While the name Jake Lacy may not immediately be familiar to you, his work certainly will be. He played Troy, the eldest son in Liane Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall dramatic mini-series, Hannah’s boyfriend Fran in Girls, Pete the sales rep in The Office, Leslie Mann’s younger boyfriend in the hit film How to be Single, Rob the nice guy rock climber in High Fidelity and, perhaps most memorably as the extremely entitled (and wealthy) newlywed who very memorably kicked off the first ever series of The White Lotus. Now, Jake is starring in one of the biggest new shows of 2025 – the thriller miniseries, All Her Fault, which is free to watch here in NZ on TVNZ+. We sat down over Zoom with Jake to talk about everything from the gender gap when it comes to parenting, to getting into arguments with White Lotus fans and what he’s learned in recent years about this industry.
It’s every parent’s worst nightmare.
You’ve organised a playdate for your child after school (you and your partner are tied up at work), but when you turn up to the address to pick up your child, they’re not there.
In fact, no one at that address has ever heard of them. Was it a typo? Some sort of auto-correct mistake that sent you to the wrong address? As your panic rises, things only spiral downwards as you discover the school mum you thought was with your child is at work themselves, they never got in touch with you (it wasn’t even their phone number!) and have no idea where your child is. Someone has pretended to be them. Your child is missing.
This is the haunting beginning to the brand-new thriller, All Her Fault. It’s a brilliant watch – a complete rollercoaster – and has a stellar cast. Seriously. It’s as if someone created an all-star special, pulling in an actor each from the hottest dramas of the last couple of years, including Sarah Snook from Succession, Jake Lacy from The White Lotus (that’s right, the disgruntled honeymooner who began it all in season one), Abby Elliot from The Bear and Michael Peña from Landman – oh, plus Dakota Fanning, for good measure.
The eight-part thriller is one heck of a juicy (and stressful) watch, with the parents of missing, adorable five-year-old Milo – Marissa (Sarah Snook) and Peter (Jake Lacy) – being a finance power couple in Chicago, obviously making everyone immediately assume a ransom call must be coming.
Marissa is beside herself from the get-go – and Sarah Snook spends the majority of the show (seriously, the majority) in tears. Peter is equally devastated, but quickly tries to manage the whole situation, as well as the extended family – perhaps, because he may have a secret or two to protect?
I jumped on a Zoom with Jake early this morning, while he was in New York, to talk about the show, the mental load, plus, of course, The White Lotus.
A Child Is Missing…
All Her Fault is an uncomfortable watching for anyone – but, if you have young kids, it’s a particularly disturbing place to send your thoughts to.
Jake says it was another layer for him to deal with, as the 39-year-old was away from his kids – two boys aged five and seven – for five and a half months. Although the show is set in Chicago, the majority of the action was shot in Melbourne, a heck of a long way from his family in Connecticut. Jake says that distance “sucked”.
“They were back in the States with my wife while I was in Melbourne,” he says. “So, I didn’t have to juggle the day-to-day of like, ‘oh, we were up all night because my son has an ear infection and now I’m here trying to shoot this.’ But what’s tricky about this job – where you go away for like five, six months and not see your family – is how useless I am to them. That there’s actually nothing to manage that you just go, ’can I help?’ Because the answer is no, you’re 17 hours away. I can order snow boots online but that’s all. What you can do is so miniscule compared to what needs to be done.”
Jake says it’s now made him look at weighing up the pros and cons of shoots overseas. “Even if it’s really creatively fulfilling, I just can’t be gone that long,” he says. “I can’t for the sake of my wife who gets saddled with this responsibility and my boys and the whole thing. I can’t swing it.”
All HER fault
It’s an interesting point for him to bring up – because parenting (and more, specifically the way the responsibilities are shared in heterosexual couples) is something that’s central to the story of All Her Fault.
Yes, this is primarily a thriller/crime/mystery, that sees us try to solve the puzzle as to who has taken Milo and why – and, what secrets are being hidden by the family and extended family. But All Her Fault also beautifully examines and highlights the differences between the way we treat mothers versus fathers and all those expectations and pressures that are placed on mothers, that simply don’t exist for dads.
When it comes to something going wrong – catastrophically so in this instance, with a case of a missing child – any judgement or criticism arrives first on the doorstep of the mother. How could this happen? What did she do wrong?
The show quietly brings attention to this in the very first episode – observing how Marissa was the one to organise the playdate: so, why didn’t she cross-reference the phone numbers with the mum she was speaking to? Where was she? How was it that she could leave her child with a mother, whose home she’d never been to before?
