For a ‘Twisted Tale,’ Amanda Knox and Grace Van Patten became one

Grace Van Patten, left, who portrays Amanda Knox, right, in the new Hulu miniseries “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” in New York, Aug. 10, 2025. Knox served as an executive producer of the ambitious eight-part series that recounts her infamous international crime saga. (Lila Barth/The New York Times)

By Maya Salam

As the title character of the miniseries “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” actress Grace Van Patten had to convincingly embody a highly examined figure at the center of a real-life legal drama followed by millions. Even more daunting, she had to do it in front of Amanda Knox herself, an executive producer.

Those close to Knox were stunned by the results.

“Grace, I haven’t told you this yet — when they see you play me, they get chills,” Knox told Van Patten during a conversation with The New York Times last week. “You just did it, and they were like, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.’ ”

Van Patten gasped in response. “It was some fusion that happened,” she said. “Because a lot of it felt very subconscious to me.”

The eight-part series debuts on Hulu on Wednesday. The chills were inspired, Knox said, partly by Van Patten nailing her personality quirks: her occasionally singsong voice, the snort in her laugh, the cha-cha in her step. These behaviors and others became ammunition for Italian prosecutors and the global tabloid machine during Knox’s highly publicized trial for the 2007 sexual assault and murder of Meredith Kercher.

Kercher, a 21-year-old British exchange student and one of Knox’s three roommates, was found dead from a knife attack in the flat they shared in Perugia, Italy.

Knox, a 20-year-old Seattle native who was studying there, and Raffaele Sollecito, her Italian boyfriend of about a week, were arrested and imprisoned just days after Kercher was found. In 2009, both were convicted of the killing, with Amanda sentenced to 26 years and Sollecito to 25 years.

In 2011, the ruling was overturned, and Knox returned to the United States. Then in 2014, Knox and Sollecito (played by Giuseppe Domenico in the series) were reconvicted of murder, a conviction that was overturned in 2015, ending the nearly decade-long saga. Another man, Rudy Guede, was convicted separately of the murder in 2008 and was released from prison in 2021, after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence. (Guede’s original 30-year sentence was reduced on appeal.)

A separate slander conviction for Knox was upheld this year. She had implicated Patrick Lumumba, the owner of a bar where she had worked, and herself in a confession made under duress, which she had tried to withdraw almost immediately. (Lumumba was in jail about two weeks as a result.)

In all, Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison.

The miniseries re-creates this legal roller coaster in an unconventional style. It is a prison drama, a courtroom drama, a love story and an anxious horror tale. And it is largely in Italian.

Van Patten (“Nine Perfect Strangers,” “Tell Me Lies”) plays Knox from her 20s, when she was full of “whimsy and optimism and innocence,” as Knox put it, into her mid-30s, when Knox was defined more by “trauma and hauntedness and determination.”

“We asked her to play the best experiences of my life and the worst experiences of life,” said Knox, now 38. “We asked her to do it in English and Italian.”

The series also depicts Knox’s decision, in 2022, to return to Italy to confront Giuliano Mignini, her nemesis during and after the trial. Mignini, the lead Italian prosecutor, had fixated on and promoted the image of Knox as a conniving, sex-crazed murderer. (He compared Knox to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, during the proceedings.) Tabloid headlines smeared her as “Foxy Knoxy,” a childhood nickname lifted from her Myspace page.

On-screen, Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli) is a relentless figure, a smug monster to be dreaded. Knox’s trip to Italy to face (and ultimately befriend) the prosecutor is used as a framing device in the series.

“This is not a show about the worst experience of someone’s life,” Knox said. “This is the show of a person’s choice to find closure on their own terms and to reclaim a sense of agency in their own life after that agency has been stolen from them.”

To prepare to play Knox, Van Patten had numerous video chats with her and spent time in Los Angeles with Knox and her two children. Knox was also frequently on set during production. It all helped the actress understand the complex emotions involved in such a nightmarish experience.

“I was able to go to those places because of how deeply open Amanda was and how deeply vulnerable she was with me,” Van Patten said.

Knox said the themes of perception and miscommunication are fundamental to the story.

“That clash of perspectives and cultures and language, and the tension there, that’s the beauty of drama and it’s the beauty of reality,” she said. “It is what makes this so psychologically and emotionally complex.”

Kercher (Rhianne Barreto) is mostly seen in flashbacks of quiet, playful moments of friendship between her and Knox. The limited screen time reflects real life, in which the media circus around Knox and Sollecito overshadowed Kercher’s brutal death. Last year, Stephanie Kercher, Meredith’s sister, told The Guardian that she found it “difficult to understand” what purpose the miniseries would serve.

“Meredith will always be remembered for her own fight for life, and yet in her absence, her love and personality continues to shine,” she said.

“The Twisted Tale” was created by K.J. Steinberg (“This Is Us”), and executive producers included Monica Lewinsky; Knox’s husband, Christopher Robinson; and Warren Littlefield (“The Handmaid’s Tale”).

It was Lewinsky who first approached Knox about dramatizing her experiences. In 2021, Lewinsky worked to reframe her own story as a producer on the FX series “Impeachment,” about her relationship with former President Bill Clinton when she was a 22-year-old intern and the fallout from it.

Lewinsky knows “deep in her bones what it feels like to have a bad experience, the worst experience of her life, used to diminish her and the turning of her into a punchline,” Knox said. “She has been such a trailblazer in the mission of refusing to be squashed, refusing to be limited.”

“I was really moved by how open people were to me,” Knox said of her collaborators. “I felt supported not just as a source but as a storyteller in my own right.”

Knox said coverage of her was informed and shaped by persistent cultural messaging that “women are either sluts or virgins, and that they all secretly hate each other and would murder each other if they had the chance,” she said. She believes younger generations are more likely to scrutinize reporting and demand more nuance than the public did during her trial.

Still, Knox said she was initially reluctant to saddle Van Patten, 28, with “this baggage that I have been carrying around my entire adult life.”

“In the same way that I didn’t want the dark shadow of being the girl accused of murder passed on to my daughter,” Knox said, “I didn’t want that to pass on to Grace.”