“Grotesquerie”: Niecy Nash-Betts on her role and that killer finale — “It scared me on the page”

“Grotesquerie” may have been inscrutable to most of us when it began, but its star and executive producer, Niecy Nash-Betts, knew exactly where it was going, and the importance of staying mum about it. For some actors that means steering clear of social media or Reddit threads to guard the story’s secrets or peace of mind. For Nash-Betts, whose Det. Lois Tryon led us through the show’s mind-freakery maze, avoiding the comments wasn’t a luxury.

“Anybody who had my phone number called me or texted me,” she told Salon earlier this week. Not surprisingly, their questions were the same ones bedeviling the rest of us.

What’s happening now?

What’s going on?

And simply: What?!

Inscrutability is rarely presented as an asset when a show debuts in a crowded fall season, but “Grotesquerie” creators Ryan Murphy, Jon Robin Baitz, and Joe Baken turned it into a selling point. Nothing about the show turned out to be what it looked like at first: a standard albeit graphically gory serial killer cop show with a Murphy-esque horror twist, pairing Nash-Betts’ Lois, an alcoholic cop at the end of a failing marriage, with Micaela Diamond’s Sister Megan, a homicide-obsessed nun and…practicing journalist?

“You know, a lot of people expected it to be very similar to the other projects that Ryan has done before, but this one absolutely stood alone,” Nash-Betts told me.

Indeed. The good sister stood by Lois as her sanity unraveled at work and in her personal life, where her daughter Merritt (Raven Goodwin) has failed to launch while, at a nearby hospital, her philandering husband Marshall (Courtney B. Vance) rots in a coma, cared for by a Nurse Redd (Lesley Manville) who’s in love with him.

Then, and without warning, the writers turned everything upside down. All along we were watching Lois’ coma dream, and she wakes up to a life in shambles. She was the one who cheated, with Merritt’s husband Ed (Travis Kelce). Megan isn’t a nun but a fellow detective married to a violent man Lois shoots in the face… or does she?

Marshall and Redd are having an affair. The only parts of Lois’ coma dreams that weren’t real were the grisly murders, until somebody starts recreating them…which drives Lois back to the hospital, the psych ward this time.

With “Grotesquerie,” Murphy tapped into the all-enveloping fear that the world is in a death spiral, building real-life metaphors into the horrors Lois dreamed of, including climate change, the loss of reproductive rights and the dehumanization of the unhoused.

The finale adds in gaslighting and patriarchal rage as Marshall is blindsided by a sexual assault accusation from a student he slept with.

“Accountability is everything,” Lois tells Marshall early in the episode, after she’s rejected his preposterous suggestion that he, Lois and Redd move in together. That should have been it for them, Lois thinks. But this finale is half Marshall’s story now, and he crawls back from his lowest point by joining an underground men’s group led by one of Lois’ doctors. And it has grand ambitions. “Perhaps the issue is that we need to return to a much more traditional model for society,” Marshall tells them, adding that it’s time to “find the bogeyman and slaughter it” so it never returns to “take what is ours.”

Solving one set of problems doesn’t erase what caused them, and as the season closes Lois accepts she and Megan have work to do. What are we to take from all this? We tried our best to get the Emmy winner to weigh in on the season’s meaning as well as take stock of how “Grotesquerie” ranks in a varied filmography that’s included acclaimed roles in “When They See Us,” “Dahmer,” “Claws” and other dramas, and whether the road to Lois Tryon began in Reno.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Most actors don’t necessarily know when an episode of their show is scheduled to debut on air, but I’m wondering if you did.

Ryan and I were tied together at the hip, so yes, I knew what was happening and what was on the way.

What you couldn’t have predicted was everything happening in the world this week. You know what I mean?

Yeah. 

So, the meat of my question is this: Ryan called this story a meditation on the feeling that the world is ending. What has it been like to know how the story was going to turn while knowing that this episode would premiere during a week of high anxiety—socially, politically, and otherwise?

You know, when it comes to what the world is unpacking, some of the things are so outrageous that you couldn’t have even planned them. You know what I mean? Some of the things that are being said, some of the things that are being done . . .I knew there was going to be an uproar in the world, but I didn’t know it was going to look the way it actually looks. And when you talk about art imitating life, we touch on a lot of the things that are happening socially. In the series, “Grotesquerie,” we talk about women having agency over their own bodies. We talk about global warming. The evil that exists in the world. Ryan was definitely in front of it.

Micaela said that when she initially read for her role, she read as if it were Sister Megan because she hadn’t seen the ending. And then in the audition Ryan told her, and that changed her second reading. What did you take in to shift your performance from the beginning to that turn in Episode 7, in the kitchen and then everything after Lois woke up?

Well Lois definitely, even in her disease, portrayed an amazing strength. She was a big deal in a small town for a long time, solving crimes. She was a legend even when she was deep in the throes of her alcoholism. She still pulled up and pushed through.

I feel like in her waking life, she was way more vulnerable, way more sensitive. Cognitively, she wasn’t on the pulse of what was actually happening, what was reality. “What was it? Am I going crazy?” So she was a lot more fragile once she came out of the coma.

Thematically, too, there was a notable transformation. When Lois is in the coma, there is a lot of vacillation between what she’s dealing with in terms of what’s going on with the case and the trauma. There was also a lot of rage. When she came out of the coma, the tone seemed to shift to a theme of forgiveness. Maybe that interpretation is wrong, but there was a conscious shift, just in terms of reckoning with her marriage and her relationships, out of her anger.

