Presumed Innocent Ending: Peter Sarsgaard Talks Twist, Defends Tommy

Nov 04, 2024

By Hunter Ingram

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for “The Verdict,” the Season 1 finale of “Presumed Innocent,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

On the day Apple TV+ dropped the highly anticipated finale of its courtroom thriller “Presumed Innocent,” Peter Sarsgaard, who plays the show’s chief prosecutor, is off the grid.

He’s holed up with spotty cell service in the “middle of nowhere,” with only his affectionate, very vocal cat to keep him company — which is rather appropriate, considering where the show leaves his cat dad character, Assistant District Attorney Tommy Molto.

All season, Tommy has led the scorched-earth prosecution of his former coworker Rusty Sabich (Jake Gyllenhaal), who has been on trial for the murder of his mistress, Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve) — who’d worked with both Tommy and Rusty as a fellow prosecutor. In the penultimate episode, Tommy had seemingly moved the needle toward conviction by eviscerating Rusty’s nice-guy persona on the witness stand. But when Tommy returns home to celebrate his day in court, he is greeted by his cat — and the missing murder weapon, a fire poker, which had been left for him with a rather pointed note to “Go fuck yourself.”

In the finale, Tommy turns the poker over to the court, but it is deemed inadmissible. All he can do now is deliver a good closing argument, which he does by telling the jury that Rusty’s assertion that the prosecution offered nothing but reasonable doubt is simply not true. Tommy makes the case that Rusty’s obsession with Carolyn and pattern of violence are more than enough to confirm he killed her. But the jury disagrees. They acquit Rusty of the murder, and he walks out with his family as a free, albeit disgraced, man.

Only later, in the privacy of their hopefully soundproof garage, does Rusty confess to his wife Barbara (Ruth Negga) that on the night of the murder, he’d returned to find Carolyn dead. Assuming only Barbara could have killed Carolyn, Rusty tied up her body up to look like she’d been the victim of the convicted killer he has been pushing since the beginning — and now we know why. He did it to protect Barbara. But really, the killer was their daughter Jaden (Chase Infiniti), who tells her parents she didn’t plan to beat Carolyn to death until she confessed she was pregnant with Rusty’s child. Rusty then announces they will sweep Jaden’s crime under the rug, and never speak of it again.

At the end of the episode, the family enjoys a normal Thanksgiving meal, even if Barbara seems somewhat hollowed out by the culpability of her husband and daughter. As for Tommy, after he is told to move on by his boss Nico Della Guardia (O-T Fagbenle), he is seen watching a Chicago Bears game perfectly content with his cat.

With his own cat Dinna crawling all over him –– ”I swear I didn’t tell her to do this!” –– Sarsgaard talks to Variety about the finale, working alongside his actual brother-in-law Gyllenhaal, whether he ever thought Tommy did it and what he thinks the eccentric ADA gets up to in his office at night. (Fair warning: You’ll never guess what Sarsgaard came up with.)

When did you find out who the killer was?

I found out somewhere toward the end of filming. I had always assumed — as an actor, I guess — that it was going to be the same as the movie. I had seen the movie back in the day, so I just assumed it was Rusty’s wife. And I knew it wasn’t me!

Well, what did you think when you found out who it was?

Oh, I always knew it would be like that! There was no other way. A story like this is supposed to be surprising but inevitable, so hopefully that is the landing that we stuck. [Executive producers] David E. Kelly and J.J. Abrams, in terms of storytelling, they know what they are doing.

Was there ever a moment that made you question if it was Tommy?

Not at all. I definitely knew it wasn’t, even without them telling me. To me, the guy has all these superficial attributes that we as a society have decided bad guys have. Like, they live alone and they have pets that are their primary friends, and that just isn’t true. And I’m glad that it wasn’t true here either. It’s like how we think that people who listen to opera music are sociopaths.

Since you mentioned the cat, Tommy does have some very specific character traits. He loves his cat, and he loves a bolo tie. Were these always in the script?

No, all that stuff started to get added as we were filming. The thing that happened on this show was that I had only read one or two episodes at the beginning. And as we went along, it felt like it was being tailored to me on some level, and to ideas that I was offering up. I mean, I was very adamant about Tommy wearing a bolo tie at one point, and they took that one so far. I guess to me, a bolo tie is a thing that men wear, but that’s because I lived in Oklahoma for a while.

I also just love this idea of playing someone who is coming into his own over the course of the show. I like the idea of little symbols that show that. My friend always says, “You can get a haircut, but you can’t expect a change from the haircut. You have to change first, then you get the haircut to symbolize the change.” I think that is true of a lot of things, and true of Tommy.

You change, and then you mark it with a medal, or in his case, a bolo tie.

If Tommy was being tailored to you, do you have a love of cats that informed the adoring cat waiting for him at home?

I mean, my cat is literally crawling all over me right now. This is Dinna, and I swear I didn’t tell her to do this! But I think that answers the question. I have always been an animal person, and I guess Tommy’s cat came out of me talking about having a cat that I love. Plus, I had a cat that passed away not long before filming, so I might have been talking about cats more than normal.

