Anya Taylor-Joy in the 'Lucky' finale. Logo text [This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the Lucky season finale, “All Good Things.”]
In the end, Lucky (Anya Taylor-Joy) is all alone — and it might be the best thing that could have happened to her.
Based on Marissa Stapley’s 2021 novel, Lucky follows a young con artist in the aftermath of a heist gone wrong. As she’s being chased by dogged FBI agent Billie Rand (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and ruthless crime matriarch/her mother-in-law Priscilla (Annette Bening), Lucky navigates betrayals from her missing husband Cary (Drew Starkey) and convict dad John (Timothy Olyphant), all as she tries to recover the millions that she stole.
Related Stories
TV The Kansas City Mayor Didn't Watch 'Ted Lasso' -- Until Ted Lasso Came to Town
Movies Anya Taylor-Joy Explains Why Method Actors Are Almost Always Men
“From the minute we started plotting the season, we always believed that for Lucky to truly be free and take her first steps into a new life, she has to do that alone,” creator Jonathan Tropper tells The Hollywood Reporter about the ending. “She can’t take the money with her, she can’t take her father with her, she can’t take Cary with her; she has to be stripped of everything in order to figure out who she is.”
Just over halfway through Apple TV’s seven-episode limited series, the losses began, when Cary died during his and Lucky’s attempt to flee from the authorities. But she is soon reunited with John, who, as a single father, raised her in the con game and taught her everything she knows. Tired of this life, Lucky strikes an immunity deal for her and John with Rand in exchange for the money, Priscilla and her vicious boss/Cary’s uninterested father, Wayne Whittaker (William Fichtner).
John is disappointed to learn that Lucky doesn’t have a plan to keep the cash. “Who wants to be free if you’re broke?” he asks, to which she responds, “You’re not going to ruin this for me, for us.” He later admits his failure as a father, and how unprepared he was after her mother died. “I did the only thing I knew how to do: I taught you how to survive in the life you were born into,” he says. “I’ve always been proud of the ways you’re like me, but what makes me prouder than anything are the ways you’re not like me. You’re better in every way.”
Written by producer and co-showrunner Cassie Pappas, the finale finds all the major players uniting at a secluded gas terminal for an exchange. The first twist comes when Lucky reveals to a nearby Rand that her superior, Agent Kershaw (Eric Lange), is working for Whittaker, leading to a fight between them that ends with Rand killing Kershaw. Wayne orders Priscilla to shoot Lucky, who is preparing for the worst and apologizing to God. But Priscilla turns the gun on Wayne, just as her right-hand-man Dutch (Clifton Collins Jr.) emerges from the shadows to eliminate Wayne’s muscle. Priscilla shoots Wayne, and then lets John and Lucky leave with the money.
Later celebrating their escape, Lucky shocks her father by saying she wants nothing to do with the funds, which Cary converted to crypto and can be unlocked with a seed phrase that he hid within a teddy bear. When she wakes up the next morning, John and the bear are gone — but he soon learns that the seed phrase is, too. Lucky replaced it with a message: “I had a feeling you’d do this, the feeling I’ve been ignoring for most of my life. I don’t remember a time where you weren’t working an angle.”
While Lucky does the recording by their motel’s pool, it’s revealed that the episode’s flashbacks are to when John made a preteen Lucky drown as part of a con to get a free hotel room. “The truth is you were willing to risk my life for the con, and I’m not anymore. I’m not giving you your money, but I’m giving you your freedom. I hope you use it wisely. I love you, dad, but you won’t see me again.”
Lucky opted to send the laptop with the seed phrase to Rand, and then, in the final scene, after years of false promises from John, Lucky finally makes it to the beach.
But, despite being billed as a limited series, a few story beats were left unresolved, including Rand’s pursuit of Priscilla. So could Lucky return for a second season?
“For me, there was such a deeply character-driven story to tell here about this father-daughter relationship and this young woman’s need to get out and start living,” Tropper says. “So sucking her into it again, you risk just trivializing all the themes we played with her. ‘And now this time she’s fighting for her life!’ Whatever it is, it wouldn’t have the same gravity or stakes.”
THR chatted with Tropper and Pappas in depth about making necessary additions that weren’t in the book and leaving Lucky all alone in the end, below.
**
I need to start by thanking you for letting Timothy Olyphant and Annette Bening loose in these last few episodes. Everyone is great, but those two especially are really cooking.
CASSIE PAPPAS I know, sometimes my biggest regret is not writing them more scenes.
Now that we’ve seen the entire series, what was it about this book and story that initially hooked you into wanting to build your own version?
JONATHAN TROPPER When [producers] Reese [Witherspoon] and Lauren [Neustadter] sent me the book, they already had Anya attached. So before I even read it, I thought it would be thrilling to write something for Anya. Then reading the book, the father-daughter relationship jumped out at me as something I really hadn’t seen before that would be worth exploring.
PAPPAS Same. When Jonathan brought me on to help co-showrun, I was very drawn to the father-daughter dynamic. I loved that there were crime thriller elements that we had seen before but the part that felt new and fresh and emotional was this dysfunctional father-daughter relationship. What does it look like when you’re born into that life? We all complain about the baggage we inherit from our family, and I was like, wow, this is some new kind of baggage — she’s born to a criminal.