I don’t know how much of it was forgiveness, but I do believe there was acceptance. She accepted herself. She accepted her life. She accepted her relationship with Marshal and with Mary, her husband and daughter. She leaned into, This is what it is. You know what I mean? “I’m going to go somewhere and return to whatever the self is I can recognize,” which is why she originally says, “Hey, I’m leaving. I’m going to Tarpon Springs. Let me go around and make amends to all the folks in my life and tell them I’m out of here. Let me sign these divorce papers. Let me tell my daughter I’m leaving.” She was wrapping that part of her life up. I feel like in a way that just screams, “I submit, I surrender and I accept that this is what it is.”

Going back to what Ryan said about the overall theme of the series – that it’s not just about fear, but it’s also about the idea the world is ending —is there kind of a metaphor in Lois’ journey that relates to what’s going on with the world that you can see?

Well, she actually confronts so many of the things that are happening in the world. She has an entire conversation about global warming — “What have we done to the planet?” You know, she has an entire crime scene where women don’t have agency over their own bodies. They’re being forced to produce. They’re being forced to feed babies from their own bodies, the milk that they produce, and all of that. There are so many places in her journey that we see happening right now in the world.

Here’s what I noticed, and I understand that everybody’s view of a piece of art is subjective. I’ve been talking to a lot of people, particularly filmmakers, artists, who have been talking about this idea of healing, finding solace, and finding resolution. That’s why I was wondering about the forgiveness element. I didn’t know if that was part of the character’s story development.

I think what you primarily see is Lois forgiving herself. She has to reconcile that. You know, I don’t know that she is so much standing, like, in judgment, where she’s shaking her finger at these other people in her life, but she’s like, “Let me be real about who I am and forgive myself and let the chips fall wherever they may after that.”

In terms of the graphic nature of everything we saw, when you first read the script, what was your reaction to that? When you first got on the set, and saw these crime scenes, that must have been quite an experience.

With regards to the graphic crimes, you don’t see them committed, but you do see the aftermath. And in a lot of ways in this world, you know, the aftermath — it just keeps going. When you experience something that’s painful or horrific, it’s like an earthquake. Those aftershocks keep showing up in the space.

For me, it was very, very important, in between takes, to be funny, be bright, be uplifting, because you have a crew of people you’re leading the charge with who are standing around with death and destruction and blood on the floor, and you know, all of these things. So I did not want to be participatory, when we were not rolling, in the horror, in the drama, in the weirdness. I would prefer to bring it back up. Kick the drum track. Let’s go. You know what I mean? And, “here goes some jokes for you today,” you know, just so that we all could stay emotionally even.

I imagine that in the days following the finale, people are going to have a lot of discussions about the gender split we see at the end of the season. You have Megan and Lois as the crusaders and the heads of their department who are hunting these killers. And there’s the strong implication that the killer is at least within, if not a bunch of people collaborating within, the men’s group that was introduced.

The point is for the audience to have conversations. That’s the whole point of art to me, to make you feel and then make you want to talk about what you feel and what you experience. So, you know, I don’t want to step on anything, you know. I want people to come to the conclusion that they come to and then come back for Season 2 to see if they were right.

You’re being very diplomatic here. But I would imagine that you, Niecy, would have thoughts to share on those optics.

Yes. That did happen, didn’t it?

So how about this: You’ve spoken about this being the most versatile role you’ve played, which now I think people understand.

Well, you know, I loved it on the page, but it also scared me on the page, which is the thing that made me want to run towards it. I’ve never played anyone suffering with alcoholism before. That’s one of the hardest things to do and make it seem real, you know. You don’t want it to feel forced or fake. You have to feel like you are living in this disease, and that was very challenging for me because at any given moment she could have been anywhere in her sickness. She could have been hungover, plastered, tipsy — you know, any place in it. So it was challenging to make sure I tracked it, to make sure that the performance was grounded and real. I often show up to things and get very excited if it’s something I’ve never done before, or if it scares me a little. And this was both.

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You’ve done so many varied roles throughout your career, and of course, you’re also, you know, a host on a competition show [“Don’t Forget the Lyrics!”] that’s a lot of fun to watch. Still, I know a lot of people still think of you as Deputy Raineesha Williams from “Reno 911” even though you’ve also played other law enforcement roles. Do you ever feel like the version of the role you played on “Reno 911” followed you to Lois?

You know what? No. Because Raineesha is an example of what not to do as a cop.

It’s really interesting how these roles have found me, from being a security guard in “Scream Queens” to being in “The Rookie: Feds” to now being a detective. There are different spaces and places where I’ve played someone in law enforcement, but I don’t think it has anything to do with Raineesha because she’s her own thing, you know?

This was a huge turn from other shows you’ve been in. That was refreshing to watch.

Yeah, you know, it took me a while to get people to trust me with drama. But now that they trust me with drama, I think they forgot I was funny. I called Mindy Kaling, and I was like, “Girl, quick — let’s do a buddy comedy. Let’s remind people that I’m funny because I think they forgot.”

. . .In my inner circle, they’re starting to call me The Range.

That’s a compliment, right? It speaks to your reach.

“Niecy Nash-Betts: The Range.” Yes, that’s a beautiful thing.

Since I asked this of Micaela, I would love to ask this of you: What are you hoping that people will take away from this, from “Grotesquerie,” from where we stand right now?

I feel like, one, this is a character you don’t typically see an African American female play. This is usually an older white male actor, this detective who’s down on his luck, but he can figure out the crime. I love that we invited people to think differently about casting and about how you see women. That’s separate from being a Black woman, but seeing women lead the charge in this type of story. And I hope at the end of the day, if we are lucky, we will say that Lois, like Kamala, saved the world from evil.

“Grotesquerie” is streaming on Hulu.