Who Killed Nancy? Cast Breaks Down Finale Twists (Exclusive)

The mystery of who killed Nancy (Kate Mara) was finally revealed during the Imperfect Women finale. Episode 7 ended with Nancy’s stepfather, Scott (Wilson Bethel), as the new prime suspect, but viewers learned what actually happened (and why Scott was involved) in the final episode. Warning: Spoilers for Episode 8 of Imperfect Women ahead!

Howard (Corey Stoll), with whom Nancy had been having an affair, was the one who killed her. She had reached out to Scott, despite their troubling and complicated history, and asked him for protection, hoping he would scare Howard or rough him up because he threatened to expose the relationship to Mary (Elisabeth Moss), Howard’s wife and Nancy’s best friend. When Scott arrived on the scene with a gun, he witnessed Howard already dragging Nancy’s dead body away.

Howard later attempted to kill his wife because he knew she and Eleanor (Kerry Washington) were on to him. A physical fight between them ensued, and Eleanor showed up to assist her friend by running Howard over with her car before Mary stabbed him to death.

A year later, Eleanor was living it up on a yacht with a new love interest, while Mary was in good spirits celebrating her daughter’s birthday. Perhaps the most shocking moment, though, was that Nancy’s husband, Robert (Joel Kinnaman), was the one who brought the cake out at the party. The series ended with a mysterious look between Mary and Robert.

“What is going on there? It’s exactly what we were asking,” Moss tells TV Insider. “We very purposefully talked a lot about what we were going to do with it and how far we were going to go and what not to do. We really wanted to raise the question, ‘What is going on there?’ But not answer it. So there is not an answer right now. We would need a Season 2 to tell you!”

Below, Moss, Washington, creator Annie Weisman, and more dive into this pivotal scene and other shocking moments from that wild finale!

Do you know what that final look between Mary and Robert was meant to convey?

Kerry Washington: I think we really did want to leave it very open-ended. A lot of the spirit of the show is rooted in the paradigm of the book, which is you think you know what’s happening, but it’s important to remember that until you understand somebody else’s point of view or live in somebody else’s shoes, you may not understand the full story.

Our imperfect women learn how to navigate how to live with questions and how to live with uncertainties, so we knew we wanted that quality to be in our finale ,while still resolving the major questions. What’s so fun about a whodunit is you get to know whodunit and you get to have resolve. I think that’s why murder mysteries are so satisfying because we get to have resolve, but we just wanted to check/balance that with … well, also, you might not know everything.

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Annie Weisman: It’s a gag, right?! There’s some understanding between the two of them that she’s keeping a little bit to herself. I think in the end, there’s something she’s not telling us and we’re left having to guess.

Is it possible that there’s something romantic going on between Mary and Robert?

Weisman: There’s the potential, I think. There’s potential.

Joel Kinnaman:  I mean, who knows? Robert doesn’t really know who he is. I still think he’s in the process of putting his pieces back together. I think if the right woman or the wrong woman … anyone that kind of is a assured and makes him feel whole, I think there’s a possibility there, for sure.

Moss: I do think there’s a really cool moment that was the spark for this ending, which is that scene between the two of them [earlier in the episode], the only scene they have where they really get into it, where she’s the only person who is honest with him. She calls him out and says what she really thinks of him. And she’s right. He hears her. And I think there is something interesting about this show that is all about secrets, all about betrayal, all about communication and lack of it and what do we hide from people … when he is actually able to hear [her].

In the flash forward, Eleanor wasn’t at Juniper’s birthday party, but she did send a gift. Where do you think she and Mary stand at that point? 

Washington:  I think they’re in a good place. It seems like there’s peace around it but I don’t know how much closeness there is in that moment. The fact that she’s not at the birthday party is really interesting to me, that she has chosen her own family and her own new relationship to literally be out at sea and in the world, in the sunshine, with the birds. She’s in a really happy, peaceful place and in an expansive, abundant place.

Weisman: They’ve taken some space to heal and grow. We really wanted there to still be that connection. She’s still there in spirit, giving a gift to her honorary niece, but she’s also got space to do her own thing. So they’re connected, but they’re also doing their own thing.

Moss: They’ve also been through so much that it if we had a chance to keep going and talk about it, it would be impossible to not have more complexity in that relationship. Too much has happened.

Washington:  I think what’s really nice is that it doesn’t feel like they’ve cut ties. Their friendship is not over, but it does feel like they are able to have a bit more space and sort of get comfortable in separate families and separate communities. But that doesn’t mean that they’re still not family to each other. Sometimes you have to expand your world a little bit.

Do you think Mary and Eleanor will ever be able to get their relationship back to the place it once was?

Washington: I don’t know that in life we should ever be yearning to get things back to where they once were. I think the nature of human beings is that we grow and evolve. I don’t know that the goal is to be who they were in college. They’re more complicated women and more complicated relationships. I do think they can continue to reach new levels of trust and intimacy and I have the feeling that they want to walk toward that with good, gentle boundaries and love, but I don’t think anybody’s ever going to return to a relationship from 25 years ago.

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In the flash forward, is Mary in a good place in terms of her pill addiction and does she have custody of her kids back?

Weisman: Yeah, the beauty of what healing looks like for her is that she told her story and was finally believed. That’s why she was relying on pills and escaping – she wasn’t respected and believed. She’s finally respected and believed, so she’s in a good place.

Nancy asked Eleanor to come with her to help end the affair, but Eleanor told her she had to do it on her own. Do you think she’ll always regret not being there on the night her friend ended up dying?

Washington: I think it’s the thing that she’s most grappling with in the beginning of the series and I do think that being able to have some peace around sharing it with her brother and moving through it and realizing with Mary that they were all hiding from each other is a very healing process for her. But I think it’s definitely something she’ll carry with her because she loves Nancy, so I think she’s making peace with i, but it will be an ongoing process for sure.

Did Howard intend to kill Nancy when he met up with her that night?

Stoll: No, he thought they were going to run off together. He was swept up in this romantic fervor. He really thought that they were living out some story from ancient Roman literature or something. That part of it was a pure act of passion.

Robert and Nancy were getting back to a good place when he found out about the affair before she died. Do you think they would’ve stayed together if she were still alive?

Kinnaman: Yeah, I think so. I definitely think that Robert would have been able to forgive her. They both kind of f**ked each other over in some ways. It’s the things that can happen over a 20-year marriage.

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Weisman: Such a good question. It was really important to me, I think, that we feel like her loss is so much more tragic if they could’ve worked it out. I think they could have. I certainly wanted to give them the opportunity to play, and I think they beautifully play, the feeling of a marriage that was worth saving and they could’ve worked it out if she hadn’t been killed.

Her death was a real tragedy, not just something inevitable. I think it’s very heartbreaking to think they would’ve worked it out and had a life together. One of the things that happens a lot in the show is people make bad choices, people make terrible mistakes. Because people are broken inside. But when someone really loves you, the sign of real love is that they could forgive.

Was Scott’s storyline meant to be a bit of a redemption arc? Or are we still supposed to hate him because of what he did to Nancy when she was a teenager?

Weisman: What an interesting question. I don’t think there’s forgiveness there for what he’s done. I don’t think there is. But I think there is gratitude [from Mary and Eleanor] that their friend got to kind of tell her truth to him and that he might have heard it, but I don’t know that there’s any redemption there. I think getting to sit in front of him as an adult and tell him her truth was meaningful. I think that’s kind of as far as it goes. But the friends are the ones who kind of have to carry her truth forward in the world.

 Imperfect Women, Streaming Now, Apple TV