Apple TV's 'Lucky' Was Always Building to That Gut-Punch Ending Between Anya Taylor-Joy and Timothy Olyphant

Published Aug 19, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT

Carly Lane is an Atlanta-based writer and critic who has been with Collider in some form or fashion since 2021. She considers herself a television nerd, diehard romance/sci-fi/fantasy reader, and nascent horror lover. Her fondness of books is only eclipsed by the towering TBR that her shelves can't possibly contain.

She is the author of A REGENCY GUIDE TO MODERN LIFE: 1800s ADVICE ON 21ST CENTURY LOVE, FRIENDS, FUN AND MORE, published through DK Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House) and currently available wherever books are sold.

Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for the finale of Lucky.

In more than one sense, Apple TV's new crime thriller Lucky has a clear endpoint. Not only has the story been building to the ultimate confrontation between the titular lead, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, and the various threats pursuing her, but the streaming adaptation of Marissa Stapley's 2021 novel was always intended to be a one-and-done season. As of now, that plan hasn't changed, according to Cassie Pappas (Silo, Griselda), who serves as co-showrunner and executive producer alongside Jonathan Tropper (Your Friends & Neighbors). "We absolutely crafted it as a limited series," Pappas tells Collider, "and we made sure to tie up all the loose ends."

Nowhere is that more evident than in the series' finale, "All Good Things," which Pappas intentionally wrote as a "one-two punch," courtesy of the big match-up featuring all of the story's major players, followed by the quietly final blow that Lucky delivers to none other than her own father, John (Timothy Olyphant). Ahead of the finale's airing, Pappas spoke with Collider about working with Taylor-Joy as both a creative collaborator and #1 on the call sheet, why filming "All Good Things" was an even more grueling experience than the Vegas-set premiere, why the final 15 minutes are all in service of the series' ultimate "emotional con," and much more.

COLLIDER: I want to start by going back to Marissa [Stapley’s] book; in many ways, I feel like adaptation is an unenviable position to be in, in terms of taking a story and the elements that work for a new medium while also having to make really tough decisions about what to part ways with. What were some of the elements that you knew you wanted to preserve from the book, and in the same vein, what did you know you had to cut loose?

CASSIE PAPPAS: We knew for sure that the heart of the show was going to be this complicated father-daughter relationship, and that exists in the book. We all inherit baggage from our parents, whether it's genetic traits or whether it's nature versus nurture. [Jonathan] Tropper and I were both really drawn to writing dysfunctional family dramas, so to be able to have that as our core, but with a criminal element to it, felt fresh and new and like something we had never seen before.

Thematically, I loved the idea that while Lucky is on the run externally, meaning the external forces that are chasing after her — she's got the FBI and the mob literally after her — what if the thing that she's actually trying to outrun is inside her, in her blood? It's her genetics. It's her father's voice in her head, and that became a cool duality of external and internal forces that she's battling. A lot of that was in the book.

The book has a lot of flashbacks that would take you to Lucky's childhood, being raised by a con artist, and how he would use his young daughter as the face of his cons, and we loved those. There's this great scene in the book where Young Lucky’s asleep in a motel room and her dad busts in in the middle of the night. Clearly, he's either lost everything or someone's after him, but something's gone tits up, and he wakes her up and goes to cut her hair in the mirror — and she, at eight years old, sprints out into the woods. They're in the middle of nowhere, and she sprints and sprints and sprints as far as she can, and then she gets terrified because she realizes, “There's no one but me.” He finds her, and basically looks at her and is like, “I'm all you've got.” She resigns, goes back, and they finish cutting her hair, and they go on the run again.

There were some flashbacks like that that we would have loved to put in the pilot, but sometimes, if you stay too long in a flashback, it takes away from the propulsive on-the-run nature. As you saw, the pilot’s almost like Run Lola Run. The whole thing is a chase sequence. We had to balance how much time you can live in a flashback before you want to get back to the action. The compromise is that, as you have seen, we have these impressionistic memories. There were whole chapters in the book that just lived in the past, and we would take the essence and the heart of that chapter and try to truncate it into a flash.

One shot that I'm thinking of instantly is in the finale — it's Lucky in the motel room, lying awake in bed, and then there's that flash to her and John's younger selves, in another motel room at a different point in time.