Early on, audiences wouldn’t have necessarily known that the father-daughter relationship was the heart of this because Tim almost felt like a glorified cameo in the first few episodes, appearing via some flashbacks and prison calls. So you played a bit of a long con there!
TROPPER Something in this show that has only been crystallizing for me very recently is that in Lucky’s relationships with the men in her life — both Cary and her father — there’s a tremendous presence of these characters even when they’re not on screen. So much of what Lucky’s doing from the minute the show starts is informed by her father; the very first scene is her flicking the lighter her father gave her. Even when Tim isn’t very present in the early episodes, very quickly you start to understand she’s been shaped by this man and she wants his approval. After Cary dies, you feel his presence in all the interactions between Lucky and Priscilla. These men are such powerful forces in her life that they don’t have to be on screen for them to be present.
PAPPAS That speaks to something I was drawn to in the early days — this idea that she’s a criminal on the run, but what if the thing she’s trying to outrun is in her blood? Like, she’s just born to be this way because she’s her father’s daughter. I liked the juxtaposition of physically running, and what if the thing is with you and you can’t outrun it — or can you? That became the central question of the series.
Anya Taylor-Joy with Timothy Olyphant in Lucky. Apple How faithful did you end up being to Marissa’s book, and were there any things that you were deadset on either adding or leaving as is?
TROPPER We made very significant changes from the book, with Marissa’s blessing. There’s a lot more you can do in a 300- page book than you can do in seven episodes of television. Primarily, there’s a strong element in the book of Lucky using a lottery ticket to search for her mother, and we felt that this show really is about Lucky searching for herself, and that an objective of trying to find her mother was going to muddy the waters, so we got rid of that plotline.
PAPPAS I always felt like the stakes of the father-daughter relationship are higher and more crystallized if there is no mother in the picture. If you’re like, “This is all I’ve got.”
TROPPER It was a lot of streamlining how much story we could tell in the seven episodes we had, which meant having to lose certain characters and plotlines that would not have helped us propel the show forward. Then inventing a few characters who would, like Agent Billie Rand and Priscilla’s right-hand-man Dutch.
Priscilla and Dutch might have been my favorite relationship in the entire show.
TROPPER It’s interesting to see in all these dysfunctional relationships where the functional relationships are, and Priscilla and Dutch have a perfect relationship.
You mentioned taking the mom out, and it probably was the right call to give the father-daughter dynamic the space it needed, but part of me was thinking, “Who was the mom? Who could have tied John down?”
TROPPER She probably couldn’t. If she hadn’t passed away, I’m sure she would’ve left him.
Cary shockingly died at the end of episode four after the big chase sequence, and I couldn’t believe it, mostly because of how much heat Drew Starkey seems to have right now in Hollywood. Was that something you debated, or were you deadset on that being necessary to get Lucky where you wanted her to go?
PAPPAS Before we even cast Drew, we knew Cary was going to die from the car crash, and the main reason is that it shows Lucky that her cons have consequences. We needed some real life or death stakes to punch her in the gut and make her go, “What you’re doing has real cause and effect.” Ultimately, because she’s tracking down the money, she brings the feds to him, so it’s on her.
TROPPER From the minute we started plotting the season, we always believed that for Lucky to truly be free and take her first steps into a new life, she has to do that alone. She can’t take the money with her, she can’t take her father with her, she can’t take Cary with her; she has to be stripped of everything in order to figure out who she is.
Cassie, there is so much going on in the finale’s big climactic showdown scene. How did you go about mapping all that out and making sure all the twists and turns were given their proper due?
PAPPAS I give a lot of credit to our director, Jonathan Van Tulleken, because he went on a location scout and saw this place and was like, “I think we have to do it here.” Then Jonthan Tropper and I were talking about, where’s somewhere cool that we could have Rand and Kershaw staked out? And when we saw that big gas drum thing, I was like, “Oh my god, what if we put them up there?”
So it came very practically, piece by piece, as we would see the location. Of all the episodes, that was the one most dictated by location. For example, when we went on a location scout there, Jonathan Van Tulleken saw a huge puddle of gas on the ground, and that’s where we got the idea of Dutch drowning the henchmen in the gas. That place was very cool-looking and very unbearable to shoot at.
I could have watched an entire show about that twisted power dynamic between Priscilla and Wayne. How did you approach that volatile relationship?
PAPPAS Annette and I talked a lot about her character, and something we landed on was that she was abused by Wayne Whittaker and then she became the abuser in her life, in other ways. Annette was very fascinated by that transformation of abuser to abuse. But then something that Jonathan Tropper and I talked about a lot, in terms of developing Wayne, was “We’ve seen what the guys on the East Coast mob look like, like The Godfather, but what does a guy who lives in Malibu and is the head of the mob look like?” We became obsessed with this idea that Wayne is into green energy and clear air and he’s making money on a fossil fuel scam and that you meet him making a kale smoothie.
