Ellen Pompeo, Imogen Faith Reid, Mark Duplass and Showrunners Explain Their Natalia Grace Ending

[This story contains spoilers from the Good American Family season finale.]

Now that Good American Family has released its final episode, viewers have seen the full intent of the Hulu’s narrative project about Natalia Grace.

The eight-episode limited series, which is inspired by Grace’s viral real-life story, was first told from the perspectives of Kristine and Michael Barnett, the Indiana husband-and-wife who adopted Ukrainian-born Grace in 2010, and who are played by Ellen Pompeo and Mark Duplass. Halfway through, the series flipped to being told from the point of view of Grace, played by Imogen Faith Reid, and later introduced Grace’s next adoptive parent Cynthia Mans, played by Christina Hendricks.

The differing perspectives, which proved to be contradictory, had been promised by creator Katie Robbins. “We start the story in Kristine and Michael Barnett’s version of events and that slowly starts to shift over time, and we’re led to question if our understanding of what we’ve been seeing the whole time is actually what happened,” the writer and co-showrunner explained to The Hollywood Reporter of the series’ goal. “Doing so allows audiences to grapple with their own biases in unexpected ways.”

The version of events alleged by the Barnetts, driven mainly by Pompeo’s Kristine, was that Grace, who has a rare and severe form of dwarfism known as spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita, was a threat to their family and lied about her age. As her legal guardians, they had Grace’s age legally changed from 7, the age of her adoption, to 22, which declared her an adult when they set her up with an apartment to live on her own, remaining her guardians from afar due to her disability.

But when Grace began to tell the story from her perspective, Good American Family did just what Robbins set out to do. Viewers watched in confusion and horror as the powerful fifth episode showed the immense physical, emotional and psychological struggles Grace was put through when trying to live on her own with her severe disability.

“This was my first role,” says Reid, who explains that since Grace has a different form of dwarfism than she does, the 27-year-old British actress worked with an acting and dialect coach as well as a movement coach for the role. “I wanted to make sure the movement felt natural in my body and not as though I’m portraying something that wasn’t true,” she tells THR. “All these elements created my own version on Natalia.”

Reid, like the rest of the cast, was aware of the ID docuseries on Grace (The Curious Case of Natalia Grace concluded with its third season in January), but Reid never had direct contact with the person she was playing. “I wanted to stick to playing my version on Natalia. I was so passionate about playing her. The things that I kept thinking to myself were fighting for that justice and seeing the light with Natalia and the empowerment,” she says. “I’m really honored that I got to do that.”

After exploring allegations taken from court proceedings and public reports to dramatize multiple conflicting points of view, the series by its end clarifies the debate around Grace’s real age: Natalia was a 7-year-old child when the Barnetts adopted her, and she was 8 years old when they set her up to live on her own.

“From our extensive research, it’s an empirical fact that Natalia was a child at the time when the Barnetts left her alone. In 2024, Natalia received a U.S. passport that makes that official. But at the time of the trial, that fact wasn’t allowed to be used in court,” co-showrunner Sarah Sutherland explains to THR. “As devastating as that is, it’s been incredible seeing people on social media talking about the show’s ‘plot twist,’ and how they’ve changed their minds about the story having now seen episodes five, six and beyond.”

The finale’s confirmation of Grace’s age now reframes the entire series, and particularly that fifth episode when Reid portrayed Grace as an 8-year-old learning to live on her own.

“When we first meet Natalia, she’s 7. As someone who is 20 years older than Natalia, hair and makeup did such a beautiful, amazing job of transforming me into this 7 year old. And when I was transformed it changed me,” says Reid. “Then when we shift to episode five, the makeup is so drastically different. She’s just been abandoned. She can’t wash her hair. She can’t look after herself — of course, she’s 8. And she has dwarfism and it’s just so heartbreaking, and it really translates.”