PAPPAS: That’s exactly us trying to do that, not having the real estate to spend five to seven pages on a flashback. The idea that these two, as grown-ass adults, are still sleeping in twin beds in a motel room, and they've been doing this their whole lives, and John is completely fine with it, and she's just not.

Anya Taylor-Joy Had a Clear List of Dos and Don'ts for 'Lucky'

"It's cool to have an actor and a producer who really is clear and knows what they're interested in."

Image via Apple TV

Anya’s a big name in her own right, and she does have an EP credit. Previously, I spoke to her about doing the show and how creatively involved she wanted to be. How beneficial was that on your side, having your lead actor involved in those types of decisions?

PAPPAS: Anya is incredibly intelligent, and so, on one hand, she's playing a character who's always the smartest person in the room, and on set, sometimes she also is the smartest person on set. She's a natural-born producer. You can just feel it in her notes, her taste. She has exquisite taste when it comes to wardrobe, when it comes to music. She has her finger on the pulse in all the ways, and that just trickles down into what she brings to set.

This is an idea that never even made it to an actual script, but there was a moment when Tropper and I were entertaining: what if Lucky, while she's on the run, finds out that she's pregnant? She and Cary had just been together.

I'll be honest: the scene between her and John, when she's eating the pickles, there was a moment when I went, “What if…?”

PAPPAS: Right now, she's on the run because she wants to get out of the life that she wasn't born into, but if you put a child inside of her, then now she's really doing it for this life — “I have to get out because I'm not doing this again to somebody else.” Really, really quickly, just upon hearing it at face value, Anya was like, “I don't want to do that. I'm not interested in that story.” That, to me, is super helpful because we were able to then pivot off from that and make it all about Lucky and her life. On many levels, Anya may have been totally right. We may not have needed that element. That element's definitely not in the book. So, there were things like that that she would really have a clear, strong opinion about.

Another thing she was really, really clear about from the beginning is that she did not want the pilot to begin with a lot of exposition. She didn't want anyone's hand to be held. She wanted the audience to be dropped in and then catch up. There's even a flashback in the pilot where you see a scene between Lucky and her dad, and he's in prison, and he's telling her, “I’ve stolen some money. I need you to go get it,” which, essentially, is the exposition. She was even resistant to that flashback because she believes the audience is smart. She believes the audience can catch up. It's cool to have an actor and a producer who really is clear and knows what they're interested in.

She brought up the fact that she first saw Drew [Starkey] in Queer before pitching him as Cary.

PAPPAS: There was nobody else but Drew for her.

Thinking about how the story shakes out, it's so sad to see him killed off. Did you and Tropper ever think about trying to keep Drew around as long as you possibly could?

PAPPAS: Totally. The Drew piece is a great example of Anya being ahead of the curve, or having her finger on the pulse, because she was hyper-aware of how good he was and how much he is massively blowing up right now. But a year ago, I don't know that he was on everyone's radar the way that he is now.

In terms of when we broke out the season, we always knew that Cary was going to die in the car crash at the midpoint, end of [Episode] 4. We hadn't cast Drew at that point; we just knew Cary was going to die. When we cast Drew, we knew what a huge following he had from Outer Banks. We knew everyone was going to love this character. We never considered not doing it, but when we explained it to him and everybody else, the reason why we felt like it had to happen is because Lucky needs, at the midpoint, to realize that her cons have consequences, and that what she's doing has real life-or-death stakes. At this point, this isn't just about conning somebody out of their wallet in their back pocket.

For her to lose Cary, in a way, allows her to then, almost as if it's like a video game, level up, with her eyes now set on her father, and go, “This is who I have to get out from underneath.” At first, it's her husband who betrays her. She can't see beyond or past that. I think Cary even has a line in Episode 4 about her dad where he says, “You can't see it. You just can't see it.” We always treated him as a stepping stone. She loses him first before she gets to the final ending where she's got to come to terms with this relationship with her father. Can she be free of this life without him? Can she be free of this life without the money? It's all of those things. Where she ends up is, “I can't have my father, and I can't have the money if I'm going to get out of this clean.”

'Lucky's Story Is Intentionally Centered Around the Women

"That was day one in the writers’ room."

Image via Apple TV

We’ve been talking about the men in this show, who are really important relationships for Lucky, but one thing that really struck me by the time I got to the finale is that the story feels very strongly rooted in three women: Lucky, Priscilla, and Agent Rand. Was that something that ever crossed your mind as the show was coming together?

