She admits to lying, takes a deal to avoid criminal charges, and tries to move on.
Her story is paralleled with that of two female detectives working a separate investigation into a serial rapist.
Their intersection offers devastating insight into the social mechanisms that too often prevent rape victims from being believed.
Wever didn’t know the story before she was sent the series' first three scripts.
She read through them as well as the original article on a long cross-country flight.
Her cheeks got red.
She kept getting up to pace in the aisle “like a weirdo.”
She adds, “It felt like it ignited something in me.”
Wever felt the pressure to get that story right, in all of its nuances.
“I did all the usual things,” she says of her preparation.
She read books, listened to podcasts, talked to various people who could inform her process.
That goes for all ofUnbelievable’s principals.
“It was hard work,” Collette tells EW.
“Some days felt like a bit of a slog.”
“The responsibility of the material weighed on me heavily,” she says.
“And I felt like Toni and I were this engine that had to keep going, keep looking.
This relentless energy honestly started to break me down after a while.”
In the fall of2013, Wever introduced her “baseline” nervousness to a national audience.
But this time, she didn’t abruptly say goodbye.
It’s about as genuine an awards-show moment as you’ll see.
And made a space they have.
She felt nervous about that, too.
“It ended up somehow exacerbating a lot of anxiety.
I experienced it as a burden.
She continues, her voice slightly sharpened.
“We’re also trying to find Marie across space and time, three years later.
I felt like I was operating without my heart….
I was pushing and pushing, going and going, and missing something.
I was probably feeling as an actor like I was missing the other half of my story.”
She cuts herself off.
“Now I feel like I’m rambling.
I don’t think this is what you’re looking for.”
Wever and Collette, particularly, work wonders together.
“It was all Merritt for me,” Collette says.
“She and I were very much a team.
We often focused and supported each other.
She alone made me laugh, in her own laconic way.”
Wever took a longbreak after filmingUnbelievablelast summer.
“I don’t feel particularly ready for anything,” she says now.
She took advantage by going to the dentist.
(“I really needed to go to the dentist!")
On her way back, in an Uber, Wever was inundated with phone calls and texts.
It was the day of Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony during the confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
She took these calls in the back of the car; the driver never referenced them.
This recounting, in a nutshell, answers why this matters to Wever.
“It matters to me, because well, I’m not sure how it could not matter.”
All eight episodes ofUnbelievablestream on Netflix beginning Friday.
