‘Locke & Key’: Darby Stanchfield’s Off The Wagon Episode Was “Incredibly Intense”

Spoilers for Locke & Key Season 1 past this point.

Given everything Nina Locke (Darby Stanchfield) goes through in the first season of Netflix’s Locke & Key, you could forgive her from trying to numb the pain of tragedy a little… But due to the fact that she’s a recovering alcoholic, things go horribly, terribly wrong in the season’s eighth episode, “Ray of F**king Sunshine.”

“It was incredibly intense,” Stanchfield told Decider about filming the episode. “It was challenging, but in the very best way because it pushes you as an actor… It pushed every part of me as an actor.”

After seven seasons on ABC’s hit Scandal, Stanchfield is no stranger to acting through stressful situations. But Locke & Key is a different animal entirely. When Nina is first introduced, she’s moving her family to Matheson, Massachusetts after the murder of her husband, Rendell Locke (Bill Heck). Ostensibly they’re looking to get away from the house where he was killed — and Nina herself, was shot and left for dead — but it quickly becomes clear that she’s also searching for answers about Rendell’s past.

Slowly, she uncovers a mystery that stretches back to Rendell’s high school days in Matheson that led to the death of several of his friends, and ultimately his own murder, as well. That last part is tricky for Nina to understand mostly because Rendell’s home in Matheson, called Keyhouse, is littered with magical keys that only people under the age of 18 know how to use. Several times, Nina touches up against that magic, but thanks to an enchantment around the house, immediately forgets what’s happened.

Things get even more complicated and harrowing in the seventh episode, “Dissection,” when Sam Lesser (Thomas Mitchell Barnet), the kid who killed Rendell, shows up at Keyhouse and threatens the entire family, demanding to know the location of certain keys. Ultimately, this experience that multiple times makes Nina think her children have been killed (don’t worry, they’re all fine) leads Nina to fall off the wagon.

Over the course of “Ray of F**king Sunshine” we see flashbacks to Nina’s life with Rendell, her spinning out of control as her children watch, and ultimately her grappling with one magic key: the mending key. Appropriately enough for someone as broken as Nina, being drunk allows her to understand the keys, and she discovers a cabinet that seems to magically fix everything. So she sticks an urn full of Rendell’s ashes in the cabinet, and waits. And when her son, Tyler (Connor Jessup) enters the house wearing one of his Dad’s flannels, she mistakes Tyler for Rendell.

The final straw? She clashes with her children, and ends up smashing the urn on the floor, spreading the ashes everywhere. The urn, like Nina, is seemingly broken beyond repair.

“By the time we got to filming that episode, I had been living in Toronto, by myself,” Stanchfield continued. “I don’t know how much of this was conscious or subconscious, but I sort of isolated myself, with the exception of these actors, the Locke kids and some of the cast members… I would hang out with them, but not too much.”

That isolation (Stanchfield noted that she would “have a meal or a coffee or something,” but that was pretty much it) helped parallel Nina’s own isolation in the series. She has her kids, including Tyler, Kinsey (Emilia Jones) and Bode (Jackson Robert Scott). She also briefly has a friend in high school coach Ellie Whedon (Sherri Saum), and Rendell’s brother Duncan (Aaron Ashmore), who stops by occasionally from Boston. But by this point in the series she’s fighting with Ellie, and her other life-line, schoolteacher Joe Ridgeway (Steven Williams) has been shockingly murdered.

“There was something really parallel about this isolation and being homesick and being kind of run-down, too, but in the best way, that really helped me in that episode with Nina,” Stanchfield noted.

Adding to the stress of filming this emotional storyline, Locke & Key block-shot it’s episodes, meaning in this case episodes 7 and 8 were shot at the same time, bouncing back and forth between scenes from each episode.

“It was the kidnapping episode, where Sam comes back, and the drunk episode,” Stanchfield recalled. “So it was also going back-and-forth every day between the two… It was really quite a crazy time. But I thoroughly enjoyed it.”

Ultimately, like in the comic book source material by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, Nina is able to climb out of her low point and begin to fix herself, thanks in part to a police detective also struggling with addiction. If Locke & Key is picked up for a second season, though, it’s something she’ll have to continue to work on, one day a time. Nina Locke may live in a world of magical keys, but no cabinet is going to mend her; it’s something she’ll have to do, herself.

Stream Locke & Key on Netflix