An Ode to Ozark’s Unpredictable Villain Darlene

Season one ended with what Emery considers to be Darlene’s darkest plot point on Ozark—killing the pregnant wife of a pastor, in retaliation for him hurting her heroin business, and cutting out her unborn child (whom Darlene would eventually adopt and call Zeke).

“It’s hard for me as a human being to justify that, but I can see why Darlene would do it,” says Emery, recalling how Darlene was told the baby would die if left inside her mother’s dead body.

In season two, Darlene mixed fentanyl into the cartel’s heroin as revenge for burning down her poppy field. “That’s pretty dark. Killing people that she really had no gripe against,” says Emery, before rationalizing the fatal dosages in Darlene’s head. “She had to make some kind of really strong statement to try to intimate that the cartel had done that.”

In season three, Darlene deployed a new revenge tactic. After Frank Cosgrove Jr. (Joseph Sikora) nearly beat Ruth to death, Darlene tracked down the mob leader’s son in an empty parking lot. In a scene memorialized on YouTube under the simple title, “Darlene is a savage,” Darlene sidles up to Frank’s convertible, points her shotgun into Frank’s lap, and says, “Is the reason you like to beat up women because you got a tiny dick?” Then she shoots.

Admits Emery, “I didn’t like having to shoot somebody’s dick off.… I would’ve probably done something else if it was me, but it was her. And she’s much more direct; she’s very forceful. And she was really aligning herself with Ruth and starting to love Ruth, who’s so close to Wyatt. And [Frank Jr.] really disrespected her in most horrible way.”

The series is rich in badass female characters, between Darlene, Ruth, and Laura Linney’s Wendy. Season four sees Darlene and Ruth butt heads as business partners, even though they have a similar gritty determination. “Darlene and Ruth were aligned in a lot of ways in terms of what they believed in and what they were willing to do. I mean, Ruth electrocuted her uncles, you know. I’m not sure that Darlene ever knew that she did that, but I think I was so attracted to her because we both felt so strongly about what we were doing and what we were willing to do to get it right.”

Wendy has enjoyed more of a Walter White–style slow journey into criminal darkness. But by season dour, Emery says, “I don’t think that that Darlene is any worse than Wendy. They just have different modus operandi. Wendy kills her brother.… She knew what she was doing too. She got very cold and scary.”

More recent seasons have shown a softer side of Darlene, as a surprisingly able mother to Zeke and loving romantic partner to Wyatt. But this sensitivity did not affect Darlene’s business approach.

“She does fall in love,” says Emery. “But she’s angry. She’s everything that a normal person is, she just feels much more strongly about certain things and is willing to do anything to stand up for herself and what she believes in.… She’s definitely the most terrifying and psycho person I’ve ever played. I hate to use the word psycho, but I do in my own head, so I may as well just say it out loud. She is definitely somewhere on that sociopathic, psychotic spectrum.”