Warning: SPOILERS for Perry Mason “Chapter Sixteen” are ahead!
Perry Mason Season 2 is officially over, and it was officially confirmed behind the murder of Brooks McCutcheon. While one of the big twists this season on the HBO series was the reveal that brothers Rafael and Mateo Gallardo actually pulled the trigger, Hope Davis’ Camilla Nygaard was the one who ordered the murder, as she saw him not only as a liability to her and his father’s business interests, but was also disgusted by his abusive behavior towards women. Ahead of the finale, a.k.a. “Chapter Sixteen,” airing, I spoke with Davis about her character’s big twist, shooting her last scene with Juliet Rylance and actually getting stung by bees for the episode’s opening scene.
Camilla’s role as Perry Mason Season 2’s shadowy villain was set up at the end of last week’s episode, as Clara Drake, wife of Paul Drake (a man who dealt with many complications this season), discovered that the drug-addicted woman who sought her fixes from Ozzie Jackson was Constance Barber, the wife of Melville Phipps, Camilla’s lawyer and the man who paid Ozzie to arrange Brooks’ murder. This left “Chapter Sixteen” free to explore Camilla’s motives, but when I interviewed Hope Davis, I was curious about whether she knew about Camilla’s guilt from the beginning or learned about it later. She said it was the former; in her words:
I knew before we started. It was hinted at before we started, but there was a lot I didn’t know, but I knew that she was involved. But I didn’t know what they were going to do with her. I didn’t know if they were going to throw her into jail, and you get the sense that maybe Camilla’s going to survive this in some way. I was so thrilled when I read the last episode and realized that she wasn’t very apologetic about she’d done. She really thought she’d done the right thing, and I think she stands by her decision, that it was someone who needed to be taken care of.
Learning the truth about Camilla Nygaard hit Juliet Rylance’s Della Street particularly hard, as she’d built a friendship with her over the course of the season. Eventually though, Perry and Paul were able to convince Phipps to help them out by stealing the blackmail photos she had on district attorney Hamilton Burger. As the cherry on top of the proverbial sundae, because Camilla passively insulted Constance to his face, Phipps ended up stealing all the blackmail photos she had on other powerful people throughout the city and gave them to our protagonists. The result was Burger agreeing to a deal with the defense: Mateo would serve 30 years in prison for Brooks’ murder with no parole, and Rafael would go free.
So that marked the end of this season’s case, but before all was said and done, Della paid one last visit to Camilla at her home, where she confronted her about what she’d done and brought agents from the Bureau of Investigation with her. During my chat with Hope Davis, she said she believed Camilla really liked Della and acknowledged that that her character is “a little lonely,” as “there certainly weren’t a lot of other powerful businesswomen she could have lunch with in that day and age.” Alas, it was not a relationship not to be, and I was curious about the work she and Juliet Rylance put into shooting their final scene together. The actress recalled:
Yeah, that’s always the trickiest thing in an eight-episode arc like this is you want to hit all the right notes and you want to give your editors lots of options in case they need to form something into a slightly different shape. So we worked very hard on that day and just tried to give as much variety as we could so they could play it the way they wanted to play it. The trick of doing an eight-hour drama is you’re putting the beginning of it together as you’re shooting the end of it. You can’t feel exactly where it’s going to land, what it’s going to feel like. So it’s kind of nerve-racking shooting those end bits because you don’t want to disappoint the audience, you don’t want to let the story down in any way. So yeah, we really worked hard that day.
As for the opening scene of “Chapter Sixteen”, viewers see Camilla going through a Japanese beauty treatment that involved being stung by bees a few times on her face. Naturally I was curious about if Hope Davis actually had to deal with the bees, rather than that process being simulated sure enough, and sure enough, she did have quality time with those insects. As she explained:
I did deal with the bees. It’s so funny, one of the many, many things I loved about shooting the show is I would get these little emails saying, ‘You’re going to be speaking Japanese in the next episode, is that going to work for you? You’re going to be playing piano a couple of episodes away, is that going to work?’ ‘Are you allergic to bees?’ was one of the ones that came at me. I said, ‘I am allergic to bees, I haven’t been stung since I was a kid.’ They said, ‘Do you have any phobia around the idea of being near bees?’ I said, ‘No, I’m up for it.’ So I think we had a little epipen standing by in case anything happened, and there was a bee handler there, and the bees were very sleepy, so I wasn’t scared of them. But those were real bees.
When we leave off with Camilla Nygaard in the Perry Mason Season 2 finale, she’s told Della that they’ll see each other again, and then she goes to speak to the government agents by her pool, so it’s hard to say if she’s ultimately led away in handcuffs or is able to smooth talk her way into a more advantageous position. From Davis’ perspective, she’s skeptical that Camilla will land in jail because she has “friends in high places.” At the time of this writing, there’s been no word about if Perry Mason will return for Season 3, but if it does, Davis told me she “would absolutely love to see Camilla again.”
You can watch all of Perry Mason’s two seasons with your HBO Max subscription now, and we’ll let you know what the future of the show may or may not hold in store when that news comes in. Until then, use our 2023 TV schedule to keep track of shows airing new episodes now or will be doing so in the coming months.
