Clarence Moye contributed to this article.
The Perfect Couple is the perfect sudsy escape. Who doesn’t love a mystery with a gorgeous locale, huge stars, and enough wine to put a rhino to sleep? Netflix’s limited series is a gripping whodunnit with everyone having a motive for the beachy crime, and that’s where Donna Lynne Champlin’s Nikki Henry comes in. As someone who doesn’t fit into this Nantucket world, this detective gets down to business as soon as she arrives, but Champlin’s grit, comic timing, and ensemble chops make her a stellar addition to such a strong cast.
Why do we keep coming back to this kind of affluent party…with a dash of danger? Champlin has an easy answer.
“It feels like a new kind of thing,” doesn’t it?” Champlin says. “They kept describing it as popcorn with a glass of wine, and I love that. It’s accurate. When you work with Suzanne [Bier], too, it’s the easiest gig. You just do whatever the woman tells you and you’re golden.”
Even when Nikki arrives on the scene, people look at her sideways. The citizens of Nantucket do not know her, so they don’t trust her and that immediate outsider classification doesn’t mean that Nikki can’t wiggle her way into their lives. It gives her an advantage. They don’t know her background or her point of view, so while these rich people are careful, they are also curious. How does she deal with being so underestimated?
“As a middle-aged woman who came to television late, it’s kind of like a Tuesday,” she says with a laugh. “Aside from The Perfect Couple there’s that list of series regulars and I’m on the bottom doing my own thing, and I walked into this gig fully prepared for that and I was okay with it. I was so happy to be there, and everyone could not have been nicer to me. They respected me. With Nikki, it’s twofold. She’s a woman and she’s an outsider. Dan, who’s played by Mike Beach, is a local and he is someone that everyone knows while Nikki is coming in like a bull in a China shop. My character is the audience’s eyeballs, and all the other characters have to explain things to me since they don’t know who the heck I am. That’s also Nikki’s advantage, though. She has no ties to anything and nobody can threaten me with, for instance, not funding the police department or a new car, because I don’t give a rat’s ass.”
Before our chat, I didn’t know that Champlin’s character was written as a man in Elin Hilderbrand’s best seller. Because they changed the gender, the writing erased a lot of tropes normally found with expectation on female characters, and Champlin was eager to dive into a character in a completely new way.
“In the book, Nikki is known as The Greek–this handsome, womanizing guy–and I am grateful to the writers and creators to decide that maybe a woman cop was a better angle than two dudes,” she says. “If this was other source material, it might have leaned into those tropes of maybe Nikki and Mike falling in love. Or they may have kissed. I would be talking about my wife or my kids or my husband. What was great about this was that I was a woman in a man’s role, and I was there to do a job. And Nikki is good at her job.”
At the end of every episode, there is a new plausible suspect when most shows can only point the finger at several persons of interet. Every time we enter the interrogation room, Nikki and Dan have the front row to the best show in town where everyone spills their secrets–bitchy comments and all. In most thrillers, Champlin and Beach would circle the suspect or yell at them until they get a confession. Even Nikki’s style of questioning feels different than other mysteries.
“Mike and I used to have a joke that every single time someone would come in for an interrogation scene that by the time they were done, we were convinced that they did it,” Champlin says. “Every single person. We acted as if everyone was guilty when they came in and that we were super convinced they did it by the time that they left. I think it worked. We were being silly, but we would stare back at them while they were spilling their guts. Everyone had motive, so our characters had a lot of ways to go in terms of finding a suspect. Everyone had opportunity. It was fun for us to have all these incredible actors come in and just act their faces off to us.”
With such a huge, star-studded cast, there is something for everyone to dig into. The Kidman? I’m there. Liev Schreiber as a zaddy with impeccable spectacle? Sign me up. Isabelle Adjani Yes, please. Champlin details a charming, hilarious encounter with star Dakota Fanning…who just may have unearthed Champlin’s biggest secret: that she’s a covert spy.
“Dakota [Fanning] is a sniper–her humor sneaks up on you. There was one time where she and I had been on set for something like three days, and we were just on our phones in the green room. She’s on hers, I’m on mine. My son happens to be a type one diabetic, and I was looking at his information on my phone. Sometimes it sets off alarms on my phone so I call to check in with him, and we have our own shorthand. I start using this jargon that he and I know like, ‘You’re 350 double up–did you bolus this morning? Are you sitting down?’ I hang up and go back to my seat, and I get back on my phone and Dakota puts her phone down. She looks at me and says, ‘Are you a spy?’ I didn’t know what she meant so I asked her why and she repeated, ‘358 double up with a bolus.’ She heard all these things that she didn’t know what they meant, so, of course, the only answer to that is yes. Yes, I am a spy.”
A Bold Performance, New Direction In Law & Order
Most recently, Champlin undertook a wildly different project — a guest role in a February episode of the long-standing procedural Law & Order: SVU. In “The Grid Plan,” Champlin plays Megan, a middle-aged New York City tourist who is sexually assaulted. However, Champlin’s Megan isn’t a traditional victim. She spends much of the episode hunting down her attacker in Times Square. She even crosses investigators several times, nearly landing in jail for obstruction of justice.
Basing the character off of women she encountered in her upstate New York upbringing, Champlin took the character in a new direction for the series. The creative team applauded her unique choices to represent Megan.
“It was funny because a lot of the series regulars were saying, ‘You’re doing things on the stand that we’ve never seen people do before.’ Of course, I responded with ‘Oh, no, is that bad? Is there an SVU way of doing things?’ And they thought it was actually really interesting to see. I’m sure part of it was the way the character was written because the character is an unusual victim for that show.”
An early scene in the episode emerged as one of the most important for the character. Hospitalized following her attack, Megan is questioned by Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and the gravity of the moment hits her in strange ways. She teeters between laughter and sobs as she grapples with the event, expressing her disbelief in it given that she was wearing an oversized coat (I.e. – nothing traditionally sexy).
It’s a fantastic moment for Champlin that she believes required the preceding ambulance-based scene to properly appreciate.
“The scene that was most important to me in setting up that hospital scene was the ambulance. In all through the trial, she wasn’t crying or yelling. She didn’t call 911 because obviously she was in shock, and the ambulance is the only time that you see with your eyeballs, what the prosecution is resting their entire case on. That whole exchange with Mariska in the ambulance, quite honestly, I found as an actress more difficult. We need that scene to be perfect to highlight how she’s traumatized and how she’s in shock to appreciate what comes after in the hospital.”
When asked what she brought to the role that was uniquely her own, Champlin credited her comedic chops (beautifully on display in the criminally underrated Crazy Ex-Girlfriend).
“When I get a chance to do a drama, I like to think that I’ve put my drama hat on, but I do think that that part benefited by Megan herself having a sense of humor. Like when I punched [her attacker], and they take him out in handcuffs. We did a couple of takes of that, but they used the take where I was like smiling but in a really crazy, manic way. It looks so out of place, but I loved it. It was really fun that Mariska and I would always believe there’s no wrong choices except for the obvious one.”
The Perfect Couple streams exclusively on Netflix. Law & Order: SVU streams exclusively on Peacock.
