When Rufi Thorpe started shopping around the film and television rights to her as-yet-unpublished novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles, she knew she wasn’t going to be precious about it. “I was very comfortable with the adaptation diverging significantly, I actually like it when they do that,” she says. “So I wanted someone who had a vision.” Thorpe had already released three novels — The Girls From Corona Del Mar (2014), Dear Fang, With Love (2016) and The Knockout Queen (2016) — and there were very early signs that Margo was going to be different. When her film and television agents suggested submitting the manuscript to producers months ahead of its planned June 11, 2024 publication, she knew she probably had a hit on her hands.
The project eventually landed with David E. Kelley and A24, and despite her intentions to give them total creative freedom, she found herself particularly moved by an early conversation with Kelley and the rest of the writer’s room. “They asked, ‘What are you afraid we’ll do?’” recalls Thorpe. “And I said, ‘I’m afraid you’ll forget about the baby.’” Margo’s Got Money Troubles follows a young college student who gets pregnant after an affair with her married college professor, decides to raise the baby on her own, and starts a wildly creative OnlyFans presence (thanks to help from her father, a former professional wrestler) to pay the bills. “Working with baby actors is so hard and it’s easy to just stick the baby somewhere and not remember that that’s part of what is changing her, and where she is finding empowerment. They really took that to heart, and I cannot believe the performance they got out of those babies.”
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Here, Thorpe breaks down the book’s most important elements, reflects on its success, and shares her reaction to the Apple TV show’s blockbuster cast.
Do you have any memories about when you knew that Margo was going to have outsized success as a book?
Normally the ways that you publicize a book are all the same: you write some listicles, you write some personal essays, you hope for review coverage. I went to New York for an event, and the publishers asked me to come by so we could record some videos for social. They had scripted this whole wrestling scene for me where I get to knock a guy out with a chair, and my publicist was pretending to be the ref counting them down. So I was like oh, okay, we’re going to be having fun with this one.
I know you’ve been open about soliciting help from women who work on OnlyFans to help make the sex work in the book as realistic as possible; how did you go about finding women to give the book a read?
I had been following a couple of different standup comedians who had started OnlyFans accounts, so I started by reaching out to them. But they were too busy and didn’t wind up talking to me. The search algorithm in OnlyFans is limited, so I would find girls on Instagram or TikTok, and then find their OnlyFans accounts and contact them there.
Did you change anything as a result of these conversations?
One thing I was trying to get a sense of is what men’s profiles are like. If you’re a user, you can’t see other users, so I wanted to know what things looked like from the creators’ side. How anonymous are people being, what are their usernames, are people using a profile picture that is their face, their dick, an anime character? The biggest plot change that came out of it was that, originally I had that when she develops feelings for JB and is trying to prove this to him, she gives him back all his money. And pretty universally, sex workers were like, no. That’s implying it was wrong to take the money. She earned that money. She did a good job, she created the fantasy. That is an admission of fault that is not right. And I was like okay, you are correct, and I hadn’t thought about it.
The show is really ripe for online discourse; did any of the reactions to the book surprise you?
In general, I try not to read about myself on social media. I feel like people should be allowed to talk shit about a book without worrying about whether the author is creeping on them. But sometimes you get tagged in things, and there was a group of pastors’ wives who were reading it as their book club pick and they were like, “We think this is a Godly book.” Which was crazy, because not only is the book pro-sex work, but the book also questions who Jesus’ bio dad was and suggests the Virgin Mary had been raped. So I was really stunned by the variety of people who were willing to root for Margo, who had empathy and sympathy for her.
What’s your personal relationship to religion?
I grew up adjacent to, but outside of, religion. We were Christmas and Easter types. My mom was a typical California hippie who also believed in crystals and past lives — so there was nothing about my experience of the church that was repressive. But I knew that I wanted to have lots of very different opinions about sex work and whether or not it’s wrong or right, and that I wanted to have moral authority in the text. It became natural for that to be Shyanne’s boyfriend. I always try to have things in there that I feel conflicted about.
What sort of actress did you have in mind for the lead role?
Well, I knew it was going to be Elle Fanning right away because she was part of the group that purchased the initial rights. What I couldn’t have imagined about her was her ability to get really animalistic and bestial. And that long throat of hers, that can make her look so regal in The Great, can also make her look like a wrestler’s daughter in a really cool way.
One of the great casting debates was, do we try and get an ex-pro wrestler to play Jinx? I loved the idea, and there were lots of people that they floated that could be excellent, but when Nick Offerman‘s name came up, he just has that ability to be hypermasculine and believably bounce a baby and cook a lasagna from scratch.
The person I didn’t understand at first was Greg Kinnear. I thought, he’s too cool to play Kenny. He was once so beautiful and Kenny was never beautiful. Can he understand a guy like Kenny? I could not have been more wrong about that. The moment I saw the dailies I saw how good he was at making sure Kenny was never the butt of the joke, which there is a real danger of.
How did you find Michelle Pfeiffer’s Shyanne?
If there was any sadness I had about the book, it’s that a lot of people left it angry at Shyanne. They thought she was awful. I see her as more of a tragic figure who’s doing her best and her best is really painful for her daughter. The show lets you fall in love with her more, and Michelle’s really understood her. I think she must have known a lot of Shyanne’s.
I had a similar reaction to the character of Mark, the professor; in the book I found him despicable but in the show I found him more pathetic.
I’d always understood Mark as a weenie. That’s part of why Margo can’t even really get it up to feel victimized by him, and she’s almost a little embarrassed that she was ever seduced by him. The problem with this whole thing is there is no bad guy but all these terrible things keep happening.
Whose idea was it for Nicole Kidman to play an ex-wrestler?
Nicole, I think, was originally drawn to playing the mediator in the book, which is a very different character than what she plays. So it was finding a way of replacing the original lawyer in the book, with a character who was an ex-wrestling buddy of Jinx’s — it sort of combined things. Everyone was enchanted by the idea of Nicole as a pro wrestler. Coming up with her character, and what her backstory with Jinx was, was super fun.
I think a lot of fans of the book will want to know about the discussions around removing the book’s love storyline with JB, Margo’s customer.
The dropping of the love story came later. They tried to keep all of the JB love story, but there was just too much material. It was really jarring to move from some of the more dramatic moments to flirting on your phone. They’re not in the same room together, and you can do that kind of thing in novels but it just translate to the screen. We tried to make it work but it’s just too different a medium.
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