“The show is meant to implicate you for having an opinion”: Ellen Pompeo, Mark Duplass and Imogen Faith Reid on Good American Family
Ellen Pompeo knew from the outset that Good American Family was a risky venture. At a recent press conference for the Disney+ limited series, she emphasised that a dramatisation of such a high-profile, real-life case had to bring something truly special. “I read it, and it was riveting,” she recalled. “But this is very tricky stuff; how would we ever pull this off?” The answer, she soon realised, lay in 27-year-old Imogen Faith Reid, the actress who brought Natalia Grace with striking authenticity.
Pompeo, who also served as the show’s executive producer, revealed that Reid was the key to the project: “Without her nailing this character the way she did, we can’t tell the story that we need to tell.” It was for this reason that Reid was cast before even Pompeo or Mark Duplass, who play Natalia’s adoptive parents, Kristine and Michael Barnett, signed on.
“This is my first role; my first speaking part,” Reid shared, while Duplass praised her remarkable transformation, noting how she mastered a new dialect and fully embodied a different physicality, adding. For her, stepping into Natalia’s shoes was about more than just playing a role – it was about representation. “It just was a real honour to play Natalia and do my version of her,” she explains, emphasising that the performance was an opportunity to give Natalia a voice and share her perspective of the events.
Duplass recalls questioning what a dramatisation could contribute to a case that had already dominated national news for so long: “What can we add to this that isn’t just ripping off from the headlines?” However, his doubts were dispelled after meeting showrunner Katie Robbins, who proposed a framework that subverted audience assumptions through shifting viewpoints, rather than a straightforward retelling: “I thought it was an innovative model for narrative television in general, but also a really ethically interesting way to tell this story,” Duplass explained. “To tell this from multiple perspectives and really use the unreliable narrators of Michael and Kristine up front to lull you into a sense of what the story might be.”
Furthermore, Pompeo emphasised that the series isn’t just about what happened – it’s about why different people interpret the same events so differently, stating, “What we’re asking the audience to do is to ask yourselves, why do you believe what you believe?” Noting that Good American Family deliberately plays with perception, Duplass notes that viewers will be urged to re-evaluate their assumptions with both the familiar and unfamiliar. “Viewers have come to trust somebody like Ellen Pompeo after 20 years of television – regardless of the fact that she may be an unreliable narrator.”
Despite their varying tenures in the industry, all three actors agree that Good American Family is unlike anything they’ve worked on before. Duplass concluded by expressing his hope that audiences would allow themselves to embrace all the emotions they experience while watching the eight episodes: “The show is meant to implicate you for having an opinion, and then you realise maybe you were a little bit too quick to judge, and that’s part of the fun. Don’t feel bad about that.”
Christina Yang
Good American Family is released on Disney+ on 9th April 2025.
Watch the trailer for Good American Family here:
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