PAPPAS: You've totally hit on it. That was day one in the writers’ room. Agent Billie Rand, who's played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, didn't exist in the book, and we felt like we needed an FBI agent on Lucky's tail to give heat and propulsion to the story. I was the one who was adamant that this character needed to be a woman. Of course, Hello Sunshine was on board for that because that's their brand. The idea that you have a female criminal, a female mob boss, and a female FBI agent — we also wanted to convey what it's like for women in the world today. There's usually a man above you, so we crafted it so that there is a man above each one of them. For Lucky, it's her father; for Priscilla, it's Wayne Whittaker; and for Rand, it's Kershaw.

By the end, they each sort of shatter that glass ceiling. They ascend the throne, and they all get their own form of redemption in one way or another, which I felt was super satisfying, and I don't know that I've seen that before in this type of genre. That was something we felt really strongly about.

Getting into the finale, something that started to happen that was half by design, and then even more naturally when you read the scenes out loud, is that scene when they're in the gas terminal, and Lucky’s face-to-face with Wayne and Priscilla, but Rand can hear her. Even though Lucky's talking to Wayne, she's actually talking to both women. She's actually telling Rand, up on the tower, that the dude who is her partner, who she fucking thinks is legit, is dirty. The thing she's saying to Priscilla, subtextually, is, “This guy let you go to prison. Are you really going to shoot me?” It became a cool, like you said, triangle of these three women communicating in the moment, and being able to thread the needle to get out of there alive.

I'm even thinking of that exchange where Lucky's told to look at Priscilla during the meeting, instead of Wayne. Again, it feels like these women have a different language they're all speaking.

PAPPAS: The thing I like about the watch that Priscilla is wearing, the reason we did the whole scene, is because we wanted Priscilla to feel her son in that moment. When she's holding the gun on Lucky, from Priscilla's point of view, you can feel him standing in between them. What Priscilla comes to realize is that the only other woman on this earth who loved her son the way she did is Lucky. There are scenes where Wayne and Priscilla are in the back of the Rivian on their way to the gas terminal; even if her hand was out of frame, Annette [Bening] was always touching the watch or shaking it. It was just a cool piece of wardrobe that you could tell helped the character.

Inside Apple TV's 'Lucky' Finale: 100-Degree Weather and an On-Set Snake Wrangler

"I would say that that was a harder location than shooting all-nighters at Caesar's Palace."

Image via Apple TV

How did you settle on that location for the meeting? Visually, it's striking, but it also lends itself to some really exciting moments, like when Clifton [Collins Jr.]'s character drowns one of Wayne's henchmen in the oil.

PAPPAS: Early days in the writers’ room, we always knew the finale was going to end in a meet where Lucky's wearing a wire. We had an FBI consultant on the show, and he said whenever you get a mid-level criminal, you always use that mid-level criminal to go after the bigger fish. Story-wise, narratively, that was always in place. What changed as we got further along in production was location.

At first, as a placeholder, we had the meet taking place at a really nice hotel, because the FBI can control that environment. Then, after a while, we knew we had this gas scam as the way that Priscilla and Wayne made their money, which is based on a real gas scam that happened here in Los Angeles, and so then we started thinking, “What if we use that as the location?” This is one of those times that a location scout helped inform our finale, because once Jonathan van Tulleken, our director, and I saw that location, we were like, “This is it. We have to do the finale here.” To answer your question, because I'm so glad you brought up the drowning in the oil, as we're scouting that location, Jonathan van Tulleken sees this giant puddle of oil, and he's like, “Oh, we’ve got to drown somebody in that.” So, as we would discover certain things, I would add it to the script.

Not only is there steam, texturally, but it also is kind of this great metaphor for the water theme in the episode, where you start on that image of Lucky drowning in water. There are several flashes of it — of her drowning during the con, and then knowing where we end, which is her free and clean, and it's like blank-slate water. It's kind of nice to have this huge set piece taking place in what is literally the opposite.

It was the hardest location we've ever shot at. It was like 100 degrees in Santa Clarita. We had a snake wrangler who, every day, would show up in the most insane outfit, and as he'd walk by, we'd be like, “How many do you have today?” He'd be like, “I've got five in the bucket.” I was wearing goggles. We were wearing bandanas because it smelled. It was just the fumes, all of it. So, I think we shot there for 10 days, and I would say that that was a harder location than shooting all-nighters at Caesar's Palace.

