‘Mr. Mercedes’: Kelly Lynch Talks Playing Deborah, Her Incestuous Relationship With Brady

Kelly Lynch said that the character of Deborah Hartsfield on Audience Network’s “Mr. Mercedes” is a type of role she’s been waiting to play for a long time.

In a recent interview with Assignment X, Lynch said that she’s “always looked” to play someone like Deborah because she likes the challenge of making the viewers feel for a character that isn’t deliberately good.

“I hated reading notes from Audience [Network] which say, ‘She’s just a really bad person,’ which is what TV networks do to make it real black and white,” Lynch told the website. “I never thought I was playing a bad person. I thought I was playing a complete human being with a particular story.”

On “Mr. Mercedes,” Deborah is the mother of Brady (Harry Treadaway), the man who stole and used the titular vehicle to commit mass murder at a job fair. While Deborah is unaware that her son is the one responsible for the massacre, it isn’t the only thing she doesn’t know as she’s an alcoholic whose reality is most of the time blurred by vodka.

“The second I read it, I thought, ‘I would kill for this.’ I’ve been waiting for this part,” Lynch told Monsters and Critics when asked what her reaction was when she read Deborah’s part for the first time. “I’ve been waiting to show someone who’s complicated, who people might say, ‘Oh. She’s a monster.’ [But] I challenge anyone to say that at the end of the 10 episodes that she’s a monster. She’s a human being and a victim of circumstance and she truly thinks she’s being a good mother.”

As seen in the series premiere, Deborah is very much concerned about Brady’s social life. She’s encouraging him to make some real friends and even get a girlfriend. And in an effort to make Brady feel that he’s desirable, Deborah started an incestuous relationship with him. “The incestuous part of the relationship [comes about] because I think Deb wants Brady to feel like he’s desirable,” Lynch said. “She wants him to be wanted.”

Lynch revealed that viewers will learn more about Deborah and Brady’s relationship when the latter’s younger brother Jerry is introduced later in the season. “You meet Jerry [through flashbacks],” Lynch said. “Jerry was [Deborah’s] younger son. Deb has lost not only her husband, her high school sweetheart but her youngest, beautiful little boy.”

“Mr. Mercedes” Season 1, episode 3, titled “Cloudy, With a Chance of Mayhem,” airs on Wednesday, Aug. 23 at 8 p.m. EDT on Audience Network.