The ending of the Season 1 finale of ‘Disclaimer’, explained

• “Disclaimer,” Alfonso Cuarón’s Apple TV+ show, aired its finale this week.
• The story ended with a twist, centered around a sex scene, that turned the rest of the show on its head.
• Star Leila George spoke to BI about filming two versions of the pivotal scene.

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for the season finale of ‘Disclaimer.’

“Disclaimer” ended this week with a big twist that changes the way viewers view the entire series.

The AppleTV+ show, adapted by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón from Renée Knight’s 2015 novel, starring Cate Blanchett as Catherine Ravenscroft, a successful documentary filmmaker whose life unravels when she is sent a novel in which she is the central character. The novel chronicles a young mother’s scandalous affair with a teenage boy while on vacation in Italy, and the subsequent tragedy that occurs when the teenager drowns while saving his lover’s young son.

The book, called “The Perfect Stranger”, was actually edited by Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), a retired teacher, a widow and the father of Jonathan, the deceased young man at the center of the story. Stephen’s late wife, Nancy, harbored a grudge against Catherine for decades after discovering erotic photographs of her among Jonathan’s belongings after his death.

Consequently, Nancy filled in the blanks and concluded that Jonathan and Catherine were having a secret affair, and that Jonathan’s love for Catherine led him to sacrifice his life to save her son Nicholas. She writes a manuscript about what certainly happened between the two, and when Stephen discovers it after Nancy’s death from cancer, he publishes it with the intention of taking revenge on Catherine for his son’s death.

‘Disclaimer’ unfolds in a non-linear fashion, giving us bits and pieces of flashbacks to the fateful meeting between Catherine and Jonathan years before. Throughout the show’s first five episodes, those flashbacks tell one coherent story: that Catherine seduced Jonathan and aggressively pursued him.

However, the penultimate episode reveals some inaccuracies in the novel’s version of events (such as Jonathan’s girlfriend leaving Italy early because of an argument with him, not because of her aunt’s death). That episode ends with Catherine and Stephen finally coming face to face, and Catherine demanding that Stephen listen to her story about what really happened in Italy years ago.

In the finale, Catherine finally tells her side of the story: she and Jonathan never had an affair. Instead, he broke into her hotel room, threatened her and her sleeping son with a knife and then raped her repeatedly. The erotic photos Nancy discovered were not memories of their relationship, but rather images that Jonathan forced a traumatized Catherine to pose for during the violent encounter.

Catherine says she collected physical evidence of her rape with the intention of going to the police, but decided to destroy it and bury the truth after Jonathan died.

The “flashbacks” we’d seen earlier in the season, with Catherine as a sex-starved cougar and Jonathan as her hapless prey, weren’t flashbacks at all. Instead, they were enactments of Nancy’s imagined (and ultimately false) version of what happened between the two.

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Stephen, initially unwilling to believe that his dead son was actually a rapist, begins his revenge plan. Leaving a barely conscious Catherine, to whom he had already given drugged tea, he heads to the hospital to kill her estranged son Nicholas, now a drug-addicted young man in intensive care after an overdose. He stops when a half-conscious Nicholas calls for his mother, and seems to realize that what Catherine told him about Jonathan was true.

Ultimately, he burns Catherine’s photos and abandons his plans. Meanwhile, Catherine chooses not to reconcile with her husband, who left her immediately after hearing the affair story and seemed relieved to hear that it was actually rape, and makes amends with a recovered Nicholas.

The twist of the ‘Disclaimer’ ending hinges on duplicate versions of one sex scene, both performed by Leila George

We first see the meeting between Jonathan and young Catherine (played by Leila George in the Italian sequences) depicted as a sex scene in episode three. The truth, that it was a rape, is shown in the finale. Both versions are extensive, detailed and graphic, and were intense to film.

According to George, Cuarón was completely upfront with her about what the role would entail, telling her exactly how he wanted to film the graphic scenes and what would be shown. Those scenes, she said, were very detailed in the script, which Cuarón showed her before she agreed to sign on.

It was important for George to know that all the sex scenes she did were essential to the story and not unnecessary. “Especially for this job, I think the whole story revolves around tonight,” George said. “It’s essential to the story. There’s nothing in it that isn’t necessary. It felt very, very necessary.”

She and Louis Partridge, who plays Jonathan, worked with intimacy coordinator Samantha Murray for about a week before filming the intimate scenes.

“Everyone is safe as long as you follow the moves you’ve planned in advance,” George said, comparing coordinated sex scenes to fight scenes or dance scenes. “That’s what we did.”

It also helped that she and Partridge bonded.

“It really depends so much on the other person and who you’re working with,” said George, adding of Partridge: “He’s brilliant and mature beyond his years. I felt so lucky to be able to work with him. “

Having self-confidence when you have to undress in a room full of people also helps: ‘I exercise a lot.’

George has no idea why Cuarón called her out of the blue to ask her for ‘Disclaimer’

George’s time on “Disclaimer” was a whirlwind.

According to the actor, it all started with a “crazy phone call” from the Oscar-winning director asking if she wanted to be on his show. There was no script for her to review in advance, so George quickly read the book it was based on in preparation.

From there, she had just three days to get on a plane and get straight into gear before flying to Italy. She estimates she was on set about ten days after that first phone call.

“I don’t know why he called me that day, what he had seen, or who really put me in front of him, I really don’t know,” George said. “But it was definitely one of the best calls I’ve ever received in my life.”

The season finale of “Disclaimer” is now streaming AppleTV+.