There are so many secrets to sift through at the center of Run Away to get to the truth.
In Harlan Coben’s newest limited series, Simon Greene’s (James Nesbitt) daughter Paige (Ellie de Lange) goes missing, and he’s desperate to find her. But when he finally does, she’s strung out on drugs and accompanied by Aaron Corval (Thomas Flynn), a troubled young man who Simon blames for taking his little girl away. Enraged by what’s happened to his daughter, Simon attacks Aaron, and Paige runs away yet again. Unfortunately for Simon, the altercation is recorded, the video quickly goes viral, and he finds himself in a sticky situation when Aaron is murdered soon after. That’s where creator and executive producer Harlan Coben and head writer and executive producer Danny Brocklehurst’s “shared vision” kicks off, and it only gets more winding from there. “We love twists and turns,” Coben tells Tudum. “In our view, it gets better with each episode.”
While detectives Isaac Fagbenle (Alfred Enoch) and Ruby Todd (Amy Gledhill) set out to find the murderer — with Simon as their main suspect — the father of three and his wife, Ingrid (Minnie Driver), go to Aaron’s apartment, the last place Paige was living, to restart their search. At the scene of the crime, under the cover of night, Simon and Ingrid meet Cornelius Faber (Lucian Msamati), a neighbor who was friends with Paige. He tells her parents that two days before Aaron died, he’d run into Paige as she was heading to see her drug dealer, Rocco (Marcus Fraser). She was in need of a fix, but also had blood on her face, so Cornelius was sure Aaron had beaten her. Since this was the very last time Cornelius had seen Paige, he tells Simon and Ingrid where to find Rocco. When they go to see him, though, things go badly and Ingrid is shot. With his wife now in a coma, Simon continues his mission to track down his daughter.
“They’re rather extraordinary circumstances, and the drama is huge,” says Nesbitt. “My character is taken to a lot of very dark places.”
Through those “extraordinary circumstances,” Simon meets Elena Ravenscroft (Ruth Jones), a private investigator who’s also looking for answers in a missing persons case that may just be connected to Aaron’s murder and Paige’s checkered past. The two become what Jones calls “unexpected allies.”
“They share things about their personal lives that overlap, and they’re weirdly able to be a little bit of a comfort to each other,” she explains. As Simon and Elena work together on a mission to uncover deeply buried secrets, another duo — paid assassins known as Ash (Jon Pointing) and Dee Dee (Maeve Courtier-Lilley) — run rampant on their own mission: killing people who may also have something in common with Aaron.
So who murdered Aaron Corval? Is Paige Greene still alive? And where exactly does this mystery take place? Ahead, we answer these questions and more. Plus, Coben, Brocklehurst, Nesbitt, and Jones break down Run Away’s major twists and untangle the series’ many secrets.
When Henry’s father, a wealthy businessman named Sebastian Thorpe, hires Elena to track down his missing son, he explains that Henry was adopted. He also shares a flyer for a tattoo parlor that has a cell number scribbled on it that he found among Henry’s things. With some digging on social media and help from her tech expert Lou (Annette Badland), Elena soon discovers that Henry had made plans to meet up with Paige Greene — Simon’s daughter, who is also missing — not long before he disappeared, and identifies that the number on the flyer belongs to a man named Damien Gorsch. When Elena goes to the tattoo parlor to try to determine what connects Henry, Paige, and Damien, she discovers that it is an active crime scene.
As we see in Episode 2, Damien was shot and killed by Ash and Dee Dee, who also murdered a man named Kevin Gano in Episode 1, but Elena hasn’t pieced that together yet. Soon, though, while searching through Damien’s internet history, Elena does discover that he had recently visited a genealogy website, searching for his biological family. It turns out Damien was adopted through the same agency as Henry, and the two met on the site.
After coming across Kevin Gano’s obituary, Elena begins looking into his death because he was also adopted and died under suspicious circumstances. In the meantime, Elena tracks down Alison Mayflower, the person who oversaw both Damien and Henry’s adoptions. When Elena confronts Alison, she confirms that Aaron was adopted as well. Fearing accusations of involvement in these cases, Alison escapes, but Elena blackmails her assistant to get the address of Alison’s girlfriend Stephanie. Through more investigative work, Elena finds out that, at the time of Kevin’s death, he had been looking for his birth family, just like Henry and Damien, and that, according to Damien’s account on the ancestry site, he had several half-siblings, including Henry, Kevin, and someone using the initials AC, whom Elena and Simon conclude must be Aaron Corval.
