‘Locke & Key’: Darby Stanchfield Says Nina’s Pain Is Always There in the Background

While everyone else on Netflix’s Locke & Key is off forging magical keys and fighting demons, Locke family matriarch Nina (Darby Stanchfield) is on the outskirts, seemingly trucking along in her own storyline. It isn’t until late in the second season that you get to see how badly she’s been hurt by her family’s general dismissal of her… And thankfully, this season Nina deals with her pain by going to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), instead of turning to alcohol.

“There’s this growing disconnect between her and the kids as is inevitable between adults and their teenagers, in that she can’t understand or experience what they are going through,” co-showrunner Meredith Averill told Decider.

In this case, what those teens are going through isn’t just something Nina can’t understand, it’s something she literally can’t remember. Thanks to the magic of the keys, nobody over the age of 18 can recall what happened when they see magic after a few seconds of brain-breaking disassociation.

With her children busy, Nina turns to a new character, Matheson Academy history teacher Josh (Brendan Hines). Like Nina, who lost her husband Rendell (Bill Heck) back at the beginning of Season 1, Josh is a widower.

“When she has her relationship with Josh and everything is great, it gives her something else to focus on,” Averill continued. “But as she starts to move away from that, and she starts to realize how disconnected and how lonely she feels, because she can’t experience the same things as her kids, that is what set her to drink again in Season 1. But now we see that she’s more evolved, and it’s what actually sends her back to her AA group.”

Stanchfield agreed, adding that, “Nina never really, totally lets go of her grief of losing Rendell … That was one commonality, common ground, that she had with this new man that she meets. He had also lost his wife, and so there is a sort of common ground that they had about they’ve been through this grief and lost someone… And then, when it does dissolve into chaos at the end, it was much easier to go back there because she’d never really lost it.”

That place she heads back to is literally her memories of Rendell. As the season comes to a close, her young son Bode (Jackson Robert Scott) decides to give her a gift: a trip inside her own head, via the Head Key, which allows her to relive the day she and Rendell found out they were going to have a third child. And instead of letting Nina lose this happiness, Bode offers her a choice to use the Memory Key — a loophole that allows adults to use magic.

“This fracture in her is something that is always going to exist as long as she’s on a different page than her kids,” Averill noted. “Which is sort of this heartbreak of the show, is that she just can’t understand what they’re going through, and that she can’t understand what happened to her own husband.”

You’ll have to wait and see if Nina used the key when Season 3 premieres; but if she does, it’s possible we might see a brand new Nina.

Where to watch Locke & Key