A reality TV show turns deadly in Ruth Ware’s latest psychological thriller

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Nicole Ransome: Hi, I'm Audible Editor Nicole and I'm excited to welcome Ruth Ware, the author of bestsellers such as The Woman in Cabin 10, The Lying Game, In a Dark, Dark Wood, and more. She's here to discuss her new psychological thriller, One Perfect Couple. Welcome, Ruth.

Ruth Ware: Oh, hi, Nicole. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.

NR: Yes, it's great to have you. So, to get right into it, I am a huge fan of reality television, and so I was instantly drawn to the setup of the fictional show One Perfect Couple. How did you come up with the premise of the show?

RW: Well, it's funny. So many of my books either kind of come together in this sort of amorphous cloud of random ideas that just kind of swirl around inside my head until they're book-shaped or else they're handed to me kind of on a silver platter. And this one was one of the latter kind. So, I was doing an interview with another British thriller writer called Gillian McAllister, who wrote a book called Wrong Place, Wrong Time. I can't even remember how the subject came up, but I think she said something about reality TV, and I said something about, "It's a miracle more of the contestants don't end up murdering each other." And she said, kind of flippantly, "Sounds like a Ruth Ware novel." And I didn't really think anything of it at the time. But afterwards, I was kind of searching around for ideas for my next book and I was like, "Do you know what? That does sound like one of my novels."

But the funny thing is, I actually am not a huge reality TV watcher. I was completely addicted to the first-ever Big Brother, which came out, gosh, I must have been at university. I think I was a student. And like everyone else, you know, all my friends were completely addicted to it. And then I think I got a bit turned off by the fact that it changed from being about just regular, ordinary people in this really weird situation to being much more people who are very clearly on it in order to make a name for themselves. People who were sort of very clearly not in it for the game, but in it for the fame. And I was less interested in that, which I think is sort of reflected in my books. I tend to be more curious about just regular people in extraordinary circumstances. So, anyway, I sort of stopped watching for a few years.

And then the gameshow The Traitors came around in the UK. And I'm not sure if it was as popular in America as it was in Britain, but it completely gripped everyone in the UK. And in the UK, it was exclusively just ordinary people off the street. And I think it was that and the sort of crime-adjacent format. For anybody who hasn't watched The Traitors, the idea of the game is that you have a large number of contestants, it's about 20 or something. And three of them are "traitors" and the rest are “faithfuls.” And the way the faithfuls win is by figuring out who the traitors are and eliminating them. And the way the traitors win is by one traitor still being in the game at the end.

So, what fascinated me about the whole premise was everybody clearly went in thinking that they were really perceptive, could tell a liar at a thousand paces, had great instincts, and you quickly realized everybody was incredibly bad at this. Basically, it was all the honest people were the ones who got eliminated first because they didn't play the game. They didn't say what other people wanted to hear. They weren't kind of playing to the audience and figuring out what made people tick and what they wanted. They were just coming out with their opinions and everybody found this incredibly confronting. And so those people tended to get eliminated straight off, whereas the traitors, who by and large were quite emotionally intelligent people and very good at telling people what they wanted to hear, very good at appearing affable, they almost never got eliminated straight away.

So, anyway, I was completely gripped by this format. And it all sort of fed into the idea of me thinking, "Right, I want to tackle reality TV in my next book." But the premise of the show in my book is much closer to the sort of Love Island, Survivor kind of format. But I think what I took from Traitors was the idea that not everybody in this show is working for the good of the team. They say they are, but there are people in this setup who are in it purely for themselves, and it's the job of my narrator to try and work out who those people are.

NR: Well, I'm a big fan of reality TV. I have seen The Traitors. I am a big fan of that show. I just watched the past season, so it's big in the US now. It's actually become really huge.

RW: I mean, it's a really fun premise, and I think it tells you an awful lot about human nature. It was fascinating to watch from a kind of crime-writing perspective because obviously the stakes are much lower, but really so many of the kind of psychological games and deceptions are exactly the kind of thing I'm writing about in my novel, just in a more kind of gamified, codified way. So yeah, it's fascinating to watch it playing out in the real world and thinking, "Ooh, if I was plotting that, how would I have done it?"

