Grace Van Patten Is Helping Amanda Knox Reclaim Her Story

Grace Van Patten was only 11 years old in 2007 when Amanda Knox was wrongfully convicted of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy, and later sentenced to 26 years in prison. She was too young to grasp all of the details, but like seemingly the entire rest of the world, she learned Knox’s face and name thanks to the barrage of media coverage. Now after roles in Tell Me Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, Van Patten says that for her to be playing the title role in the Hulu limited series, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, premiering August 20, feels like fate.

Back in 2016, when Van Patten was starting out in her acting career, she watched the Amanda Knox documentary on Netflix. She couldn’t believe what had happened to Knox—how the investigators questioned her for hours in a language she did not speak, how they manipulated her into falsely confessing; how she was painted as a femme fatale—the infamous Foxy Knoxy—in the courts and in media around the world, a caricature in a lurid tale concocted by prosecutors in lieu of physical evidence.

Van Patten couldn’t fathom that all of this had happened to Knox when she was her same age, a 20-year-old like her with plans and dreams for her life. She called up her agents and told them, “I want to play Amanda Knox.” She asked if any projects were in the works, but there weren’t any at the time, so she forgot about it as other jobs came her way. That is, until last year, when she learned she was being considered to play Knox in the Hulu series. “I was like, Oh my god, how crazy would that be?” Van Patten says. “It’s a full circle moment. It feels like it was meant to be, which sounds cheesy to say, but it’s weird how the universe works sometimes.”

Dress, Louis Vuitton. Earrings, Jennifer Zeuner.

Her first indication that she was being looked at for the role was when Knox herself started following her on Instagram. “I took a screenshot and sent it to everybody like, ‘What does this mean?’” Van Patten tells me. She met with the creator and an executive producer of the series next, and says “it was just the most beautiful conversation.” The part was hers.

When I later ask Van Patten to name the role most pivotal to her career, she doesn’t hesitate before saying, “It’s definitely playing Amanda—one thousand percent.”

Portraying Knox in the series at both age 20 and at age 35, when an exonerated Knox returns to Italy to confront her prosecutor, presented a new challenge for the now 28-year-old star. There was also the inherent difficulty and awkwardness of playing a living person. But more than that, Van Patten felt the weight of helping Knox, who serves as an executive producer on the series, tell her truth to the world. “It feels weird to even call it a role,” Van Patten says. “It felt so much bigger and more important than that, because we were all helping somebody reclaim their story.”

Jacket, skirt, heels, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Earrings, Ben Amun.

When I reach Van Patten on a video call in late July, she’s inside her trailer on set in Toronto, filming season 3 of Tell Me Lies, the Hulu drama series she’s starred in since 2022. Based on a novel of the same name by Carola Lovering, Tell Me Lies follows a toxic relationship between Van Patten’s character, a college freshman named Lucy, and Stephen, a junior, played by her real-life boyfriend, Jackson White.

Van Patten tells me she’s happy to be back filming again with the cast and crew: “We’re like family now.” I beg her to share some details about the upcoming season, but she says she can’t reveal much. “All I will say is: It’s just as crazy as ever. I didn’t think it could get crazier, but fans are in for a ride,” she teases. “There’s more chaos; there’s more juicy juice. Even we don’t know what happens at the end of the season. We all come up with our own theories, which is really fun.”

I ask Van Patten how it feels to act in the show opposite her boyfriend, especially as the character he plays is creepy, controlling, and well, sociopathic at times. “He’s a little too good at it, isn’t he?” Van Patten says, laughing. “I’m like, Where does that come from?” But in seriousness, she adds, “It’s the best part about all of this. Because playing a role like this, and doing these types of scenes, you have to really go there. They’re emotional and intimate. To do that with someone you trust so much, it just makes it a whole other experience, as opposed to doing it with someone you don’t know on that level. With us, there’s no block; it’s just full taking each other in, because that’s what we’re used to.”

They met during the audition process in 2022 and started dating before they even knew if White got the part. “We didn’t know what was going to be more complicated—if he did get the part or if he didn’t—but we didn’t care,” Van Patten says. “We just couldn’t help it.”

Shirt, jeans, Zimmermann. Bracelet, Ben Amun. Ring, Awe Inspired, Foundrae.

The critically-acclaimed Hulu series they co-star in, executive produced by Emma Roberts, rises above the tide of typical dramatic series with its groundbreakingly realistic portrayal of a toxic relationship. “This is a show that takes young people’s feelings very seriously,” Van Patten says. “I thought it was so unique, because it showed the negative effects of a toxic relationship and the ripple effect it has on the people around you.”

Over the years, Van Patten has heard from viewers who told her the show had been the catalyst for them to escape similar relationship dynamics. “The best compliment I ever get is when fans tell me the series helped them see how bad of a situation they were in, and it helped them get out,” Van Patten says. “If this show can do that, that’s so amazing. I hope it continues to do that, because it’s so hard. It’s so hard to break that cycle and get out of a relationship like that. It’s an addiction.”

Van Patten was raised in TriBeCa. When she was 17, her family moved to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, which she still calls home when she’s in town. She’s a city kid—“New York is the best city in the world,” she correctly asserts. She smiles as she recalls buying her favorite slice or going with her dad, Tim, as a kid to Green-Wood Cemetery to visit her grandparents’ graves. “It’s where I learned to drive,” she tells me. “I would sit on my dad’s lap, and we’d drive the cemetery streets.”