TROPPER Wayne is another character who wasn’t in the book. It was important to add to the menace, to humanize Priscilla, and to complicate the crime story. And now there’s the notion that all three of these women have a male figure above them that they have to rise above in order to find redemption.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Annette Bening in Lucky. Apple Maybe it’s my love for Tim as an actor, but I so wanted John to finally step up and be the dad that Lucky deserved. When she woke up and he was gone, I was like, please, let this be a fake out and John just ran out for some coffee. Since you felt Lucky had to be alone, was there never a world where that guy was suddenly going to change his spots?
PAPPAS Exactly. There are certain characters in this show who are never going to change: John, Priscilla. But Lucky still has the chance to change. It’s almost like she hasn’t been in this life long enough for it to have solidified her fate. And so, for the ending to be satisfying, we knew Lucky had to be 100 percent free of all of these people.
TROPPER My feeling always was that if Lucky didn’t get out, 25 years from now, she’s Priscilla. I think she knew that, and I think Priscilla knew that, and part of Priscilla letting Lucky walk away was letting her be the thing that Priscilla didn’t get a chance to be.
How did you want to have Tim play that moment of discovery that Lucky worked him and the aftermath when he pulls over? He seems messed up about it but also lets out a little laugh.
PAPPAS After the initial shock of, Holy shit, she played me, it is nothing but paternal pride. Because it’s like, Damn, I taught her so well. Oh my god, she’s better than me. Tim had such a blast shooting that day. We were driving around in the hills of Malibu, and he just kept being like, “Can we go again? I think I got another expression.”
You have Lucky recording the teddy bear message to John while sitting next to the motel pool, and this is after we spent the episode flashing back to him forcing her to jump into a hotel pool and drown, all in the name of a con. What did you love about that symbolism? It’s like she’s finally breaking free from the anchor that has been keeping her underwater.
PAPPAS It’s about the deep down truth that you’ve been running from your whole life, which is: my dad used to let me kinda drown to get a free week at a hotel. (Laughs.) The drowning con has haunted her, it’s why she says she dreams about drowning. And when you push that up against the fact that they somehow survived the gas terminal and he doesn’t want to just be free, it makes her go, Oh yeah, you’re the guy that was down to let me drown for the con. You’re never gonna change. So I think at the heart of it is your past and present colliding in a way where you can’t deny it anymore.
TROPPER There’s a beautiful piece of symbolism in the thing that saves her ultimately being hidden in the kind of childhood toy she probably never had as a child. This innocent-looking teddy bear — until we bloody it, of course. Pick your metaphor.
The final scene jumps to Lucky walking on the beach, bloodied feet being washed by the water, and we end with a smile on her face — something we didn’t see much of over these seven episodes. What felt right about leaving her and the show there?
PAPPAS In episode six, she tells this story about the shared dream she always had with her dad about the ocean, that he had dangled this carrot in front of her her whole life, saying, “Yeah, we’re on the run right now, and I know we go from place to place and we’re con artists, but one day we’re gonna run out of land and see the ocean and stop this life.” That bought a lot of time of her putting up with his bullshit, and then she comes to the realization of, I’m never gonna see that with him. The only way I’m gonna go and put my feet in the water and be free is if I do it by myself, for myself.
The one thing you did leave open-ended was Rand’s pursuit of Priscilla, sneaking up on her and declaring, “I’m gonna fucking get you.”
PAPPAS Yeah, Annette and Aunjanue have both brought that up to me! (Laughs.)
Getting Priscilla was the driving force for Rand all season, so why did you decide to not finish that job?
PAPPAS Rand’s partner is killed at the end of episode six, so for her not to go face-to-face with Priscilla and be like, “You killed my partner, I’m gonna get you,” I think would’ve felt like we hadn’t resolved that emotional piece. Like we’ve said, for both of them, they’re locked in their place: Rand’s always going to be on the hunt and that dogged FBI agent wanting to take Priscilla down, and Priscilla’s always going to be just outside of her grasp. I felt good about leaving that door slightly open.
TROPPER And that means that the only person who got to walk away is Lucky. These two are clearly going to be locked in the same struggle. It seems like Priscilla will ascend to Whittaker’s throne, and, as much as she should, Rand’s not going to let it go. So they’ll continue this cycle of psychological destruction and possible physical destruction, while Lucky walks into a new life.
In leaving something like Rand and Priscilla open-ended, is there any part of you that is considering a season two?
PAPPAS We have not talked about it.
Tropper: Except to reporters who ask the question!
PAPPAS It definitely was designed to be a limited series, and we made sure to tie up all the loose ends as best as we could to where it was satisfying.
TROPPER For me, there was such a deeply character-driven story to tell here about this father-daughter relationship and this young woman’s need to get out and start living. So sucking her into it again, you risk just trivializing all the themes we played with her. “And now this time she’s fighting for her life!” Whatever it is, it wouldn’t have the same gravity or stakes.
The danger with sequels like that is always, at what point does it become The Brady Bunch goes to Hawaii? You have to really have a reason to do it. If somehow one of us came up with an amazing idea, it would be worth considering. But I think there’s something very complete about the story we told.
***
Lucky is now streaming all episodes on Apple TV. Read more of THR’s finale coverage.
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up
