Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Olsen Are Both Candy
It's a double slay as the two stars portray the same axe-wielding woman in different streaming shows
There is a crisis brewing among white women actresses. They are running out of murderesses to play. So much so that both Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Olsen are playing Candy Montgomery, a woman accused in 1980 of murdering Betty Gore, the wife of a man with whom she’d been having an affair.
Biel’s project, Candy, released its first episode on Hulu today and will release episodes daily until the 13th (Gore’s murder also happened on a Friday the 13th, cheeky). Olsen’s, called Love & Death, is scheduled to be released on HBO Max later this year.
It’s not uncommon for two similar projects to be released in the same year. We all remember the great Friends with Benefits/No Strings Attached wars of 2011. We all managed to survive having to remember which one was Olympus Has Fallen and which was White House Down. I could do this all day: The Truman Show and Ed TV, The Prestige and The Illusionist, Deep Impact and Armaggeddon, the Fyre Fest documentaries. You get it, this sort of thing happens.
Rarely though does it happen with the exact same story. Even in the case of 2006’s twin Truman Capote biopics, he was at least a prominent enough figure to deserve it. I would guess that only true crime obsessives and people who live in Wylie, Texas, knew who Montgomery was before today. They might still be the only ones for all I know. There’s not much chatter around Candy, aside from Biel’s recent bombshell revelation that she reached out to Montgomery herself to see if "she was interested in having any conversation whatsoever." She was not.
Maybe Olsen’s show will be a bigger deal. That wouldn’t solve our main problem here, which is two-pronged. Firstly, we don’t need any more true crime limited series. If I can Google how it’s going to end, I don’t want it.
Second of all, streamers, you guys have to talk to each other. In high school we had a Facebook group for prom dresses so that no one would show up wearing the same one. Maybe you guys could do something like that. “Heyyy guys, we’ve got dibs on the gruesome-murder-by-axe woman, just letting you knowww 💖.” Then someone can respond, “Omg which one?? 😂” Now we have a dialogue. Those are just sample messages for y’all; feel free to personalize as needed. Once you have that figured out we can start talking wigs. I have some notes.
