10 amazing facts about “How to Get Away With Murder”! (List)

Read here 10 interesting fun facts about the TV series “How to Get Away With Murder”!

1. The pilot episode of How to Get Away With Murder quickly set the frank tone for the show in terms of sexual content. In the first hour alone, it featured Davis’ married Annalise Keating receiving oral sex from her boyfriend (Billy Brown) and Falahee’s Connor seducing nerdy IT specialist Oliver (Conrad Ricamora), in order to obtain incriminating evidence Keating could use during a trial.

2. There are about 80 students in the average 1L lecture at Harvard. Annalise Keating has only ever called on maybe nine in total, though her classroom diplomacy has skewed heavily towards her favorite Keating Five.

3. In order to get into the headspace of Connor Walsh, actor Jack Falahee (Connor) said he does “a lot of action-based work from Stanislavski, blah blah blah.” But what also helps him is making separate playlists for different scenes with “emotional prep songs” that he loves. “I was really digging Phantogram,” he told us, “which is funny because then they used Phantogram in episode nine as the climax song. I was, like, going through PTSD watching.” Aside from digging Phantogram, Falahee admitted that he has a soft spot for Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.” “When I heard that song I think I listened to it, like, 45 times. I had never heard of it, I was so late to the game. And then I was working out and it came on. I was, like, ‘What is this?’ Taylor Swift, she’s great.” Or as co-star Matt McGorry (Asher) referred to her, “T-Swizzle.”

4. Liza Weil, who plays Bonnie Winterbottom, has been in four of the Shondaland shows, including each on TGIT night. Shonda Rhimes was a fan of Weil since seeing her on Gilmore Girls and asked to meet. The idea of a general meeting with the high-profile producer terrified her because “the idea of just being myself in a room feels a little daunting.” The meeting got rescheduled multiple times and Weil joked that she felt her “authenticity diminishing” with each postponement. After day-player roles on Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice, she read for a few roles on Scandal and landed Amanda Tanner, which was a “super dark thing to do.” For Murder, she read for Pete Nowalk and Betsy Beers; Shonda wasn’t even in the room. “I feel like {Shonda’s] just an intensely loyal person who fiercely believes in this stable of actors that she creates and uses over and over again,” Weil said. “I’m extremely grateful.”

5. The writers alone do not inform the whole story. Charlie Weber (Frank) and Alfred Enoch (Wes) shared how incredible it can be when writers use the actors’ onscreen work to determine future plot points, specifically in the scenes taking place on the night of the murder. Katie Findlay (Rebecca) enjoys having open conversations with showrunner Pete Nowalk. She says some of their talks have even changed what happens in future scripts.

6. The increasing amount of hot, explicit sex on television may seem gratuitous to some, but the cast of HTGAWM disagrees. “It’s just two people doing what people do, all over the world,” said Billy Brown (Nate), laughing. “Somebody’s doing it right now!” Viola Davis, who plays Annalise Keating, said she finds it “liberating” and that her big, sexy scene with Billy Brown “was a lot of takes. I just went for it. And [Billy] really goes for it.”

7. We fans already know who killed Sam Keating, one of the prime mystery plots in the first half of season one. Alfred Enoch didn’t find out that his character, Wes, was going to be the murderer until the table read of the revealing episode. “When I got the script for the night,” he said, “I was like, ‘Whaaat? People!’ That was crazy just because I’d never worked in that way, you know? It was something very new to me … If you’re playing Othello, it’s useful to know if you’re going to kill Desdemona. Not like you’re going to walk around [looking like] you’re going to smother her every five seconds. But It can help you to build to that, or to not build to that.” Findlay expanded that actors are often tempted to play the ending because it serves as an anchor for the characters, in which case, not knowing the ending can actually be beneficial.

8. An inspiring example of an actor implementing change is the scene that revealed Annalise Keating removing her wig at night. Viola Davis said “I’m not going to stay in a bed with full makeup and hair as a sexy character. If I have to do that, it’s going to force me to do really, really bad acting. That’s not human. Human is women take their hair off at night — especially African-American women — we wear a lot of wigs. We take our makeup off. We don’t walk great in shoes. We’re not necessarily likable. We’re not always a size two. Some of us have deep voices. And you’re just going to have to deal with it.” Davis likes to see real women on TV, an image that excites and inspires her. What she doesn’t like is “the archetype of womanhood on TV. It depresses me. That’s the thing that makes me wanna go back home and eat and binge and eat a lot of bread. Eat bread! Because I know the truth.”

9. Davis uses an example from her time studying at Juilliard to encourage TV showrunners and actors to present images of real women: “I always tried to be the 90-pound white girl, only because we did a lot of classical training there and all of the ingénues in Shakespeare, or whatever, were very small women. So I tried to make myself small — I don’t know how I did that — just thinking small. And I tried to have a high voice, which sounds ridiculous, right? I thought there was only one way to be sexy. I almost felt like I had to disappear. But it feels really good to embrace exactly who I am and be my sexy, to be my sexualized, to be my woman. It’s the joy of my life. And I think it found me at the right time of my life too, when I’m really unapologetic for who I am. I think women want to see themselves on TV. We’re in the 21st century and I think we need to woman-up. Shonda Rhimes is the one who is fearless with it. ”

10. “I always say that I think our characters are way better actors than we are,” said King, who plays Michaela.