‘Candy’: Jessica Biel Talks Her Transformation Into an Infamous Killer (Exclusive)

Jessica Biel took a close look at human nature when it came to taking on the role of infamous killer Candy Montgomery for Hulu’s upcoming series Candy. The drama series is based on the real-life story of the 1980s housewife and mother who was accused of killing her friend Betty Gore (Melanie Lynskey) with an axe, and Biel told PopCulture.com that the brutal story took her to a “fascinating” place as an actor.

“[Candy is] such a fascinating person, and the story is just too crazy to be real almost, is what it feels like to me,” Biel shared. “But I just love the pathology of a character like that. And I’m just interested in humans, and why they do the things that they do. I always think like, ‘Wow, we’re all capable of anything.’” Biel said when taking a role like that of Candy, “I like to put myself right at the edge there and look over and [ask], ‘Am I capable of this?’ Those are the questions that I’m always asking myself specifically with a project like this.”

Lynskey told PopCulture she was similarly taken by the beauty of the script paired with the horrifying true story. “I loved all the little moments where they just show the mundanity of the suburban life that these women were leading and how much was placed on their shoulders – how much they had to do every single day, how exhausted they both were and how [we] slowly get to know both of them,” she explained. “Then, it all culminates at the end of the show in this way that’s so shocking.”

Lynskey continued that she became particularly protective of her character Betty, who never found the same apparent ease as Candy in her role as a mother and housewife, struggling emotionally with the toll placed on her before her death. “I wanted to make sure her story was told in the fullest way possible,” she shared, “that you got an understanding of the fact that she was a woman who was really struggling and had absolutely no help in any respect and just the loneliness of that – of being somebody who needed help and was getting it from nowhere in the time when everyone was supposed to just be like, ‘Ooh, I got married, so that’s the rest of my life set.’”

“It’s a very heartbreaking thing, the whole story,” she continued. Biel added that while Candy’s case did eventually go to trial, which is shown in the Hulu series, it’s a “very tough question” of if justice was done as someone who ultimately couldn’t be there to witness Betty’s killing. “We just don’t know where everyone’s mindsets were at that point,” she considered. “But a life was taken, and I don’t know if there’s ever any real justice for that … you know?” Candy, also starring Timothy Simons, Pablo Schreiber and Raúl Esparza, premieres on Hulu Monday, May 9.