Executive producer and director Greg Yaitanes told Variety that you and Jake lived together during filming. As real-life relatives, did you bring the work of these big courtroom scenes home with you? Did it change your brother-in-law relationship to go at each other in the courtroom?

Oh no, never. Never. When I leave work, I really prefer not to even mention work. But we did live in the same house. That is true. I lived all the way on one wing on a lower level, and he lived on the other end. For the first part of filming, I thought I could get away with renting a place every time I came into town, but the part got more substantial, to be quite honest. Like I said, it was kind of tailored to me and I didn’t know what it was going to be when I first started. It got more and more interesting, and more to do, so I told Jake, “Can I bunk with you?”

But I would say we worked very little on anything besides running lines. If anything, having that relationship just makes it easier. There is no ice breaker needed. And I know that I can disagree with him comfortably, or agree with him comfortably. It is just how people who respect and care for one another act. Being able to say to someone that you care about, “I don’t think that works,” is nice. It can sometimes take a while with a relative stranger you have only been acting with for a couple of weeks – everybody wants good news all the time.

Speaking of being comfortable calling him out, there is a line in Tommy’s closing argument where he alludes to Rusty’s history of lying with a straight face, and you so passionately point to him and say, “This charming face.” Was that line scripted, or did you just come up with it?

I honestly have no idea. We mostly stick to the scripts in this show, but there was room for other stuff for sure. And it definitely does sound like something I would have said to Jake. But I’ve had a number of people, as the show has been coming out, who have come up to me on the street and say, “I think maybe you did it.” I’ve been thinking a lot about that, and I think it is because if I looked like the quarterback of the football team who got the prom queen, for some reason people in life would be less scared by what I could do. And I would say there is no actual reasoning for that in life.

But I’ll remind you that handsome people frequently do awful things. I always think it is interesting when you go to play these characters and you encounter firsthand people’s bias. People express fear from all these interesting places.

We don’t get a lot of backstory on Tommy’s own fixation and history with Carolyn in the show. Did you imagine what that might be?

I think the backstory is that he is bending over backwards to try to give someone space and falling on your face doing it, and all that stupid stuff. But otherwise, I actually thought of Tommy as someone who is extremely confident about his own mind. He was a guy who didn’t lie one time in this show, I don’t think. So there is a very straight person who maybe isn’t that great at enjoying himself. That’s who he is to the people around him, and to her.

We see Nico Della Guardia tell Tommy to move on after Rusty’s acquittal, even though he initially seems plagued by the outcome. By the end, though, he seems to be in a good place with his cat. What do you think the aftermath is for Tommy?

We don’t really get to see it, but if he is confident in the end that the truth came out and the right thing happened, which I think he can be convinced of with all the evidence there, I believe he can go prosecute another case. This could be a great thing for him, actually. Maybe it will make him a better man in the end. Though I certainly didn’t see that coming.

You said you had more to do as the series progressed, and a lot of Tommy’s scenes are these incredible monologues in the courtroom. How did you prepare for those?

When you have more to say, it is always a mixed blessing. Talking more is not necessarily ideal for an actor. But it was nice to play someone who is a performer. So telling a good story to a jury and having them listen, you can’t just tell it bone dry. It is always nice to get to play a performer because you get to let out that side of yourself. Tommy is my kind of performer.

You spend most of your scenes with O-T Fagbenle, and Tommy really has Nico as his sounding board. What was it like working with him?

I love O-T. All of the actors in this, like Bill Camp, are ones I have known for a while, except for O-T. He and I are both chess players, though it doesn’t mean that we are great at it. But we played once or twice on set, and we would talk about so many things that were off topic while we played. I think it gave the scenes an ease, because not every scene is the last day of someone’s life. That relationship between he and I really developed over the course of the show, and I think they were fully creating that one as we went along. I think it is very special and singular for Tommy.

Did it surprise you that people thought Tommy might have been the killer?

I mean, I always knew there would be people who thought that. But in my mind, there was zero chance that he was. I thought this was a guy who had a lot of integrity, but also had a lot of eccentricities that made it difficult for people around him. But I would want him on my side as a lawyer.

Actually, one of those first courtroom scenes they sent me, which they told me they wanted to do in one shot without cutting away like a play — that was when I really started looking at him and who he was. I had a great on-set lawyer who helped me think about his dialogue as a prosecutor would think about it. And through that process of getting to know him, I realized he is all lawyer. The guy is just a lawyer. He just does it. He feeds his cat, and then he does it. He’s a fucking machine. I like that quality in him. I’ve always liked him, and I’m surprised that people have any issue with him.

It’s amazing what having a cat at home will do to humanize a person.

Seriously! They asked me once, “What do you think this guy does in his office at night?” I was like, “Oh, I don’t know. Why don’t you just leave me in the office, and we’ll figure it out?” They figured I would be practicing my speech, but I ended up doing some version of capoeira or jiu jitsu from high school that just kind of occurred to me in the moment. Right there on set. So Tommy in his alone moments — I guess he is a little odd.

Apple has announced “Presumed Innocent” will return for Season 2, but with a new story. Would you ever revisit Tommy Molto should that new person need a good lawyer?

[Long pause] I don’t know. That’s the answer I have for you.

This interview has been edited and condensed.