Blame is also apportioned to another mum (played by Dakota Fanning) about her hiring process for their child’s nanny. Meanwhile, that same mum is having a hell of a time trying to coordinate her work schedule with school pick-ups – all the while being judged for working, pressured to do more at the school and join the parent’s committee (she’s told that parents with only one child are expected to do more to make it “fair” to the parents of multiple children. Groan).
Jake’s loathe to go too deep into talking about this theme and be seen as some sort of spokesman for the cause – “This white, cis, straight male is maybe not the conduit to be like, ‘let me tell you about women and what they’re up against,” he says. “We have wonderful, professional, talented, intelligent, thoughtful cast members and producers who are a much better conduit for that.”
But, the division of labour – often emotional labour in particular – of parenting, is something that falls to not just women to talk about, but also men. And that dynamic was something Jake found interesting to explore in this role.
“Marissa’s character has an undue, unfair amount of responsibility for our son,” he says. “And then, when something goes sideways, Peter weaponizes that against her and is like, ‘you dropped the ball’. She’s like, ‘Why am I the only one holding the ball though?’ That tension was interesting to talk about and create and play with… I just try to not be that in my own life, I guess.”
It’s a part of the story he found thought provoking and interesting, and says he admired the way the directors, writers and producers intertwined it into the story, without making it supersede the action, or be too subtle.
“A lot of that, at least in my experience on set, was a credit to Sarah [Snook, who also acted as an executive producer on the show], who was like, we can accomplish these things both at the same time and not talk down to the audience and just show them those relationships and let them draw this conclusions – as opposed to like, looking into the camera and being like, ‘pretty messed up, huh?’ Audiences are smart. They can see it.”
The Darker Side
Jake’s had some pivotal roles in the past – from sales rep Pete Miller on The Office, to Hannah’s boyfriend Fran on Girls. He’s played a fair number of ‘nice guy’ roles, until falling into a few more… should we say complex characters of late, or, isrich douchebags more apt?
There was of course Shane from Season one of The White Lotus – the very first character we met. Shane was constantly aggrieved – the opulent hotel suite he was staying in for his honeymoon wasn’t quite as opulent as the one he (or rather his mother!) ordered.
Jake says Mike White explained the character’s behaviour in a way that made sense for him to get into playing the character. Mike White explained that Shane wasn’t a bad guy, he was just walking around feeling like he’d been done wrong.
“He sat down with me before we shot and was like, ‘He’s just trying to have a nice time on vacation, and this thing has happened. That’s all. He’s a good guy. These people are lying to him, and he’s spending $20,000 a night on a room. It’s crazy.’ And he was also like, ‘When you have that level of wealth, there’s a paranoia that sets in about how people are treating you.’”
It’s been one of the strange things about fame for Jake, as in the wake of The White Lotus, still five years later he has people talking to him about Shane.
“With the White Lotus, people would talk to me about that character and I think have the assumption that they and I have the same point of view on that character – where they’re understandably in judgement of him and I would, sort of by default be in defense of him and be like, ‘well he’s not that bad actually! I think what really happened is…’
Now I’ve learned to temper that a little and just go, ‘That’s great! Thanks for watching! Thanks for tuning in!’ rather than getting into a whole argueent with a stranger about a fictional character from five years ago, y’know, like what am I doing here?”
In general though, despite the characters he’s played, the public reception to him has so far always been pretty fair.
“No one comes up and assumes I’m a rude person or devious – I mean, we’ll have to wait and see what happens with this one!”
Because, yes, without any spoilers, there are certainly a few skeletons in his All Her Fault character’s past.
And, what’s made this show even more thrilling to make, is the fact that Jake was completely unaware of what was ahead of him when he arrived in Melbourne to begin filming.
Before filming, he tells us, he’d only been given the first couple of episodes to read.
“I got to Melbourne, where we shot most of it and that’s when they were like, just so you know, this is what your part really is and that was thrilling, because I knew about 10% of the full breadth of what my character gets up to and I was already excited at that point,” he says.
Jake says what originally drew him to this project, was the Australian actor – and Succession star – Sarah Snook.
“I knew that Sarah was a part of it and was a fan of her work,” he says. “Without reading anything I was like, if Sarah signed on, it’s got to be pretty good, because she’s awesome. Then I read the first couple of scripts – I thought they were great and I knew Minkie [Spiro] who directed the first four episodes and Kate [Dennis] actually, who directed the final four – I’d worked with both of them and really like their work and our time together. All the pieces came together.”
All Her Fault premieres Friday 7 November at 8am on TVNZ+