NR: So, that actually begs the question, were there any real-life moments from reality TV or real-life people that inspired events or characters in One Perfect Couple?

RW: Oh, wow, that is a good question. Individuals, no. I generally try really, really hard not to put real people in my books. All of my characters, I guess, are a sort of amalgam of maybe individual qualities from people, things that I've observed online or in real life or met people who just really intrigued me and I thought, "You know, that aspect of their character is really curious." So, I generally try pretty hard not to put real people in my books, or even sort of thinly based on real people. It feels, I don't know, a little bit presumptuous somehow. I would say some of the characters in my book are sort of inspired by prominent online personalities more than reality TV contestants.

"That's what I was trying to explore, really, was the sort of power dynamics within romantic relationships and how differently those play out in friendships."

But I was lucky enough to talk to one of the people who was on The Traitors in the UK. I happened to know him through a kind of friend of a friend. They had to sign an NDA, so he didn't tell me any kind of trade secrets or anything I wasn't supposed to know about what was going on behind the scenes. But he was really interesting on just the kind of emotional side of it and just some of the practicalities. I was able to run some of my scenarios past him and say like, "Does this sound plausible?" And he was like, "Yes, this is, and no, it's not." And of course, the reality TV company in my book is a much more kind of fly-by-night operation. Traitors is done by the BBC in the UK, you know, it's produced to a really high standard. They have welfare teams, they have psychologists. And I very much deliberately went down the route of having a company that was sort of slightly fraying around the edges, slightly underfunded. So, a lot of the things that ought to be there are not, kind of to heighten the tension.

So, one of the details in the book about everyone having to give up their personal devices, their phones and their electronics and stuff, he told me about that, and I've since found out that's a really, really standard clause on reality TV, because of course, understandably, they don't want you phoning your mom or your boyfriend or sounding off to your friends. They want you completely sort of directing all of your emotional energy into the show. So, yeah, all of that was absolutely fascinating.

NR: Oh, I love that. I didn't know that it was like a standard for them to take the devices. I thought that was an element that you added so that once the storm hit, it was a lot more debilitating.

RW: Yeah, no, it was incredibly convenient for me. It wasn't something that I made up, but when I found it out, I was like, "Oh, this works perfectly."

NR: You never really think about all of the behind-the-scenes. It's scripted TV, but unscripted for some.

RW: Yeah, it is really interesting. And, actually, One Perfect Couple doesn't focus quite so much on that, purely because my main character, Lyla, is a contestant, so she sees it from the contestant point of view. And so she's kind of thinking about, "Oh, how are they going to edit this? How am I going to appear?" So she has that worry in the back of her head. But you never see it from the producer's side, which I was slightly disappointed that I couldn't get that in because I think it would have added a whole extra layer of psychological manipulation to watch.

NR: Yeah, but I think that it really helped, the story being told from her perspective, because it really does shed a light on how you think as a contestant. And that actually leads into my next question. Main character Lyla is really out of her element when she joins the show. She does it essentially just to support her boyfriend, Nico, who's an aspiring actor. And she learns that she's not the only couple like that as well. There's quite a few interesting dynamics between a lot of the couples there. How did you go about choosing your cast of characters who would collide on the island once the extreme conditions set in?

RW: That's a great question. Yeah, so I guess the setup of my show is sort of Love Island-ish, and so a lot of the contestants who go on it, they're aspiring actors as Lyla's boyfriend Nico is, or they're YouTubers like Connor wanting to get a bigger platform for their audience, or they’re sort of models, or whatever it is. But I also love the kind of Traitors aspect of it, of having just people who were ex-army or teachers or bus drivers or whatever it was, just brought together by applying on a whim to do this show. And so the format of my show that I came up with was that it would be a couple's TV show. And therefore I sort of imagined that there would probably be one half of the couple who was kind of going on it for professional reasons, and the other half who'd sort of reluctantly come along or semi-reluctantly come along to be a good spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever. And that's very much the case with Lyla and Nico.

