As Emmy nominations approach, Vanity Fair’s HWD team is once again diving deep into how some of this season’s greatest scenes and characters came together. You can read more of these close looks here.

THE SCENE: ALIAS GRACE SEASON 1, PART 6

The centerpiece of Netflix’s period miniseries Alias Grace, an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel, is an almost-18-minute long scene where convicted murderess Grace Marks (Sarah Gadon), a longtime inmate, becomes the subject of a well-intentioned but theatrical exhibition of hypnosis. Grace’s good manners and longtime protestations of innocence have convinced some that she has been taken advantage of. But the holes in her story, and the conflicting testimony of witnesses, lead to her imprisonment nonetheless. In an extremely Victorian move, her supporters suggest hypnosis in front of a private audience—hoping to uncover something in her repressed memories, while also enjoying the novelty of a recent fad.

The process does not go as expected. Beneath the sheer black veil placed over her head—and in front of every uptight clergyman and stuffy society matron who has gossiped about her—Grace becomes an entirely different person. She begins to speak in a low, hissing voice, and darts malevolent glances at Simon Jordan (Edward Holcroft), the obsessive psychiatrist attempting to determine if Grace can claim insanity. The voice coming out of her mouth is saucy, cunning, and remorseless; it claims to be Mary Whitney (Rebecca Liddiard), a girlhood friend of Grace’s who died after a botched abortion. In just a few minutes—with just the addition of a veil and some theatrics—the scene radically re-frames the story, offering Grace up as a martyr, a murderer, a performance artist, or the subject of supernatural possession.

Director Mary Harron anchored the sequence on Gadon’s performance, laying out the scene around her as if it were a painting. The high, curtained windows of the parlor, coupled with the somber tones of the audience’s Victorian dress, suggested to her a John Singer Sargent portrait; fittingly, the folds of the sheer black veil fall over Gadon’s face like broad brushstrokes. Both Gadon and Harron said in separate interviews that they were nervous when approaching the scene, owing to its complexity and significance.

Both, however, left satisfied with what they accomplished. “It’s the masterpiece of the show,” Gadon said. And, as Harron observed, “The veil is like the perfect image or metaphor for the whole show, because Grace is veiled—she’s partly obscured, she’s enigmatic, and you’re constantly trying to see the real self. So it was a beautiful image, in the end.”

HOW IT CAME TOGETHER

As written by Sarah Polley, this sequence offered room for interpretation—which made filming it particularly daunting for its director and star. The hypnotism was like a one-act play within the show itself, said Gadon. “I was overwhelmed by the amount of work to learn. It became a massive sequence.”

Originally, Harron said, the scene took place seated around a table, “more like a séance.” But after watching Augustine, a 2012 historical drama from French director Alice Winocour, Harron realized that such an arrangement wouldn’t tease out one of the scene’s most vital elements: that Grace, an object of fascination and a true-crime celebrity in her own right, is being put on display by the hypnotist, Jeremiah (Zachary Levi), a charlatan with only dubious scientific talent.

“He doesn’t know that she’s going to talk in Mary’s voice,” Harron said. “But there’s also that aspect you don’t know—is it a séance? Is she actually channeling something? Is it some kind of confession? . . . Is it a repressed self taking over? Or is it a kind of ghost—the ghost of Mary Whitney? You just don’t know. It’s also theatrical, and it’s also a performance—but we’re not sure how much is a performance and how much is real.”