This story about Elizabeth Olsen and “Love & Death” first appeared in the limited series/movie issue of TheWrap awards magazine.
What is it about Candy Montgomery that Hollywood finds so irresistible? With two high-profile limited series in back-to-back years, the story of a housewife turned hatchet killer has proven enticing. In 2022, there was Hulu’s “Candy,” co-created by Robin Veith and Nick Antosca and starring Jessica Biel as the woman acquitted of murdering the wife of her lover. Now there’s HBO Max’s “Love & Death,” an interpretation of the same bloody story, written and produced by David E. Kelley and starring Elizabeth Olsen.
Olsen’s interest in donning Candy’s blood-soaked flip-flops had less to do with what Montgomery did or didn’t do and more to do with how he operated. “The draw for me is that I don’t feel like I know how to use my femininity as a person in the world,” Olsen said. “And this is a woman who has managed her entire life to use her femininity as a force to get what she wants. She is a part of myself that I am trying to investigate. There’s something about me that has a hard time, for whatever reason, trusting people who use that ability, and I don’t necessarily like that part of me.”
That Montgomery’s entire personality depended on appearances fascinated Olsen, who, as an actor, is all too familiar with outside pressure to look a certain way. “When I first started with her, she was holding on to everything she presented because she needed some kind of public affirmation, to the point where, during the trial, she told her lawyer that she would not become an emotional monkey to him because even though she is being tried for murder, she still worries about how she relates to people from an aesthetic standpoint,” Olsen said. “I found all those options to be really weird and interesting.”
Because “Love & Death” is based on a true story, Olsen had a lot of material at her disposal to help build her character. There is extensive archival news coverage, plus the true crime book “Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs” by John Bloom and Jim Atkinson on which the miniseries is based. They all dove into how in 1981, Berry Gore, a suburban Dallas wife and mother of two, might have ended up in a pool of blood in her own home, hit 41 times with an axe. Montgomery knew the Gores from church and was having an affair with Betty’s husband, Allan. At the murder trial, she successfully pleaded self-defense for herself and was acquitted.
“The reality of what happened is almost like doing homework for you because you don’t have to make things up,” Olsen said. “There’s something nice about having any kind of existing font, because there’s something to interact with. There are phrases or letters or anecdotes from the life of a person that open something up for you”.