Elena goes to Stephanie’s home looking for Alison, but nobody’s there, so she leaves her card with a note asking them to contact her. Elena soon receives a call from someone claiming to be Stephanie, and they make a plan to meet up in a parking lot. When she arrives, however, it’s Dee Dee who’s waiting for her. Pretending to be Stephanie, Dee Dee drives Elena to a cabin. Inside, Elena steps onto a tarp, and Ash points a gun at her. While memories of Elena and her late husband Joel flash across the screen, a gunshot sounds — Elena has been murdered by Ash and Dee Dee.
“I did find it quite scary to shoot,” says Jones. “I’m facing Dee Dee, and then I have the realization that Ash is there. It was that turning round, and he’s holding this gun, and he was so totally in it.” Jones thinks that not showing the actual murder makes the moment even more eerie and impactful. “I was very glad that I didn’t have to actually fall on the floor, because I think that might have made it a bit comedic.”
Losing a key character six episodes into an eight-episode series comes as a shock, but fans of Coben and Brocklehurst’s work know it’s a twist the pair like to employ. “It’s not the first time we’ve done this,” Brocklehurst points out. “We have killed off Jennifer Saunders and Eddie Izzard.”
“We love to kill off comedy legends,” says Coben, adding that this twist also ups the emotional stakes. “Danny and I wanted to break your heart a little bit. It’s one of the reasons why you get an actress as lovable as Ruth Jones.”
This heartbreaking murder, a little over midway through the series, keeps the audience on its toes. “We were very careful in how we filmed this and how we wrote this part, where you still think there's some way she’s going to get away,” Coben continues. “Then, when we slow down, and the music starts, and her feet hit that tarp, and she starts to see her husband, you realize this really is the end.”
The audience knows Ash and Dee Dee are on a killing spree from the start of the series, but their motivation isn’t revealed until Episode 5. The episode opens with a flashback to three weeks earlier: Dee Dee is living among what appears to be a cult and going by the name Holly. Her religious chanting is interrupted by a fellow member who walks her out of the commune, hands her an envelope, and sends her off to “spread the Shining Truth.” After being promised that her friend will get paid once they complete the tasks, Dee Dee opens the envelope to find photos of Damien Gorsch, Kevin Gano, Henry Thorpe, and Aaron Corval with Paige Greene — their kill list.
We come to find out that Ash and Dee Dee grew up in foster care together, and recently reunited to carry out these murders. Dee Dee is a member of the cult, but Ash is openly suspicious of the group, especially since he hasn’t been told exactly why they want these people dead. When Dee Dee takes Ash back to the compound in Episode 5, another member of the cult, Mother Adiona, slips him a note that says, “Don’t kill them. Don’t trust Dee Dee.” Still, because of the deep bond he formed with Dee Dee through their shared traumatic upbringing, Ash continues on and even takes on the new assignment of killing Elena after Alison reports back to the cult that the PI is catching on to them.
Episode 7 opens with a flashback to Dee Dee leaving the compound three weeks earlier, and then follows Mother Adiona as she runs to warn a man named Nathan that he’s being targeted by Ash and Dee Dee. Back in the present, as the killers bury Elena’s body, they see a text on her phone from Simon and worry about what Elena may have told him before her death. Later on, when Ash eventually confronts Dee Dee about Mother Adiona’s note, Dee Dee reveals that Mother Adiona’s biological son, Nathan, is on their kill list and finally lets Ash in on the reason they’re after these men.
The leader of the Beacon of the Shining Truth cult, named Casper Vartage but known by followers as “The One,” is dying, and his two “divine” sons, known as “The Visitor” and “The Volunteer,” are ready to take over from him. But they’re not the only sons The One had with his impressionable young followers. The others were put up for adoption without their mothers’ knowledge or consent. “It’s written in the symbols that the Shining Haven and all of The One’s possessions will be equally divided amongst all his male heirs,” she explains to Ash. Now that he is nearing the end of his life, the cult leader has tasked them with killing the additional sons so they don’t “ruin the Shining Truth.”
Coben chose to write Run Away around a cult because, he says, “There’s a certain fascination with that kind of brain manipulation, if you will, and that sort of obsession, believing what’s not necessarily so.” Plus, Coben explains, the insular community offered an interesting juxtaposition to the mainstream spheres that Simon’s family occupies in the story: “What could they have to do with a cult that’s way in the outskirts of society?”
