Alison Brie’s character Amy in “Apples Never Fall” does not operate like your typical eldest sibling. She lacks a steady source of income, is emotionally erratic and her housing situation is one shared with a group of graduate students.
But as the Peacock limited series’ third episode shows, she’s also perhaps the only Delaney with a healthy amount of emotional intelligence.
In the TV adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s 2021 novel of the same name, Joy Delaney (Annette Bening), matriarch of a competitive brood of tennis players, goes missing, prompting the four children and their father to revisit old wounds and unearth family secrets.
Episode 3, “Amy” serves as a bottle episode for the eldest daughter — following the structure lined up with episodes for Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner), Brooke (Essie Randles), Troy (Jake Lacy) and patriarch Stan (Sam Neill). In retracing her steps before her mother’s disappearance, one major memory that resurfaces for Amy revolves around her dropping out of college her senior year. She was with her mother in the car before going into the Delaney household to break the news to the rest of her family, and Joy stood by her side.
“It’s a lot about loneliness, and it sort of speaks to how isolated Amy feels even within her own family, and how much she feels Joy, her mother, is her only ally, the only person who really sees her,” Brie told TheWrap. “Once she’s gone, she’s really alone. But at the same time, it takes bringing some of these old wounds to light to really free Amy from this prison of isolation that she’s created for herself.”
“I know through my own experience with depression that it’s really easy to isolate oneself, and you don’t want to burden other people with those big emotions,” Brie continued. “The Delaneys are often really exasperated by Amy on the whole and by her emotions, so I see why she could have kept it a secret, but it’s a nice big release for her when she can bring some of her secrets to light.”
Brie asserted that Amy’s mental health journey also puts her at a different vantage point than her siblings or their parents. The theme comes back around at the end of the episode, and Amy gets her time to speak her mind.
“She is very unique within the Delaney family,” Brie said of the character, adding that even though all the siblings grapple with childhood pressures, traumas and a demanding father “whose love is conditional,” she’s probably the only one who’s gone to therapy over it.
“Amy seems to have done the most work on herself,” Brie said. “I think she’s the only person who wants to talk about things from the family’s past that happened and how they’ve affected them. I really admire the way that Amy moves through the world unselfconsciously expressing herself.”
When it comes to Savannah (Georgia Flood) infringing on Amy’s physical and metaphorical space in the Delaney family, the oldest Delaney daughter calmly attempts not to let it phase her.
“Despite Amy’s alarmist nature, at her core, I think she’s an optimist. She tries to see the best in everyone. She leads with positivity when it comes to Savannah,” Brie said. “I’m not saying it’s all altruistic. Some of that might even just be to prove her siblings wrong and to be the best of the Delaneys in that moment. She wants to at least put on a front that she’s embracing this stranger and is not intimidated by her.”
She added: “Of course, after one evening with her, she’s highly threatened. And so there is cause for alarm witnessing the closeness that Savannah has with her mother.”
As for her chemistry with her younger landlord Simon Barrington (Nate Mann), Brie offered high hopes.
“I would call it a romance.There’s some elements in there,” she teased. “There’s something really fun about their age difference. Simon is much younger than Amy, but somehow he is much more responsible. He seems more mature in a lot of ways, but it’s such a sweet and unexpected relationship that they have. I think that at first he wouldn’t be on Amy’s radar at all, and he is the only person who is showing Amy compassion through this traumatic experience that she’s going through with her mother’s disappearance, and it’s so endearing. It’s sweet that they are total opposites.”
All episodes of “Apples Never Fall” are now streaming on Peacock.