“We were like, ‘Well, if anything happens, we’re already here,’” she adds, laughing.

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Her introduction to the entertainment industry also came via her father, an award-winning director of some of the most popular HBO series of all time: The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Boardwalk Empire, and Game of Thrones. Van Patten grew up visiting her dad on sets, and has said watching the affable James Gandolfini morph into the vindictive Tony Soprano was particularly impactful. “I have memories of being in awe of the people around me, watching them transform in front of my eyes,” she says. “As a kid, I would be talking to one of the actors and they’re a certain way, and then they call action, and they’re a completely different person. I was like, ‘How do you do that?’”

At age 8, she auditioned for a part on The Sopranos, appearing as Eugene Pontecorvo’s daughter, Ally. “My dad worked on the show. I was a little kid with dreams, and I said, ‘I really want to act, dad.’” After bugging him for a while, he let her audition. “I’ll never forget, my mom dropped me off, and I went into the studio and signed my name in. It was the scariest, I remember the nerves so vividly while I was waiting in the hallway. And then I got called in, and my dad’s in the back row with his legs crossed, and he gives me a little wave.”

Dress, Christopher Esber. Earrings, Jennifer Zeuner.

She was hooked, and went on to hone her talent at the famed Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. After graduation and a stint in community college, she landed her first feature film role, a Netflix indie rom-com called Tramps, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2016. The following year, she played Adam Sandler’s daughter in Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories. She then acted in a number of indie films and theater productions before being called the breakout star of Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers in 2021 for her performance as Zoe Marconi, a grieving college student who attends Nicole Kidman’s cuckoo wellness retreat with her parents after a family tragedy.

Though Van Patten would eventually like to try acting in an action film or a comedy, the throughline of her career so far has been playing messy, complicated women, and that’s by design. “It’s unfortunately rare to come across female characters with a lot of layers and depth, so any time I read characters like that in a script, I’m so drawn to them,” she says. “I want roles that feel like I’m playing a full-fledged human being—that’s the only kind of role I would like to play.”

Her desire to portray female characters with depth is, of course, what drew Van Patten to Knox as well. Filming began about two months after she landed the role. She dove into studying Italian right away, Zooming with a dialect coach in Italy. She also read and watched everything she could find about the case. But she says the most “impactful and important” thing she did to prepare was speaking with Knox directly. “She was so open and vulnerable, and trusting, with me. I couldn’t believe that, after a lifetime of people creating this narrative about her, she was able to trust me—some random actor—to tell her story,” Van Patten says. “It made me really emotional and gave me more incentive to try to show accurately how she felt. That was so much more important to me than trying to do some impersonation.”

Dress, Louis Vuitton. Earrings, Jennifer Zeuner. Ring, Chloé.

And Knox says that commitment is exactly what she and the rest of the crew were seeking when casting Amanda. “What we were looking for in an actress to play me wasn’t just the right look; it was the ability for this person to embody me at wildly different moments of my life, when I was young and naive, when I was older and haunted, going through the best moments of my life and the worst,” Knox tells me. “I loved that Grace was able to capture my whimsy, my lightness of being. And just her willingness to work so hard to get it right, to put everything on the table and hold nothing back.”

Most of the Italy scenes were shot in Rome; the crew only briefly ventured to Perugia to film. The exterior of the house where Amanda and Meredith lived, and where the murder took place, was recreated in remarkable detail in a different town in Italy. The interior of the house was built on a soundstage in Budapest, where much of the filming also took place.

Jacket, McQueen. Dress, Ferragamo. Earrings, Awe-inspired. Rings, Chloé & Awe-inspired.

Van Patten’s real-life sister, Anna, plays Amanda’s sister, Deanna, in the show. The Van Patten sisters relished the time together during filming, exploring Italy and Hungary together during their time off. “Anna was there with me a lot of the time, and it felt like we were Mary-Kate and Ashley,” Van Patten says, smiling.

Knox visited the set in Budapest, although she did not go to Italy during filming. Van Patten was nervous, at first, about acting out the most traumatic moments of Knox’s life right in front of her. “I was constantly thinking about her and how hard it must be to relive all of this, in a way,” she says. “But she’s just so unbelievably strong and brave, and articulate about how she felt and about what was going on, and she made me feel really safe and calm to go in there and give it my all.”

In addition to serving as an executive producer, Knox also co-wrote the final episode. Watching the eight episode series in full, it’s evident that this version of the Amanda Knox story is one that has been told—firmly, finally, and fully—on Knox’s terms. “I really hope people leave with a perspective based on facts and not the biases that were fed to them at the time,” Van Patten says. “It would be amazing if people went into it thinking one thing, and by seeing it, they reevaluate their opinions.”

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But as Van Patten as Amanda says near the end of the series: It’s hard to change minds. Change is not guaranteed, but it is possible. And Knox and Van Patten are both optimists.

“Helping Amanda reclaim her story felt beautiful, it felt important, it felt like I was doing something good,” Van Patten tells me. “You forget sometimes, and I’m guilty of this too, when you see people in the news or in documentaries—you’re not seeing them as human. We all sit down on the couch and eat popcorn and watch these true stories about actual trauma that these people went through.”

“To understand what Amanda went through is devastating to me, but it’s also inspiring: how she handles everything, the way she maintains positivity, and the way she was able to forgive,” Van Patten continues. “I’m in awe of her.”

Hair by Clara Leonard at The Wall Group. Makeup by Misha Shahzada at A-Frame Agency.