Atlanta actress gets spotlight in Netflix’s ‘His & Hers’: ‘This is a joy.’
Spoiler alert: Don’t read this if you haven’t seen the show and want to be surprised.
Atlanta actress Crystal Fox has spent more than 40 years on stage, in films and on TV, but the creators of the new Netflix limited series crime thriller “His & Hers” have gifted her with one of her buzziest roles to date, courtesy of a shocking twist ending.
“This is a joy for me,” Fox told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution with a smile at the Ritz-Carlton on Monday. “But it’s also a joy for the people who watched it. I got to entertain them.”
“His & Hers,” which was shot in metro Atlanta and Dahlonega, quickly zoomed to No. 1 on Netflix‘s top 10 TV show list, and is currently the No. 2 most popular show referenced by IMDb users, behind only “Stranger Things.”
In the six-episode series, Fox plays Alice, the doting mother of lead character Anna (played by Tessa Thompson), an Atlanta TV broadcaster whose son dies from sudden infant death syndrome. What’s worse for Alice: She was babysitting when it happened.
“She didn’t do anything wrong, but she still feels like she failed as a parent,” Fox said.
A devastated Anna disappears for a year, ghosting her job and family. But at the start of the series she reappears, persuading her TV boss to allow her to cover a murder in her hometown of Dahlonega in North Georgia.
By happenstance, Anna’s estranged husband, Jack Harper (Jon Bernthal), has moved back to Dahlonega to be a detective. He is also investigating the murder. The victim: one of Anna’s former classmates, whom Jack happens to know all too well.
This also gives Anna an opportunity to check in on her mom, who has spent her life in Dahlonega running a cleaning business.
Alice is happy to see her daughter again. But she has begun showing signs of dementia. When she makes Anna eggs, they are full of shells. At night, she wanders out of her house naked.
As more classmates die, suspects pile up, including Anna and Jack. But Alice, given her mental state, is off the radar.
Ultimately, rival TV anchor Lexy (Rebecca Rittenhouse), whom Alice discovers is a former classmate, is pinned as the serial killer and is shot to death.
Case closed? Nope.
In a letter a year later, Alice informs her daughter she was the person behind the three murders, not Lexy.
“What has been fun and what I didn’t expect is all the texts and calls I’ve gotten from friends, actor friends,” Fox said. “They’re screaming over the reveal. I get home and my phone keeps going ‘bing bing bing!’”
In her grief after her daughter disappeared, Alice began watching old tapes of Anna pretending to be a newscaster when she was a teenager.
But one tape revealed a stunning secret: Three of Alice’s classmates brought her to the woods when she was a teenager, where she was raped.
Alice decided to get revenge on behalf of her daughter. One by one, she began brutally murdering the trio, twice by knifings and once by drowning. She also faked dementia to stay under the radar.
“She took advantage of the fact that people her age with her type of job are seen as invisible,” Fox said. “Nobody paid any attention to her. She was never a suspect.”
The murder of Jack’s sister Zoe (Marin Ireland) was the toughest one to justify, Fox said, because she was technically family.
“It took me a moment,” Fox said. “How could she live with that? Alice watched Zoe grow up. She was a mess, and people kind of tolerated her reckless behavior. She was a single mom, but not a good one. She was a mother not mothering. She had to go!”
And for Alice, Fox said, the end justified the means, because Jack and Anna are seen at the end of the series happily taking care of Zoe’s daughter as their own.
Fox thinks Thompson, who has appeared in movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Creed franchise, enhanced the entire series with her subtle acting.
“Whenever you see her, there’s a level of mystery,” Fox said. “You wonder what her character is thinking. She brings integrity to everything she does.”
Fox grew up in Atlanta, and most of her notable acting roles have been shot in Georgia. She was a police officer on Carroll O’Connor’s crime procedural “In the Heat of the Night” for several seasons and the matriarch over eight seasons of Tyler Perry’s soap “The Haves and the Have Nots.”
She got her first taste of the power of Netflix in her first-ever lead role in Perry’s film “A Fall From Grace” in 2020, and enjoyed a juicy role in Apple TV’s “The Big Door Prize.” Both shows were shot in Atlanta.
Despite Fox’s overall success, she recalled having a moment of angst as she neared 60 years old, before “His & Hers” came along. “Where am I supposed to be in the spectrum of art?” she asked herself. “How do I stay relevant?”
She said thanks to “His & Hers,” her agent is fielding calls for fresh opportunities.
“I feel like this show has opened me up to a much bigger, younger audience,” she said. “I hope someone who sees this keeps me in mind for a future project.”
About the Author
Rodney Ho writes about entertainment for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution including TV, radio, film, comedy and all things in between. A native New Yorker, he has covered education at The Virginian-Pilot, small business for The Wall Street Journal and a host of beats at the AJC over 20-plus years. He loves tennis, pop culture & seeing live events.
