How Blake Lively’s ‘Crazy’ Another Simple Favor Twists Came to Be: ‘She Went for It’ (Exclusive)

Warning: This story contains spoilers for Another Simple Favor, now streaming on Prime Video.

• Another Simple Favor has a major plot twist that involves Emily’s triplet who was thought to have died at birth
• Blake Lively has spoken about how the twist and opportunity for dual roles again after the 2018 original “upped the ante”
• Director Paul Feig says the third-act reveal was not in the original draft of the sequel

In Another Simple Favor, Blake Lively brings double trouble — again.

In the 2018 original A Simple Favor, based on a novel by Darcey Bell, Lively had dual roles as Emily Nelson, whose real name is Hope McLendon, and her estranged sister Faith. They had a triplet, Charity, who was stillborn.

As the thriller shows, Emily drowns Hope in a lake. That crime — and others Emily committed — are ultimately exposed by frenemy Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick), and Emily is put behind bars.

One of the biggest twists in the sequel Another Simple Favor is the reveal that Charity never died: Their aunt Linda (Allison Janney) delivered the triplets and stole newborn Charity, lying that the baby had died at birth.

Onstage at the SXSW Film & TV Festival in March, Lively, 37, said she was confident going into the sequel until director Paul Feig informed her about the plot twist, which was added in a later version of the script.

“I was like, no nerves, I know what I’m doing this time — and then right before we started shooting he said, ‘I have, like, a little bit of a curveball idea.’ … It definitely upped the ante. It was very uncomfortable to watch in this theater with you all. It was my own personal torture.”

She added that Emily is “probably my favorite character I’ve ever been fortunate enough to play.”

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Feig, 62, mentioned during a conversation held at SXSW in March that this installment’s storyline was significantly reworked.

“There were a lot of times in the development of this I tried to kill it because I was just like, ‘If we don’t get it right, let’s not do it,’ ” he said, according to USA Today. “We actually had a script that was green-lit, and we threw 70 percent out of it.”

On the March 7 red carpet, Lively told the official SXSW cameras that Another Simple Favor is “so much more wild than the first one” and that Feig “totally pushed us out of our comfort zone once again.”

Jessica Sharzer, who wrote the 2018 adaptation, co-wrote Another Simple Favor but says the twist involving the long-lost triplet Charity was not in her version of the draft.

“The script changed a lot over the course of the development, some of which I had to do with and some of which I didn’t. The ending of the movie is very different from the draft that I wrote,” says Sharzer, who adds that she “had nothing to do with” the Charity twist or that nonconsensual incestuous scene.

Laeta Kalogridis, known for her Shutter Island screenplay, is the other co-writer on Another Simple Favor. She says the filmmakers were committed to making the sequel “feel simultaneously completely nuts and totally believable.”

Adds Kalogridis, “I think you’re looking, at least a little bit, at how to take the audience by surprise while delivering something that doesn’t feel like it couldn’t happen with these characters.”

About that shocking bedroom scene — which shows a kidnapped and incapacitated Emily in shock as it’s implied Charity briefly performs a nonconsensual sex act on her — Feig says the moment came from how the sheltered, deranged Charity might view the world.

“That was all kind of inspired by the fact that when I was a kid I was so awkward around girls, and I just hit a point where I was like, ‘I wish I could just date myself. I wish I could clone myself, because then it would be so easy, and I’d know everything that made me feel good and didn’t feel good,’ ” explains Feig.

“When we were playing around with what we were going to do with those characters, it was like, well, this seems natural that bored Charity has been locked away for so long with nobody in her life other than her crazy mom, that she would probably have this weird thing about anybody who looks like her. She sees Emily as another doll that she possesses, really.”

Feig says the uncomfortable scene “very much so” changes Lively’s Emily character and the kinship she forms with frenemy Stephanie.

“It’s the first time Emily got in over her head or was outplayed, if you will,” he says. “I mean, she’s outplayed by Stephanie, but this is being psychologically outplayed and pretty much freaked out by her weird sibling.”

“What I love about it is it bonds them, as much as Emily and Stephanie can be friends. We never want them to be besties, we just want them to kind of understand and have respect for each other and like each other in that sort of begrudging way that two rivals have.”

Feig says he’s glad they revised the script to go with the long-lost triplet reveal after the first film mentioned a sister lost at birth. The plot twist was “sitting right there and we almost didn’t take advantage of it,” he says.

“And then it was fun to tell Blake we’re changing it, because she’d read the original draft of the script. She was like, ‘Wow, okay.’ But we have such a great trust between us that if I picture something that’s really crazy and over the top, she’s like, ‘Well, let’s try it,’ ” he says. “And she went for it.”