As Ash and Dee Dee continue discussing the mission and her belief in this so-called “Shining Truth,” Dee Dee explains that the religion helped her come to terms with their tragic past and that the money they’re getting from carrying out these kills will allow them to live the life they want. “After everything we’ve been through, don’t you think we deserve that?” she asks Ash. Finally understanding what all this is about, he’s ready to move forward with their next assignment — killing Aaron.
At Aaron’s apartment, though, Dee Dee and Ash discover that Aaron is already dead. As they’re leaving, they spot Simon, who is meeting back up with the drug dealers that may have information about Paige, so they go after him. When they’re spotted, a gun fight breaks out, and Ash is shot dead. Devastated and incensed by the loss, Dee Dee pursues Simon up the stairs of the apartment building and shoots him. “After Ash is killed, you're almost cheering on Dee Dee Terminator-style because you know how much they were connected, even though they were fucking terrible,” says Coben. But, just as she’s about to finish the job, Mother Adiona shows back up and throws her off the ledge of the apartment building. Dee Dee now lies dead on the concrete.
The heart of this story is a father desperately searching for his runaway daughter, but with a string of murders connected by a dangerous cult, there’s a looming question of whether the missing girl is even still alive. Early in the finale, that question is finally answered. Paige reappears for the first time since Simon spotted her in the park at the start of the season, which led to that disastrous altercation with Aaron. She’s at her mother’s hospital bedside, looking a lot better than she did the last time Simon saw her.
As she tells her relieved father, Paige has been in rehab and is now almost a month clean from drug use. When she found Aaron’s dead body, she feared that the police would think she had killed him, so she ran. As Simon uncovered over the course of the series, Paige had been sexually assaulted at university. Not long after, she began spending time with Aaron and turned to drugs. Fearing his disappointment, Paige didn’t tell Simon any of this, but she did confide in Ingrid, who then set her daughter up at the rehab center she had been treated at when she was younger — something else Simon was completely unaware of.
In Run Away, Coben and Brocklehurst bring us into many different worlds. There’s the privileged environment of finance jobs and private schools that the Greene family inhabits, the dingy apartments and dodgy crowd that hangs around the Marinduque Estate where Aaron, Paige, and Cornelius live, and of course, the creepy Shining Haven commune. But something unites all of them. “Addiction is one of those things that makes all those worlds overlap,” says Coben. “It affects everybody — every economic and every social class.” That’s why the author wanted to tackle the topic of addiction, and it’s what guided Brocklehurst as he adapted the novel. “I was very, very keen that we made this one really emotionally truthful to parents and to that feeling that this can happen to anybody,” he explains. “I think that what Jimmy’s done really well is bring that sense to life.”
Knowing that addiction can touch anyone helped Nesbitt channel honest emotions in his portrayal of Simon, especially in his scenes with Paige. “To locate the real depths of despair or helplessness or guilt or paralysis, it is handy at times to be able to tap into the reality of my life as a parent of two girls,” says Nesbitt. “It’s easy for me to imagine just how awful that would be.”
To create all the different worlds that converge in this one emotional story, the team behind Run Away filmed on location across Northwest England, including in Greater Manchester and Liverpool.
Coben says he was first inspired to write the story while sitting in New York City’s Central Park with a street performer strumming nearby. “I was thinking, ‘What if Simon Greene is sitting right on this bench where I am now?’ He is sort of half listening to the busker, and when he looks up, he sees it’s his daughter. And when he approaches her, everything goes wrong,” Coben shares. “I love those What Ifs.” Executive producers Nicola Shindler and Richard Fee call that opening scene in the park the “emotional hook” of the story, and it’s what made Run Away one of their favorite novels from Coben. So, of course, finding the right location was important.
Eventually, the team landed on Sefton Park, in Liverpool. “In the book, it’s Central Park, so we had a lot to live up to,” Fee says. “But Sefton Park feels very iconic for that big hook scene.” It also turned out to be Driver’s favorite filming location. “For me, the most gorgeous discovery was Liverpool and Sefton Park. I had never been [there] before,” she says. “The architecture and the layout of the city is so fantastically beautiful with this huge park in the middle. We shot in this Georgian square, which is meant to be the exterior of the house that looks exactly like a big Georgian square in London.”