So, my main character, Lyla, is a scientist. And I realized when I sat down to write her that actually I have written a lot about people in kind of the arts and I've had journalists and writers and things like that in my books. I've never written a scientist before. But my husband is a virologist. He doesn't work on chikungunya, which is Lyla's specialty, but he's been in very adjacent worlds his whole career. And so that was super convenient. And all of the pressures that Lyla is experiencing at the beginning of the book, you know, she's working on short-term contracts, she's having to apply to grant committees to sort of justify her presence. She's kind of working from paper to paper and really standing on her past results, which are sort of 50 percent down to her own hard work, but 50 percent just luck, whether the project she's working on works out. All of that was based on my experience watching my husband kind of claw his way up through academic science and some of the pressures that people in that situation face.

It's not an easy way to make a living and it's not a very family-friendly way to make a living, particularly when you're dealing with the kind of thing that Lyla does, which is live virus cultures, because they need tending. They're kind of like sourdough [laughs]. You can't just go away and leave them. If you've got a cell line, you have to keep feeding it and splitting it and making sure it's healthy. And all throughout our early relationship, my husband would be suddenly looking at his watch at 10 o'clock at night and going, "Oh, I haven't split my cell lines." And then he'd go off to the lab at like 11 o'clock at night and come back at 2:00 in the morning or whatever. And that's fine when you're 24 and don't have kids. But when you are in your 30s, you know, your kids are waking up at night, you're trying to get a mortgage because your two-year contract isn't very attractive to a mortgage provider. All of that is a bit of a crunch point. And I think science loses a lot of people at that point. And I wanted to, without being kind of heavy-handed about it, I wanted to just shine a little light onto that about the pressures of being a working scientist.

And it sort of made a convenient plot point for why Lyla might be at a point in her life when she was kind of ready to make some difficult crossroads decisions. And her partner, Nico, is at a very different kind of crunch point. He's a bit younger than her. He's sort of 28. He's an aspiring actor. And he's starting to get to the point where if he doesn't make it soon, he's probably not going to. So, all of this kind of professional and to an extent kind of personal kind of crossroads is combining for Lyla and Nico and is a big part of what persuades Lyla to say yes to an opportunity that she might ordinarily have turned down.

NR: I did enjoy the part in the book where Nico and her kind of get into it because of the competition, because, of course, they have the deal where she's not going to take it as seriously. So, I really enjoyed their dynamic of that situation and how that actually ends up playing out in the story.

RW: Yeah, it was fun. It was fun to write a situation that is such high stakes for one part of the couple, and the other half sort of doesn't really care about quite so much. Those were some really interesting scenes to write.

NR: My next question is, actually, what type of character dynamics were you most interested in playing with-slash-exploring within the reality TV world?

RW: The primary kind of dynamic I suppose I wanted to explore was the dynamics within a relationship that is put under extreme pressure. And all of the relationships in the book are tested in very, very different ways, and they all crack and crumble in slightly different ways. And some of the bonds that are forged on the island are much more ones of friendship, or they're different kinds of relationships, and some of them prove more enduring than some of the romantic relationships. I guess that's what I was trying to explore, really, was the sort of power dynamics within romantic relationships and how differently those play out in friendships.

NR: I was going to say, we find that women's solidarity is a theme within this story, especially as everything begins to fall apart, as everything is just going crazy on this island. And I noticed that this is a theme throughout your work where you write very strong and clever female protagonists who are placed into really tough situations. What about this theme draws you to write these kinds of stories?

RW: It's a really good question. And I think female solidarity is a really big theme in this book. It sort of has and hasn't been in my previous books, and a lot of my previous books have explored female friendship, but they've also explored toxic dynamics within female friendships. So, I think I just love to explore relationships for better or for worse. And I suppose I'm just always really drawn to women's stories. I read a lot of fiction by men and a lot of my favorite books have male protagonists, but in terms of my own writing, female stories are what I keep coming back to. I think it's what I know best, obviously, being my own experience. But also I've been incredibly lucky to have a really close group of friends who I've been friends with since school and we're still in touch, we WhatsApp every day and hang out a lot.