In terms of how the finale is paced, you'd think that, instinctively, the big confrontation would go right at the very end, and then it happens, and you realize there’s still 15 minutes left in the episode. It's the comedown, but then you're bracing yourself for what's around the corner. When you were plotting out the finale's structure, what fueled the decision to wrap up the action at that point? We know in hindsight what it's building to, in terms of Lucky making that decisive break from her father, but it's definitely something that might surprise the audience, since it happens when you start to lower your guard.

PAPPAS: Absolutely. It's something that I felt very strongly about from the very beginning — an emotional climax in addition to the action set piece climax — so that's how we structured it. To your point, you're exactly right: if this was just an action movie, that would be our penultimate, second-to-last scene, and then you'd be done. But for us, it only solves part of the problem for Lucky. She still has to figure out, “What am I going to do with my father?”

It's like a one-two punch, in a way. We have this action set-piece climax, where Lucky uses this back-pocket information she has on Kershaw as a bomb to sort of blow up the whole thing. She threads the needle perfectly. Priscilla kills Wayne, Rand kills Kershaw, and Lucky and her dad get out alive. Then you think, to your point, you're like, “Okay, now we're in the denouement.” The way I would think about that last little stretch of scenes is that now, Lucky is going to run an emotional con on her father, almost like she's setting a trap. Because I think there's this part of her brain that deep, deep down is like, “I've got the money.”

I also love the idea — I think it's something I learned from my therapist — of the tension of opposites, that you can hold two things to be true, even though they're very different. Where Lucky's at at the end is, “My dad's a criminal, and he's never going to change, but he's also my dad, and I don’t want to lose my dad.” There's this inner child part of her, especially in that scene where they share the dreams after she eats the pickle. His dream is essentially saying, “You've always been my way out. You're my lucky charm. That's why I nicknamed you this.” That's the way he sees it. He doesn't see the emotional cost on the other side of it: that she's always been the face of his cons.

She starts to tell him her dream, and she's like, “Mine's a recurring dream of drowning.” He goes, “You know what that's about, right?” And she looks excited, like she's about to open up to her dad, and before she can even say it, he goes, “It means you're running out of time,” and he just mansplains to her. In that scene, whatever shred of hope she had left deteriorates because he essentially goes, “Right, so what are we going to do with the money?” And she's already said repeatedly, “I don't want to do anything with the money. I want to be clean and free of it.”

It's that night that she realizes, “Okay, my dad's going to always be who he's going to be, and I'm going to leave this last trap and see if he goes for it.” She knows he will, and he does. What's cool about it on his side is that Timothy [Olyphant] — you'll see, on his face, the shock of it when her voice comes out of the bear, and then the next emotion is parental pride. He almost has a smile, and I think it's because he's like, “Damn, I taught her well.” The narcissist in him is still like, “Yeah, I taught her. She's better than me. The student has surpassed the master.”

We had to be really mindful in the edit, to your point, because once you're done with that big action set piece, if those later scenes drag on too long, you start to sort of lose the tension that you need for a finale. A good example of where we ended up cutting in the edit was the scene between Priscilla and Rand by the pool. Rand's basically like, “I'm going to get you,” and Priscilla's like, “Aren't you tired? Go home.” That scene was much longer on the page. They sort of waxed poetically about morality and good and bad and stuff like that, and we ended up cutting to just the bare-bones essentials of that scene so that we could get to the ending and not lose the pacing we had. It's an interesting episode. I don't think it's totally structurally conventional.

Something else that stood out to me in that final sequence with Lucky — not even just thematically, but visually, there's a parallel between her waking up alone in the motel and waking up alone in Vegas.

PAPPAS: I love that you picked up on that. I love it. I can't remember if we talked about this the first time we met, but we studied a lot in the writers’ room about the art of the con, and we learned that it's essentially a cycle of trust and betrayal. You gain someone's trust, you betray them before they even realize it, and you walk out the door, and you've got money or a car or whatever it is. We thought, “Oh, that's a really cool thematic theme for the character, that she's also emotionally stuck.” The actual mechanism of a con is a cycle of trust and betrayal, and then that metaphor is what's happening in all of her relationships. Cary is a cycle of trust and betrayal. He drugs her. He leaves. Same with her dad at the end. It's that idea that she has to break that cycle in order to be free.