Another critical location that was challenging to get just right was that of the Beacon of the Shining Truth. “The house for the cult was quite hard to find because that is something that is so particular,” says Fee. “It has got to have a big impact onscreen. It has got to feel very visually distinctive, but there is a danger that it could feel too heightened or too unbelievable, so it was trying to find that balance. What we found is terrific and works very well.” According to Shindler, Cornelius’s home at the Marinduque estate also needed to strike a balance between “interesting” and “dark.” The spot that was selected helped imbue those scenes with a gritty reality. “When you are on location in such places as the Marinduque estate, it is a reminder that people are living hard lives out there,” Msamati shares.
After raiding Shining Haven and learning of Ash and Dee Dee’s involvement, Detective Fagbenle understandably concludes that they were responsible for Aaron’s death. But after Simon and Paige reunite, we learn who actually killed him. As she explains to her father, Paige’s current stay at rehab, which she returns to after visiting her mother in the hospital, wasn’t her first. Her initial attempt to get clean at the facility was unsuccessful because Aaron tracked her down, snuck in, and shot her up with drugs while she slept. The next day, she left with him. Though Aaron had avenged Paige by attacking her rapist back at university, he was obviously deeply troubled. After he and Paige connected with his half-brother Henry through the genealogy site, Aaron got jealous and assaulted Paige. She once again sought help from Ingrid, who told her to return to rehab. Before she did, however, Paige went back to Aaron’s apartment the following day. There, she discovered his dead body and eventually realized her mom had killed him. Before Paige heads back into rehab, she and Simon agree to never tell Ingrid they know the truth. “She did that to protect me, and I have to live with that,” Paige says to her father.
After Ingrid comes out of her coma and is released from the hospital, however, Simon confronts his wife about Aaron’s murder. With no regrets, she explains that she arranged an alibi with her co-worker Jay, who said he would cover for her if anyone asked any questions. But, after killing Aaron, Ingrid was seen leaving his apartment by one of the drug dealers, Luther. Knowing that Ingrid had murdered Aaron, who worked for Rocco, he feared that she was after them as well, which is why he shot her when Cornelius sent her and Simon to them and claimed self-defense.
Though incredibly shocking, the reveal that Ingrid killed Aaron isn’t the series’ final — or juiciest — twist. After Ingrid shares the story of why and how she murdered Aaron, she tells Simon, “No more secrets,” but it turns out, she’s still keeping one, and it’s a doozy. Back at home, Simon sits down for a chat with Paige, who is now home from rehab and doing well. He says he never understood what she saw in Aaron and that he had noticed, when he visited their apartment, there were two single mattresses, meaning Paige and Aaron likely weren’t sleeping together. He also shares that he had spoken to the person who raped Paige, and he said that as Aaron was beating him up, he kept saying over and over, “No one hurts my sister.”
As Simon previously discovered while looking for his daughter, Paige had joined a “Family Tree Club” back when she was still at school. Now he’s pieced together that Paige also met Aaron through a genealogy website, and found out that they, too, were half-siblings. Unlike The One’s other sons, Henry, Damien, and Kevin, though, Aaron and Paige share a mother. Paige confesses that Ingrid told her that she was part of this cult. Like the many other young mothers who had been members, she got pregnant by The One, had the baby, and then was falsely told the baby was stillborn. Eventually, she escaped, and that’s when she went to rehab. “I’d driven my mum to kill someone,” Paige says to her dad. “But she didn’t just kill someone, did she?” Simon asks. “She killed her own son.” Again, Paige begs him to never confront her mother about the whole truth, and as the family sits down to eat dinner together, it seems like he has agreed. But, as the series’ final shot closes in on Simon’s face, he stares directly at the camera before it quickly cuts to black.
“Right at the very end, I look down the lens as if to say, ‘What do I do now?’” Nesbitt says.
The actor isn’t sure how his character will answer the question, but insists that’s not what really matters. “The important thing is that Paige is okay. I think Paige and Simon can [move on]. I'm not sure about Simon and Ingrid,” he continues. “I like that ambiguity because it isn't all a happy ending. How could it be?”
Brocklehurst also likes the uncertainty as to what happens next. “It treats the audience with an intellectual respect to have their own opinion,” he says. His personal opinion, by the way, is that in their final shared look across the dinner table, Simon and Paige understand that they now hold a heavy secret that can never be shared.
Coben agrees, “That’s going to haunt them the rest of their lives, both of them.” But, as is illustrated by all the characters throughout the series, even with our secrets, life goes on. “You can live with secrets, because we all do. None of us fully knows the interior of another person.”