Reid says she worked with the show’s episodic directors, including Liz Garbus who directed that episode, titled “Too Hurty Without It,” in movement sessions to learn to to walk as Natalia, “but make it genuine in my own body and natural and not like I was portraying something that wasn’t true for me.” Something that helped her, she said, was remembering the pebbles that the end of the series revealed were in Grace’s shoes, contributing to her pain and explaining the bloody socks found by Kristine (which she used as evidence of Grace having her period and being older than she claimed). “That was something that helped my movement, the way it changed my physicality.”

Duplass, who played her onscreen adoptive father, was moved by the shift of perspective that viewers will now have on that episode, after watching the finale.

“We don’t really know how old Natalia is as a viewer as we’re watching this story,” he tells THR of the experience watching the series. “Imogen is playing someone that could plausibly be older pretending to be that age, or is actually that age, and then she has to play someone that is actually older while consistently giving us a Natalia that we can believe in through the whole thing. Those little nuances and expressions that made her feel a little bit older sometimes or a little bit younger sometimes, made you ask, ‘Is she acting? Is this real?‘ That to me is where the brilliance of her performance lies.”

Sutherland says that, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 50 percent of all people will experience a disability at some point in their lifetime. “It is not a niche topic,” she says, yet societal bias against people with disabilities is a topic that’s still poorly understood: “It’s so rare in this day and age for people to change their perspectives on something and to admit their own biases,” she says. “Our hope is that the show helps to normalize that type of admission, even if just for a few people.”

For Robbins and Sutherland, this final act of Good American Family was why they wanted to tell the story in the first place. “This story stabbed me in the heart, and I think if anyone other than Katie had approached me with it, I wouldn’t have had the trust to say yes,” says Sutherland of her co-showrunner, having written and produced 50-plus episodes of television together. “Katie’s vision for the series took what could have become a salacious, lowest common denominator thrill ride and kept the thrill, while also bringing the audience on a journey of questioning their own monstrosity, their own bias.”

Despite the series not letting Kristine, or Michael, off the hook in the end, the pair never faced legal repercussions after they were charged with neglect of a dependent. Michael was found not guilty in 2022. The following year, the charges against Kristine were dismissed.

In Good American Family after the trial, Kristine stands by her decisions when pressed by her friends and Michael, and even when questioned by her sons. Pompeo says she had to commit to Kristine’s truth in order to find the truth in her final performance.

“I feel like for someone to take such dramatic steps, they’re really convinced [they are right],” the Grey’s Anatomy star tells THR of stepping into Kristine’s shoes. “It would take a tremendous amount of humility for someone to admit they’re wrong. People just don’t do it, right? We see a lot of that right now. It’s much easier to stay in your ego bubble and keep committing to what you think is the truth.”

She continues, “And so at the end of our show, I don’t know if it’s method or what, but I didn’t know how to receive or how to play the information we get. So I tried to do what most people do and shove it down and make excuses for it. There is so much nuance to the scripts; there are so many moments that could be either this or that. I could be either fully committed or fully full of shit. And that was a life jacket for me in this moment: You never really know if she believes what she’s selling or if she doesn’t.”

Whether or not Kristine sees the light, Pompeo says the truth is there for viewers. “The character I play is very good at manipulating people and getting people to do what she needs them to do. She’s very skilled. But I think the receipts are there,” she says, also referencing the pages of damning Facebook messages from Kristine used in trial discovery that were shown in the finale. “We know what we see, what there was physical evidence of. But again, there’s receipts for a lot of things and that doesn’t ever seem to matter. People can sort of say whatever they want, and people somehow believe what people say and not what they see.”

What Pompeo is touching on was what Robbins found herself most taken aback by in her years spent researching for the series.

“This show dances in a lot of different genres, but one of the genres that it skirts around is horror tropes, particularly in those early episodes. And at the end of the day, the thing that is the scariest is that you can have some pretty clear-cut facts, or what we think of as being facts, and yet in the court of public opinion and in the court of Indiana, that doesn’t actually end up changing things,” she says. “That is one of the most important ideas in this show. That the truth sometimes doesn’t even matter.”

