his character?
AD: It was definitely a challenging beat to play. He thinks he's making this grand romantic gesture, rejecting his family in order to save his relationship with Rachel. His mind is really made up. His parents didn't have the relationship he thought they had. He’s dealing with his mom’s betrayal. It's all simmering up until that last moment. It takes him the whole season to come around to where Rachel was at the beginning. But they've swapped places at the end. They just can't get on the same page.
MH: It’s telling that Nicky’s romantic gesture is what dooms the woman he says he loves. There’s something about that that reflects a wariness of guys who think of themselves as the “nice guy.” Are you attracted to playing that kind of contradiction?
AD: It's just always interesting watching or playing flawed characters, people who are trying their best to be good but falling short. He’s just such a people pleaser. I think both of these characters are, at least towards each other. The horrors of being a people pleaser. You just find yourself in situations that you don't want to be in. You're doing things that you don’t want to do. We see where that gets you in the end.
MH: When Nicky finally completes his vows with Rachel, does he think he’s sending the curse back to her and saving his family, or does he think it’ll somehow erase what he did?
AD: I think Nicky still believes that Rachel is his soulmate, which is why he doesn't die. And I think he was hoping that part of her also believed it deep down, and that she wouldn't… you know. It's the only way I could approach the thought of playing that moment.
Florence Sullivan
MH: That’s a romantic interpretation! It’s interesting to me that in the end, the only survivors in the Cunningham bloodline were the men. They seem to have found their soulmates, even when it wasn’t reciprocated.
AD: I didn't even realize that until you just said it. The Cunningham men are all romantics at heart, I guess. I think Nicky believes what he said during the wedding, that it’s about waking up every morning and choosing this person. To them, it’s about the choice. You can only control your choice. To him, the soulmate connection comes down to your soul choosing another soul, I think.
MH: We end the season with Rachel as the new “Witness” and the curse potentially lying dormant in the Cunningham bloodline. Will we see a second season?
AD: I have no idea. And even if I did, I don't think I'd be allowed to say!
MH: There’s something about what Rachel says to poor little Jude—“I’m sorry that this happened, but remember that it happened”—that gives me hope. Or should I say dread?
AD: That would be an interesting season 2—a time jump to his wedding.
MH: We leave off with Nicky as he watches Rachel, who he saw dead the night before, walk into his room, get her stuff, and finally get the hell out of Dodge. What’s going through his head?
AD: To me, in that moment, he's just in shock and disbelief. Just catatonic. At that point, after you’ve watched something kill most of your extended family, there’s not much else left to do but grab a teddy bear and get into bed with your shoes on.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Nojan Aminosharei is the Entertainment Director of Men’s Health and the Special Projects Editor of Harper’s Bazaar. He was previously the Entertainment Director of Hearst Digital Media, and before that a Senior Editor at GQ. Raised in Vancouver, Canada, Nojan graduated from NYU with a master’s degree in magazine journalism. The late Elaine Stritch once told him, “What the fuck kind of name is Nojan? I’m 89 years old, I don’t have time for that shit.”
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