This post contains frank discussion of the Big Little Lies season two finale titled “I Want to Know.” If you haven’t watched it yet, now is the time to leave.

Poorna Jagannathan is a veteran actor of stage and screen with a long CV that included a central role on HBO’s The Night Of. But when she got the call to appear in Big Little Lies, the actor was immediately overwhelmed by both absolute joy and enormous stress. As Katie Richmond, the lawyer originally hired to represent Celeste (Nicole Kidman), Jagannathan had a front-row seat to the prestige drama TV showdown of the century: Kidman vs. Meryl Streep.

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Courtesy of HBO

“I would have taken this role no matter what,” Jagannathan said in an interview for the latest episode of Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast. But the chance to work with the most “elite cast in the world” was frosting on the cake. You can listen to Jagannathan’s full interview—including her revelation that in her version of the script, one of the main characters didn’t make it through to the end of the season—here.

When asked about the possibility of a third season of Big Little Lies—which Kidman has said is a very real one—Jagannathan expressed surprise at the season two finale’s cliff-hanger ending, which saw the Monterey Five all walking into the town’s police station together in solidarity. “I read the script and I watched yesterday’s episode and I was like, ‘Oh my god there might be a season three!’” she said. “It’s not the script I got! One character doesn’t even make it. One character dies. It’s a different script. This version left the door open on something I thought was definitely closed.”

Jagannathan was disinclined to reveal which character in her version of the script had died, and HBO declined to comment when asked. But it’s not a stretch to imagine that in that earlier iteration, the depressed and guilt-ridden Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz)—whom we see drowning in her mother’s vision at the end of episode four—is the one who didn’t make it.

Another possibility to consider is that Jagannathan got a fake version of the script—which sometimes happens on high-profile shows and films, in order to prevent sensitive plot lines from leaking.

If Bonnie was an intended victim this year, there could be several reasons—beyond a hope for a season three—why the show ultimately decided to keep her alive. Big Little Lies has come under fire before for its engagement—or lack thereof—with Bonnie’s status as the only nonwhite woman among the Monterey Five. Last week, the Atlantic’s Shamira Ibrahim wrote that “Season 2 failed to give Zoë Kravitz’s character the depth of interrogation and analysis granted to its other stars.” Kravitz herself told Rolling Stone last fall: “I tried to get a little more…[race] put into Big Little Lies…but people are scared to go there. If we’re making art and trying to dissect the human condition, let’s really do that.”

Jagannathan, an Indian-American actor born in Tunisia, agreed with Kravitz’s assessment. When she first tried to watch season one of Big Little Lies, Jagannathan said she turned the show off: “I wasn't drawn to watching things with so many white people in it.” The actor later got sucked in when she tried to watch again on airplane. She praised the show’s explorations of motherhood, femininity, and sexual violence: “I was so drawn to it, beyond race. It’s a powerful thing for them to have done that because I'm pretty skeptical.”

Still, the actor said, she wished the reality of Bonnie—or even her character, Katie—navigating this extremely white space had been more fully fleshed-out: “It’s a very well-written show some scenes and characters are underwritten. The aspect of color is introduced but not explored.”

If the season’s ending was altered, the rewrite may also have something to do with the way it was reportedly massively reworked in post-production, when—according to a report in IndieWire—season one director Jean-Marc Vallée dramatically transformed director Andrea Arnold’s season two work. Jagannathan had a lot of praise for the editing on season two—“the flow of the episode was great because of that editing”—but says she was “saddened” by how everything worked out for Arnold.

HBO said in a statement to IndieWire: “There wouldn’t be a Season 2 of Big Little Lie without Andrea Arnold. We at HBO and the producers are extremely proud of her work. As with any television project, the executive producers work collaboratively on the series and we think the final product speaks for itself.”

Because much of Vallée’s work reportedly came during the post-production stage, Jagannathan said she didn’t see any conflict play out on set. Quite the contrary, she said: shooting the courtroom scenes was an extraordinarily emotional experience for everyone involved, including Arnold. Jagannathan described the director checking in between takes with her eyes red from crying. The project, Jagannathan said, was “sitting in its femininity”; it was clear to everyone, she added, that this sensitive “material was in the hands of someone who cares.” Jagannathan called Arnold “a genius.”

But as much sympathy as the actor has for her director, she’s also familiar with the behind-the-scenes complications of getting a high-profile HBO project off the ground. Jagannathan also worked on HBO’s The Night Of, which went into production in 2013—but didn’t see the light of day until 2016, after the sudden death of lead actor James Gandolfini, who was replaced first by Robert De Niro and then John Turturro. The press, she said, never got the full story of what happened behind the scenes on that show.

So with the Arnold story, Jagannathan said, she’s aware that none of us have the complete picture yet. When it comes to HBO, she explained, there aren’t two sides: There are “multiple sides.” The only whiff of tension Jagannathan reported from the set came from season two star Meryl Streep, who would push back on notes from her director. “Meryl wouldn’t entertain any comments that insinuated she was the villain,” Jagannathan explained. Streep wasn’t rude, but would protectively respond “that’s not of your business” when she got a note she disagreed with. That’s fine for a multiple Oscar winner—but Jagannathan jokes that she would be fired very quickly if she tried something similar.