Minor spoilers for The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox are ahead! You can stream the series with a Hulu subscription, and catch new episodes on Wednesdays.
I was already so impressed by The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, and specifically Grace Van Patten’s performance as the titular woman. In the first two episodes that have aired on the 2025 TV schedule, I’ve been captivated by her and this incredibly complex story. Now Amanda Knox herself has revealed one way the actress went above and beyond to pull off the leading role in this true crime series, and I’m even more blown away.
With emphasis, Knox said that Grace Van Patten is “phenomenal” in this show while being interviewed on Armchair Expert. The podcast’s host, Dax Shepard, agreed too, pointing out that as a performer, she likely had to learn Italian for this project. He explained that Knox didn’t speak great Italian when this all began, but “by the end of the trial, you give your closing statement in Italian.”
Knox, who is involved in the series as an executive producer, concurred with that and thanked him for understanding the evolution of fluency and how it impacted the show and Van Patten’s performance specifically. She said:
Thank you for appreciating that nuance, because, again, like one of the things about this show is that miscommunication that's happening, and she not only had to become fluent in Italian in order to portray this role, she has to portray quasi fluency. She has to portray a progression of fluency over time.
In the two episodes of The Twsited Tale that have aired, Amanda’s inability to speak fluent Italian works against her in a big way – as seen in the interrogation scene that made me panic. While she can say some things, overall, the language barrier leads to major miscommunication and misunderstandings that contribute to her eventual arrest.
To pull that off, Van Patten had to make us believe that she only spoke a bit of Italian. That had to be hard, no matter what level of fluency she was at. However, learning it to be fluent and then also having to pretend not to fully know it has to be even harder. So, yeah, we need to give her flowers for this. And I think we need to proactively give her flowers for what’s coming.
Knox was arrested in 2007, she was in prison until 2011, and she was eventually exonerated in 2015 by Italy's highest court. She spent four years in an Italian prison, and this show, so far, has followed that experience while also telling the story of Amanda returning to Italy in 2022.
That’s a long period, a lot of distress and a lot of time for her understanding of Italian to evolve. As Shephard said, Knox gave her closing statement, and I'd guess we’ll see that in the show too. That means we’ll see Van Patten play out this, and we’ll see her go from kind of speaking Italian to fluently speaking Italian, and that’s so incredibly impressive.
Watching the new streaming series, I had already been thinking about this. I’m someone who has struggled to learn other languages, so I felt very sympathetic for Amanda as she tried to understand what was going on as the police investigated the murder of her roommate. At the same time, I was thinking about how difficult it could be for the actress playing her, because she’s an American character, and the majority of the other characters are Italian. So, English and Italian are both used a lot in the show, and I was wondering if Van Patten was fluent in both.
Now, knowing she learned it and also played out the actual evolution of Knox's understanding of the language is seriously impressive. Learning a language is so difficult, and she had to do that on top of telling a very heavy, true and complicated story. So, yeah, after learning this information about Grace Van Patten and her performance in The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, I’m blown away.
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