Another Simple Favor's Writer Explains That Shocking Incest Scene

Spoiler alert: Don’t read on if you haven’t seen Another Simple Favor.

Just when you thought a movie couldn’t get any twistier than 2018’s A Simple Favor, its sequel somehow made Emily Nelson’s identity-warping existence even wilder. After the big twin reveal in the first movie, Another Simple Favor upped the ante with a triplet reveal, as Emily learned the sister she thought had died in childbirth has been hiding in the shadows all these years. And her reunion with Charity is... very unnerving.

Once Charity incapacitates her twin sister with a drug, she begins to fondle her unmoving body in bed, cooing about how she’s going to make Emily “feel good” as her hands travel lower and lower. The scene is something of a cheeky nod to an incestuous joke baked into the first movie, as Emily continues to tease Stephanie when she learns she had an intimate moment with her stepbrother. It’s also one of the many queer layers to the second movie, building on Stephanie and Emily’s strangely seductive vibe and the big twist of Emily’s fiancé Dante’s hidden love life.

Jessica Sharzer, who co-wrote the sequel, explained that the first movie’s large LGBTQ+ fanbase is what inspired the intimate moments. “The first movie has a really big gay following, which we wanted to embrace,” Sharzer told The Hollywood Reporter. “We were looking for opportunities to tell really great stories that also have a queer element to them. The queer element of the franchise is baked in as far as we’re concerned to the storytelling and the relationship between Anna [Kendrick] and Blake [Lively] in the movie we see as a love story. It may not be a romantic story, but we see it as primarily a love story between two women. It may be twisted, but it is a love story.”

When it came to crafting Charity’s unique style, Sharzer revealed that Lively was the one to have the newly introduced triplet dress like she was plucked straight out of Little House on the Prairie. “She really is interested in cottagecore and I just didn’t know what it was when she brought it up,” Sharzer said. “She brought that idea, which you can see in the Charity character, that she’s dressed in this really old gingham dress and she has this hairstyle that’s really retro and that came from Blake directly.”