Amanda Knox knows how to put on a brave face. She was perfectly composed on the set of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, an eight-episode limited series premiering August 20 on Hulu. That is, until the day they recreated how Italian authorities questioned Knox after the brutal murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher. “I did not lose my shit on set,” Knox tells Vanity Fair—“except for that time. We spent two 10-hour days doing this scene from all the different angles over and over and over again. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to get that right, so that the next person who is wrongly accused and ends up falsely confessing feels like people are more willing to believe them.” The experience was intensely emotional: “I just remember sobbing.”
That interrogation was a major turning point in the case dramatized by The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, which debuts its trailer and key art exclusively with VF.
Knox, an American studying in Perugia, Italy, was only 20 years old when the British-born Kercher was killed in 2007. Investigators focused on the quirky Knox and her then boyfriend of roughly a week, Raffaele Sollecito, leading the media to push a false narrative that the murder was some sort of sex-torture mishap—led by a woman the tabloids called “Foxy Knoxy.” Italian courts convicted Knox and Sollecito twice of Kercher’s murder, before finally exonerating them in 2015. A separate trial convicted Rudy Guede, a Perugia local with a history of break-ins, of the crime. He was released from prison in 2021 after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence.
Last year, Knox was once again re-convicted of a crime in Italy—for slander, over a statement she made while in police custody that named Patrick Lumumba, her former employer, as responsible for Kercher’s murder. Italy’s highest court had overturned the conviction in 2023 and ordered a retrial. Although Knox was sentenced to three years in prison, she was not expected to serve any time beyond the four years she already spent in Italian custody.
Knox has spoken out several times since her exoneration—telling her story across two books, a 2016 Netflix documentary, several podcasts, and even a cameo on the prematurely-cancelled Peacock comedy series Laid, which was prematurely canceled. Though she’d long been chased by filmmakers hoping to make a scripted project based on the case, she’d also been burned before—by a 2011 Lifetime movie and, a decade later, the Matt Damon–led drama Stillwater, which borrowed the broad strokes of her case without seeking her involvement. (Director and cowriter Tom McCarthy acknowledged in a 2021 interview with Vanity Fair that Stillwater was inspired by Knox, but maintained that it was a work of fiction.)
“Today, I’m an executive producer and creative partner, whereas in the past, even those who have approached me with the best intentions, it’s always been, ‘We want to tell your story,’” says Knox. “I wasn’t interested in having yet another person’s voice telling the worst experience of my life for who knows what reason.”
The 2021 birth of Knox’s daughter and a call from the right collaborator—Monica Lewinsky, whom she’s called a fellow member of the “Sisterhood of Ill Repute”—led her to reconsider. “This story was one in which real human beings—myself, but also my roommate Meredith, my boyfriend Raffaele, and even my prosecutor Giuliano Mignini—were diminished. We were put into little boxes and judged on the basis of the labels that were stuck on us,” says Knox. “This series is really working to push back against those containers. We don’t have to be limited by black-and-white narratives when thinking about tragedies. And I think that’s really useful in a time where people are siloing off and not finding common ground. This story serves as a cautionary tale for that.”
With Lewinsky, Knox, and Knox’s husband, Christopher Robinson, assembled as executive producers, it was time to find a showrunner who could shrewdly revisit one of the 21st century’s most sensational true-crime tales. As her time on the Emmy-winning drama This Is Us came to a close, series creator K.J. Steinberg emerged as that missing piece. “I might’ve been the only person who did not have a strong opinion about Amanda Knox,” Steinberg says. “A lot of people had zealous and fervent opinions—not only about her innocence versus her guilt, but her as a person. I read hundreds of takes on her, people putting themselves as authors of who she is, and I found it all very distracting and confusing. But as soon as I met her, I was certain of her.”
Steinberg hoped to unspool the public misperceptions surrounding Knox. “They looked at her behavior and supposed that they were looking right into her inner life, which is such a dangerous thing to assume,” she says. “Our show is not a whodunit. It’s about how and why did this happen. How and why did bias take hold of the authorities on the ground, the people in the media, folks at home? Even the best of people, the smartest of people, had such distorted views.”
Grace Van Patten, who had long felt a connection to Amanda Knox, came on board to bring the story’s enigmatic heroine to life. “I vividly remember watching the documentary when it came out, and it kind of aligned with when I first started acting,” says Van Patten. “I actually said to my agents at the time that if they ever made an Amanda Knox project, that would be my dream.” After original star Margaret Qualley reportedly dropped out of the project due to scheduling, Van Patten rose to the occasion, calling the opportunity “a crazy full-circle moment.”