"The wonderful thing about the crime genre is that there is really nothing you can't tackle in crime...I've never felt restricted by writing crime."

And, yeah, the ways that friendship is tested over the years and the different ways that people come through for each other and what that can look like. Sometimes the best way of supporting someone is to take a step back or to challenge them or to ask them an uncomfortable question. All of that, I'm really fascinated by. There's some interesting relationships that spring up in One Perfect Couple, both romantic and non-romantic.

NR: And without giving spoilers, this story ends with a huge convoluted twist, and honestly, I wish there was a reunion segment, you know, like how we get in reality TV, because I would love to just pick the brains of the survivors. Did you always know who was going to survive in the end?

RW: So, this isn't a spoiler, I don't think, but I think it's probably no secret to say that actually quite a lot of the contestants don't survive, in a very literal way, not just in terms of the game. This book might have my highest body count. I'm not quite sure. I think it's either this one or One by One, which also has quite a high number of deaths. Typically, my books only have one or maybe two deaths in them. But this one is an exception.

So, the book opens with a man and a woman fighting for their lives. They're in the sea, she's trying to drown him, he's fighting back. It's very unclear who's going to come out with the upper hand. I wrote that first, before I wrote any of the rest of the book, and I always knew that was where the book was heading, that's the climactic scene of the book. How you get there, who those people are, all of that is part of the question that drives the book. I always knew who was in the sea. I always knew how they would get there. I did not 100 percent know who else was going to be there with them. And some of the twists and turns along the way really surprised me. There were a few people who I knew would make it through to the end, but a lot of them were very much in danger for quite a long time, I'm sorry to say.

NR: So, because you write such in-depth psychological thrillers, how do you keep track of all the details? What is your writing process like?

RW: I would love to say that I had a really elaborate system, and some of my friends do. Writers love to talk craft when we are just shooting the breeze, and I have friends who have really elaborate Excel spreadsheets or systems of index cards. Or some of them use really cool software, like timeline software or Scrivener where you can have files on characters and stuff like that. I don't do any of that and it makes me feel slightly ashamed [laughs], like I'm sort of not a proper writer.

I really basically hold it all in my head. So, with One Perfect Couple, just purely because there were A) quite a lot of names and B) a lot of villa names—each of the couples is assigned to a different villa and each of the villas has a specific name. Basically, the premise of the plot is they fly out to this island, they all kind of get put up in these luxurious villas. And then on the first night, there's this horrific storm, the staff are not staying on the island because there's not room for them. They're staying in a boat, just off the island, and the boat gets swept away in the middle of the night. So they wake up the next day, half of the villas are trashed, the island's infrastructure is kind of falling apart, the desalination plant isn't working. So, because of this, there's a period where they all change villas and end up sleeping in different villas. And so I did have a little paragraph at the end of my book saying basically who is in what villa now, but that was it in terms of notes.

This book is quite complicated in terms of timelines. Well, actually, Lyla's narrative is not, it's just completely linear all the way through, but there's an unusual amount of kind of found material, I guess, for want of a better word. Radio calls, transcripts of radio calls, diary entries, which is scattered throughout the book, not in the same order as the events are. So sometimes you will be getting information before the event happens. Sometimes you will be reading a diary entry that refers to it after you have seen it play out in real life, and those parts were quite complicated. I wrote them exactly as they appear in the book. I didn't go back and sort of seed them in. But it did mean that I more than usually had to keep track of what day everything was happening on. So, for a while in the manuscript there were a lot of little comments in the margin saying, "Today's the 27th, and it's a Monday and it's 10:00 AM, and Lyla is staying in this flat…”

So, keeping track of all that was a bit of a work in progress. But in terms of the characters, I tend to spend quite a lot of time thinking about my characters before I actually put pen to paper. So, I sort of felt like I knew them quite well before I even started. I don't have a file. They're a bit like my friends. I just kind of know what's going on with them and like to keep tabs on them. Like you, I would have loved to have a reunion at the end. I really wanted to have like a kind of "six months later..." But yeah, truth is, half of them would have been dead, so it would have been a bit of a [laughs] bummer reunion.

