‘Locke & Key’s Darby Stanchfield Breaks Down The Netflix Series’ “Woman Shattered Beyond Repair”

When Locke & Key premieres on Netflix, you’ll finally get to meet the entire Locke family: Tyler (Connor Jessup), Kinsey (Emilia Jones), Bode (Jackson Robert Scott), and even Uncle Duncan Locke (Aaron Ashmore). But it wasn’t until late in the process that the production added one of the most crucial members of the family, matriarch Nina Locke (Darby Stanchfield).

“I was the last family member cast,” Stanchfield told Decider over the phone, “and they liked what I brought.”

What Stanchfield, a TV vet who starred as Abby Whelan on ABC’s hit Scandal for seven seasons, brought was something very different than what Nina Locke brings in the books by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez. This version of Nina, as Stanchfield describes it, is, “not drunk the whole time with tears streaming down her face and she’s not in a leg brace.”

It might be reasonable to assume that would be the setup, though. As Locke & Key begins, Nina’s husband Rendell Locke (Bill Heck) is murdered right in front of her by a student named Sam Lesser (Thomas Mitchell Barnet). In the comics, Nina is also injured during the attack (the full extent isn’t revealed until several volumes later), and moves her whole family back to Rendell’s old, family home of Keyhouse.

There, the kids discover the house is filled with magical keys that each have their own abilities, and fight an evil entity who wants to possess those keys. They also discover quickly that Sam is tied to that entity, and their father’s death wasn’t so accidental after all. This info only further complicates things for Nina, though, because adults aren’t able to see the magic of the keys — so all she knows is that her family is being repeatedly attacked without seeming sense or reason.

“We wanted to recalibrate Nina,” Carlton Cuse, an Executive Producer and writer on Locke & Key told Decider. “In the comic books she’s kind of drunk the whole time. And in our story, she’s on the wagon, and it’s all about the wagon,  deep into our season.”

If you look at the page, and then at a picture of Stanchfield, you might sense that disconnect. The comics character has black hair, of course, but beyond that there’s a deep sadness in the way artist Gabriel Rodriguez draws Nina. She’s also, as written, prone to violent outbursts and frequently drives away her own children, often barely able to look at them since they remind her too much of her murdered husband. Not so with Stanchfield’s performance.

“Darby just brings to the table such immediate sympathy,” Cuse continued. “She’s so likeable. She’s warm, she’s a welcoming character and person. We wanted Nina to draw you in right from the get-go, and then we would go on the ride of her emotional journey; which is a fairly bumpy road, as she’s dealing with the investigation of her husband’s murder, the resettling of her kids after an incredible trauma, and then ultimately, her own struggles with alcoholism.”

Added Cuse, “It was a hard search to find someone like Darby, who has the intelligence, the presence, and then the sympathetic, fundamental quality that we really were looking for in the character.”

If you still don’t quite see it, don’t worry, neither did Stanchfield. After meeting with showrunners Cuse and Meredith Averill, they handed her a stack of the comics and encouraged her to read the book. It wasn’t until she got to the point that the books describe Nina as “a woman shattered beyond repair,” that Stanchfield felt like she truly understood Nina.

“And when I got to that point, then I really sat down with the comics and kind of binged them and obsessed over them, really,” Stanchfield recalled. “And let the sadness and beauty of those illustrations and words kind of feed me, in that… That was my journey.”

You’ll be able to watch Stanchfield’s journey as Nina Locke yourself, when Locke & Key debuts on Netflix on February 7.

Stream Locke & Key on Netflix