It is a few days after the Emmys and Jake Lacy is, for good reason, still riding high. He had been nominated for his first time at the ceremony for his role on HBO’s The White Lotus, which also scored nods for a whopping eight cast members. “Getting nominated just wasn’t on my radar,” he tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. Then he got to see his friends and co-stars Murray Bartlett and Jennifer Coolidge win. In addition, creator/writer/director Mike White and the series itself took home top honors.
The darkly comic satire, about rich people behaving badly while on vacation in Hawaii, dominated the zeitgeist when it aired in 2021—so maybe its deluge of Emmy wins shouldn’t be a surprise. But it is certainly…something to be living in a world where a TV series that featured a hotel manager giving an employee a rim job, pooping in a suitcase, and getting stabbed someone is now considered award-worthy art.
“That's the new bar now,” Lacy says with a laugh. “High or low, we set it.”
His first thought after reading those scenes was: Are they really going to let us do that? “As if there were rules and someone would come down from high and be like, ‘No, this is unacceptable!’” When he and Bartlett did press as White Lotus aired, he was surprised to learn some people believed that the defecation was real. “People would be like, ‘Is that you? Are you pooping in this?’” They would have to clarify that, while it is Bartlett squatting over the suitcase, it was in fact digital poop. “Like, come on…”
The start of our conversation proves that there is no greater icebreaker than a TV poop scene. Admittedly, the levity is needed, given the subject matter of the series that we’re actually meeting over Zoom to discuss: Peacock’s A Friend of the Family. “Yeah, this conversation will be a little different,” he says.
The series, which premiered on the streamer last week and airs new episodes on Thursdays, is based on the disturbing real-life story of Jan Broberg, who had previously been the subject of the documentary Abducted in Plain Sight.
There are a series of horrifying, almost implausible twists to the story—to the point where as more details emerge, your jaw drops so low, it threatens to crash through the floorboards.
In the 1970s, Broberg was abducted twice from her family’s Idaho home—first at age 12 and then at age 14—by their neighbor and close friend, Bob “B” Berchtold. The first time, he took her to Mexico and convinced her that aliens had kidnapped her. Berchtold used recordings of “the aliens” speaking to brainwash her into having sex with him, under the threat that her family would be harmed if she didn’t. When the Brobergs finally reunited with Jan, Berchtold worked his way back into their fold again; both Jan’s mother, Marianne, and her father, Bob, had sexual relationships with him.
Lacy plays Berchtold, a hard pivot from the roles that he had become known for in series and movies like The Office, Obvious Child, How to Be Single, Girls, and High Fidelity. (Vulture had, at one point, published a ranking entitled, “Which Jake Lacy Character Is the Nicest Nice Guy?”) A Friend of the Family follows The White Lotus in its revelatory weaponization of that “type” he had perfected. His classic American handsomeness that had been used to convey cinematic congeniality was now used to telegraph something more sinister.
In The White Lotus, he played the quintessential Aggrieved Rich White Guy; now, he’s playing the friendly neighbor no one expects could be responsible for so much evil.
Lacy hadn’t portrayed a character like this before, and was asked to read for series creator Nick Antosca and Eliza Hittman, who directed Episodes 1 and 3. “I was like, I would want me to read for it, too,” he says.
For an actor, there’s an undeniably riveting character study to play with Berchtold. Occupying his mindset is also a terrifying prospect, however—from the sheer hubris he carried to what it means to have been capable of such grotesque abuse of a child.
Lacy had the same recoiling reaction to the unbelievable twists in the Brobergs’ case that so many viewers of Abducted in Plan Sight did. “When Berchtold’s world starts to spiral out and collapse, his response is to go further and harder and faster in the opposite direction. He continually doubles down,” he says. Just when things couldn’t seem wilder, Berchtold took Broberg again and hid her under a different name in a private school in California. While on parole, he took Broberg—a minor—across state lines and was still abusing her. “Yet the whole time, he’s calling the Brobergs as if he were riding shotgun in the search for Jan. That's brazen on a whole other level.”
Unlike the documentary about the Brobergs, A Friend of the Family uses its time to reveal how this entire family fell victim to a predator—especially at a time when people didn’t discuss pedophilia and maybe had never heard of the concept of grooming. Those scenes are unsettling when they unfold in the series, though under Antosca and Hittman’s guidance, never exploitative or gratuitous. (The abuse, for example, is never shown.) They’re also captivating.
Filming those scenes involved a bit of dissociation and emotional redirection. “It's easier for me to conceptualize what it would be like to kill a person than it is for me to think [about] what it would be to abuse a child,” Lacy says. “Robert Berchtold did not feel the disgust, shame, and guilt that you and I would feel in even engaging in those thoughts. For him, that's the thing he wanted most. So for me to attempt to hack my mind to get me to go there is unhealthy and unnecessary, because then I'm feeling disgusted and in judgment of myself. And this person was not.”
But beyond stretching himself as an actor, he saw a profound opportunity to say something with the show, especially because Jan Broberg herself served as a producer on it. “Jan has a real purpose for telling her story this way. If we do it right, it might actually matter,” Lacy says.
A Friend of the Family, in a sense, is a way for the Broberg family to correct a narrative that was created about them.
After Abducted in Plain Sight premiered on Netflix in 2017, Broberg’s family was raked through the coals. Viewers were disgusted that they allowed this to happen to their daughter twice. How naive must they have been? How selfish with their own sexual desires were they that they allowed Berchdolt to seduce them to this extent, to cloud their judgment so severely? Then there were the least-forgiving critics, who were baffled that Jan, even if just 12, would believe that she had been abducted by aliens.
Broberg has spoken about this criticism—and why it’s motivated here to tell her family’s story again.
“We know if people start talking about things that actually matter like this, it will make a difference,” she told Variety.. So whether they are talking smack about my parents, they’re talking. Whether they’re talking about, ‘That dumb Jan Broberg, how stupid could she be to think she was kidnapped by aliens?’ I don’t care anymore. I want them to talk because, to me, that moves the needle closer to prevention, closer to awareness and closer to what I hope to stand for, which is hope that you can heal from trauma.”
In recent years, the value of the true crime genre has been called into question, particularly for using real victims’ and survivors’ traumas for titillating entertainment. Increasingly, the actual people connected to true crime feel emboldened to expose and criticize these works as crass exploitation.
Following the premiere of Netflix’s Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story in late September, for example, a relative of one of the serial killer’s victims’ relatives tweeted the family’s displeasure that the series exists. Many online sided with them; that didn’t stop millions of people from streaming the show, however.
That’s why it’s essential that Broberg and her mother were so closely involved in the creation of Friend of the Family. She has been outspoken in interviews and during a speech at the premiere in New York City about the series’ mission for healing. Most importantly, A Friend of the Family doesn’t limit its scope to trauma: She wanted to show how an entire family—an entire community, really—can be groomed by a person, and how common it is for that grooming to be done by a person they know, trust, and even love.
“[Jan] is the living example of what she hopes to communicate with this series, that, look, this subject matter and what happened to the whole Broberg family is difficult, dark, and horrific,” Lacy says. “But there is hope at the end here for anyone who's been through anything like this, that this does not have to be your entire story. This can be a percentage of what has happened in your life, and that you get to choose what happens next.”
The entire experience has been a moving one for Lacy and the whole cast; that much was very much on display when the actors and the Brobergs reunited for the series’ emotional premiere. It’s a project that, outside of being a juicy acting gig, imprints on your life in a profound way.
“[The Brobergs] lived rich, full lives at the end of these events,” Lacy says. “The fact that she can be on set with me and be rooting me on is a level of like grace and mental health work that I will probably never know.”