I put a lot of random personal stuff into this episode, like that scene when John's talking to Lucky about Tommy Tangle; before he does the super bad thing and steals the bear and leaves, I wanted the audience to see that he was just a single dad doing the very best that he could raising a girl alone, and that's all he knew to do. That's something my mom used to do when she was brushing my hair before I went to school. We would name all my tangles. My mom's a Texan, so she'd be like, “Where's Tommy? There's Theresa!” For me to be able to tell my mom that Tommy Tangle made it into the finale of Lucky was pretty funny.

'Lucky's Cassie Pappas Explains the Apple TV Thriller's Very Last Shot

"She has no idea who she really is underneath the masks."

Image via Apple TV

There are two moments that feel like another parallel within the finale. Lucky looks at the camera after leaving the message for her dad in the bear, but then there's another fourth-wall break at the very end, when she's at the beach. You can feel the peace that she's achieved — maybe not total peace, but like she's one step closer to having her own life, whatever that looks like. When did you know you wanted that to be the last shot of the show?

PAPPAS: I wrote a monologue in Episode 6, and basically the idea behind it is a carrot that John had dangled in front of Lucky as a child that was basically a promise, saying, "We're not going to do this forever." That's a classic con artist thing. “We're going to hit big, and then we're going to get out. We're not going to do this forever.” I wanted Lucky to have this shared dream with her father, where he made a promise to her that, “We're on the run right now, and I know we're always on the move, but one day we're going to actually run out of land. There's not going to be any more because we're going to be standing with our feet in the sand, looking out at the ocean, and we're going to be free.”

I think she truly had held on to that image and that idea her whole life. By the end of the finale, I wanted her to get to a place where she's able to say to herself, “The only way I'm going to get there is if I give it to myself. Free myself from my father, give the gift to myself, and my feet will be in the sand, and I'll be looking out at the ocean.”

The thing that dovetailed in a nice way was, again, the water imagery. The drowning con was something that we came up with in the first week of the writers’ room. We had no idea where we were going to use it, but we just thought a kid that's grown up from motel to motel probably doesn't know how to swim. They haven't had time to have swim lessons, and how fucked up would it be if her dad decided to use that as a way to get their rooms comped at a nice hotel? Then, as we broke the rest of the season, I realized it was a cool thing to dovetail with the ocean at the end. You can take this imagery of water, which has been her recurring nightmare, and now it means something else entirely different to her, and this slate is clean.

She's come of age wearing masks. She has no idea who she really is underneath the masks. To me, that final shot of her, the close on her face, is where we purposely wanted to cut before we got to an exhale. It's almost like that first breath of her new life. She can literally be anyone. The masks are off, and you don't really even get to see the release of it, but you almost get to see a smile.

It feels like there's a little smile there.

PAPPAS: Yeah, you can imagine the various number of takes we had to go through of how much smile.

Something that just occurred to me when hearing you talk about the water motif is that it seems like that's part of why Lucky's reaction to discovering Cary at the beach house is so strong. Not only has he betrayed her, but he's in the place that she always pictured herself in.

PAPPAS: Yes. Having a swim. Speaking to Episode 7, I had just written the last scene as “beach.” It was nondescript. I remember our locations guy calling me and being like, “Were you picturing a tropical beach?” I thought that might seem a little cliché, the con artist escaping to the tropical beach. And then he's like, “Well, I've got an idea. What about Big Sur?” And I literally lost it. I was like, “Are you kidding me?” It turned out that we could pull off Big Sur. We shot that last. Literally, it was the last thing we shot before we wrapped. We took a skeleton crew to Big Sur, and we shot at Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, and that was just really, really cool. It's the coolest beach you could actually end up at.

There could be more to the story, but it's such a good ending that you almost don't want to.

PAPPAS: That's the question we keep getting: is there going to be a spin-off? As of right now, absolutely no conversations are being had about whether that should happen or not, but we absolutely crafted it as a limited series, and we made sure to tie up all the loose ends.

I think the scene between Priscilla and Rand has a teeny feeling of a cracked door, because it's a bit unresolved. But what I like about where we leave Priscilla is she's alone in her mansion. She's ascended the throne. She's killed Wayne Whitaker, but her son is dead, so at what cost? I do like that final image of her alone by the pool — having it all, but also maybe having nothing.

All episodes of Lucky are now available to stream on Apple TV.