Before the credits roll on Good American Family, a title card informs viewers that, since the series was completed, abuse allegations against Cynthia and Antwon Mans (played in the series by Jerod Haynes in the series) have come to light; and that the Mans and Kristine maintain their innocence. In 2024, Grace was able to get her passport to reflect her birth date of Sept. 4, 2003, making her current age 21.

“At this point, while in the state of Indiana, her age has not been changed, on her U.S. passport it has. And that’s reflective of a tremendous amount of physical, biological genealogical evidence. And that felt like a bit of a triumph,” says Robbins.

“We can’t speak to how Natalia will feel or not feel, or speak to the future,” she adds of the real Grace. “My hope is that we have tried very, very hard to tell a version of this story that is empathetic and that gives justice to her story.”

Perhaps that’s why it’s Michael who is confronted by Natalia in a scene that was invented by the writers for the finale. He’s given an opportunity to ask for forgiveness, though he can’t quite get to a place of repentance. When the Barnetts’ son, Jacob (Aias Dalman), steps up to apologize to Natalia, Kristine leaves her family — or rather, they leave her.

“I think we’ve all seen the language of cinema: two people sit on a bench together and they work through things. And while the scene [between Michael and Natalia] certainly has the language of that, it doesn’t quite get there,” says Duplass of Michael’s failure to connect with Natalia. “There’s a mismatch, and as much as Michael wants to see what he’s done and look at it, I think he’s incapable of it at this point. That was really fascinating for me to play, because the language of the scene is telling you we’re going to transcend it, but they can’t get there and it’s really sad. I think it’s a very fitting end to their journey.”

Reid says the scene was devastating for her Natalia, who held onto her bond with Michael. “When it comes to my version of Natalia, Michael is someone who was broken and Natalia wanted to fix that. And I think that was really important to show because Michael is just this vulnerable guy and Mark’s version of Michael was so beautiful,” says Reid. “You see their relationship is a little bit maintained in that scene, but obviously it’s broken, and it’s so sad as well because Natalia and Michael before, in my point of view, had such an amazing relationship and bond of wanting to fix each other.”

The series also ended with Kristine watching a news-making clip from Grace’s birth mother confirming Grace’s version of her age (real-life story here), and Grace receiving an apology from the trial investigator (Dulé Hill) for the system failing her. Reid’s Grace returns to her new adoptive home with the Mans to then see the massive social media response to her birth mother’s video. The last image is of Grace smiling as she scrolls through the social media support.

“I remember doing the court scenes in the last few episodes,” says Reid, “it felt really surreal because I was playing my version of Natalia, and Natalia is now a woman. I remember going back to my trailer, and I felt so emotional. I just want justice. At that point, we had been filming for four months, and I grew so passionately for my character. I was like, ‘I just want her to feel seen and heard.’”

This may be where Good American Family‘s story ends, but it’s not where Grace’s story ends. The real Grace participated in the ID docuseries The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, and the most recent season followed Grace’s dramatic split from the Mans family. She is currently living with a new adoptive family, Vincent and Nicole DePaul.

In her final conversation with Cynthia (Hendricks), Reid somewhat pushed her adoptive mother away, which Reid says was reflective of her disappointment over the trial. “She was so positive that the court case would go so well for her and, because she has reactive attachment disorder, her main thing is to push people away,” Reid explains. “She’s used to pushing people away when people deeply care about her, and I think Cynthia in our story knew that about Natalia. She knows she acts out, but ultimately that love is always there and her door is always open. I think that’s how we portrayed it.”

Since Grace’s real-life story with the Mans, and then the DePaul family, continues, there is opportunity to continue on with Good American Family. Pompeo, also an executive producer, makes it clear that this is where her role playing Kristine ends, but both she and Robbins could be open to exploring where Grace’s story goes, particularly with Cynthia.

“I think Kristine Barnett’s story is finished,” says Pompeo. “There’s been a third installment of the documentary and Natalia continues to speak her truth and her story. So I guess if there were another season of this … is Hulu listening?”

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Good American Family is now streaming all eight episodes on Hulu. Read THR’s show coverage.