NR: It would have been a very small reunion, but we would have got some questions answered, probably not the truth, but we would have got some questions answered. So, all of your novels have been narrated by the talented Imogen Church. What do you think it is that makes her such a great narrator fit for you?

RW: Do you know, I don't know. And the funny thing is I'm often congratulated on choosing her, and I didn't. My publishers came to [me] and I was just presented with Imogen. And they said, "Do you like her?" And I said, "Yes, she's great." But since In a Dark, Dark Wood, which was the first one of mine that she narrated, I've asked for her every single time. Obviously, authors don't always stick with the same audiobook narrator. But I think for many people, she has become kind of my voice. And sometimes people are surprised when they meet me and I do a reading and you can sort of see them joining the dots in their head and thinking, "Oh, she's not Imogen," which I know they know that logically anyway, but still I think it's sometimes a surprise to hear that I voice certain characters differently to the way she does.

But I think, gosh, I think she's got an amazing sense of dramatic timing. I think she's got a background in acting, and that obviously really helps. There's a few moments that I get a lot of correspondence about from people. One of them is in The Turn of the Key. There's a scene where you can hear someone walking across the room above, and in the book it's just kind of written “creak, creak,” but the way Imogen voices it is so unbelievably creepy and I've had so many people just messaging me going, "Oh, my God, creak, creak, Imogen" [laughs]. Like, yeah, she does it really, really well. So that's a big part of it.

A big part of it, she does voices incredibly. She's really good at distinguishing characters. My book One by One, it has two narrators. And there was a point where I think one of my editors said, "Do you want to go with two narrators?" And I said, "Well, let's see." Imogen voices them so perfectly. They sound like two completely different people. I don't know how she did it, but she nailed that.

And the other big part, which is, you know, people sometimes say, "Why don't you do your own audiobooks?" I cannot do accents at all, and Imogen is cracking at them. I have a very unkind habit of setting my books in Scotland or Cornwall or North London. Whenever I read those parts, I sort of skate over the accents and try not to do the Scottish characters. Imogen's really, really good at it. She gives everybody a real kind of sense of who they are in their voice. You really believe it. I think I just have to set her a real challenge in my next book. I'm going to have to have a character with a sort of Pygmalion-style, really complicated, like they grew up in Australia and then they moved to Canada for two years, and then they lived in Dubai and just be like, "Okay, Imogen, go” [laughs].

NR: A mosh-posh of accents.

RW: Exactly, how you gonna deal with that one [laughs]?

NR: So, my next question is, outside of psychological thrillers, you also wrote fantasy series like the Winter Trilogy and the Witch Finder series. Why did you decide to start writing thrillers after you wrote your fantasy stories?

RW: So, yeah, it's funny, people often say, "Why did you decide?" And I don't really think of it that way, because it really felt like crime thrillers sort of found me, rather than the other way around. So, the story behind it was I'd written five books for teenagers, and I was kind of casting around for my next idea, and nothing was jumping out at me. I'd sort of suggested a few things to my editors, and they were kind of like, "Yeah, it could be all right. You know, go away and see." I wasn't in love with anything. And then I had coffee with a friend, and she's a real crime and thriller addict. I wasn't writing them at the time. And we were talking about crime and thrillers that we'd read. I think maybe she'd been about to go on a hen night or something. I can't remember how it came up. But anyway, she said—and funnily enough, going back to the discussion we were having at the beginning about books kind of arriving on a silver platter, that was a silver platter moment—she was like, "I'd love to read a thriller set on a hen night." And I was like, "I would love to read a thriller set on a hen night, and I've never read one. And why does it not exist?"

Because a bachelorette party is such a great setting. You've got really high tension. You've got a cast of often quite disparate characters, because they're often people who are coming from different points in the bride-to-be's life. You can have childhood friends, you can have university friends, you can have work colleagues. Often the people who are attending either know each other incredibly well or else don't really know each other at all, both of which is sort of quite interesting. And it's also a very sort of emotionally heightened time, you know, you feel real obligation to go, you feel real obligation to spend money that you often don't have. There's a whole web of quite complicated tensions and loyalties there. And I thought, "I really want to read this book, and clearly no one's written it. So maybe I should."

But the problem was, of course, that this was in no way a book that could be for teenagers. So, it's very clear that this wasn't going to be a YA novel. And so I kind of wrestled with that for a bit and then went and spoke to my agent and said, "I've got this book I really want to write, but I don't think it's for teenagers." And she could have said, "You've got your established audience, stick with what you know, you worked really hard kind of building this up." But to her credit, she didn't. She said, "If that's what you want to write, you write it and we will figure it out." And so I wrote In a Dark, Dark Wood and that was my first thriller and I loved it so much. I went on and wrote—what are we up to, number nine now? So yeah, eight more.

NR: So, do you have a genre you're looking to explore one day?

RW: I don't know. I mean, I think the wonderful thing about the crime genre is that there is really nothing you can't tackle in crime. You can have it funny or cozy or terrifying or political or thought-provoking or historical or speculative, whatever you want. The genre kind of stretches from people like Sarah Pinborough to Laura Shepherd-Robinson to Donna Tartt. It's a huge kind of array. So, I've never felt restricted by writing crime.

But two of my novels for teenagers were historical novels and I loved writing history, but also more researching it. I just really enjoyed the research process. And so many of the plot nuggets that I came up with were things that I just stumbled over in the course of the research and was like, "Wow, that's going in my book." So, I could definitely see myself writing a historical novel one day, if only for the pleasure of immersing myself in a library archive with a pen and paper and a desire to find out as much as possible about some weird niche in history.

NR: See, that's the start of a crime novel too [laughs]. You stumble upon something you shouldn't.

RW: Absolutely, yes. Something that somebody hid in the library 50 years before and never thought you'd find.

NR: Oh, my goodness. See, silver platter. Let me stop.

RW: That could be my next book. Exactly. I'm actually working on my next book already.

NR: Do you have anything book-related that you're excited to share with listeners and fans?

RW: Well, so normally I can talk about my next book, but this one is actually hush-hush, so I'm not allowed to. But I do have exciting news that I got the other day, which I've been sitting on for an agonizingly long time, as one always does. Netflix is making an adaptation of The Woman in Cabin 10, and Keira Knightley has been cast as Lo, who is just the most—I was like, "What? The Keira Knightley?" They were like, "Yes, Ruth, there’s only one Keira Knightley." So that's amazing. That's probably my most exciting bit of book news at the moment. I can't wait for that.

NR: Oh, that's great. I cannot wait for that one as well. And I have to ask this question, I have to put you into the mind of your characters in One Perfect Couple. If you were a character in this story where you'd go to this island, what would be your role in the story?

RW: Oh, God, this is a good question. I fear, unfortunately, if I were a contestant on the island, I would probably be someone who got killed by a coconut falling on my head very early on in the proceedings. It's almost impossible that I would go on one of those shows anyway, because my worst kind of fear in the world would be to be filmed running along a beach in my bikini. I just can't think of anything worse. So, I think the chances of me being on the island in the first place would be very slim. But if I was, it probably wouldn't be as a contestant. It would be as a nefarious producer. I'd be the person behind the scenes trying to craft a narrative out of everything and being like, "Oh, well, could we pretend that Lyla's actually having a bit of an affair with ... maybe if we film them from this angle, it would look like they're kissing." So I think that would be me. I would be the nefarious producer. I'd feel bad about it, but you know, whatever, I would have to pay my mortgage. And then I would get hit by a coconut extremely early on in the proceedings. So, yeah, sucks to be me [laughs].

NR: I love that. Well, thank you for taking the time to answer all of my burning questions, Ruth.

RW: Oh, Nicole, thank you so much for having me. I have had a blast. You've made me think about One Perfect Couple in ways I never considered before. So, thank you for having me on.

NR: Listeners, you can get One Perfect Couple on Audible now.