The stars of Peacock's true-crime series talk to ET about bringing the unbelievable story to the screen.
Now streaming on Peacock, A Friend of the Family is the star-studded true-crime saga depicting the unbelievably real story about what happened to the Brobergs when the neighbor of their dreams turned out to be a living nightmare and drove their family apart.
“It’s truly something else,” says Mckenna Grace, who portrays Jan Broberg, who was 12 years old when she was first kidnapped and brainwashed by Robert “B” Berchtold (Jake Lacy) in 1974. Despite her safe return, it wasn’t the last time she would be abducted by Berchtold, who also manipulated and seduced both of her unassuming parents, Bob and Mary Ann (Colin Hanks and Anna Paquin).
“To me, this story is so much scarier than any fabricated horror film or anything like that,” Grace continues, explaining to ET’s Matt Cohen that this man that they trusted turned out to be “a master manipulator, and that’s terrifying.”
“The man who did this to this family is an evil guy, and it was all premeditated. He knew exactly what he was doing,” Hanks says. And Lacy agrees, saying, “He knew what to look for and how to force people into positions where they were compromised.”
Adapted for the screen by showrunner Nick Antosca (The Act, Candy), the nine-part limited series is also produced by Jan and Mary Ann Broberg, who both wanted to lend their experiences to this harrowing cautionary tale after first sharing their stories in the 2019 docuseries, Abducted in Plain Sight.
Not only that, but the two worked closely with the cast to give them insight into how one person preyed on their family by building trust and creating special relationships before separating them psychologically. In addition to kidnapping and assaulting Jan twice, Berchtold also had sexual experiences with both Bob and Mary Ann after years of grooming everyone he encountered.
“I talked to Jan very often,” Grace says, adding that it was “lovely to be able to talk to her and hear her experiences” before getting her blessing to recreate her story onscreen. “Even though it’s nice to have freedom, personally I wanted to have that connection with her and learn as much as I could about what she was thinking at the time and what she was feeling ‘cause it’s so complicated.”
Knowing that both Jan and Mary Ann were involved reassured Lacy, who was tasked with bringing back to life the man who upended the lives of their entire family. Although Berchtold died by suicide in 2005, the actor had access to “documents and recordings and letters and diary entries and all these things from Jan,” he says.
Based on the story being told here, “it was my understanding, and in our telling of it, a master manipulator had this innate ability to read people and know what they wanted, what they needed and how to provide that for them,” Lacy says of Berchtold.
Because this all happened in the ‘70s, there wasn’t a broad awareness for things like pedophilia or grooming. “It’s not a known thing in the world in the way that in 2022 you know exactly what a pedophile is,” Lacy says, explaining that at that time, they were all living “a very open, trusting, earnest, vulnerable life.”
“It was not common knowledge, you know, the things that they were experiencing,” Hanks agrees.
“And that also the perfect storm of circumstances that the Broberg family was living in when he arrived in town,” Lacy says, noting that Berchtold’s crimes “weren’t a one-off thing.”
In fact, he did similar things to his own family, mostly by grooming his wife, Gail, who had her own concerns about her husband but could never imagine just how far things would go. For Lio Tipton, that meant going into survival mode. “Or what I figured would be a survival mode version of Gale, where everything almost is live or die,” they say, choosing to focus on that rather than the question of whether “did she know or didn’t she?”
From Tipton’s perspective, “the intention of Jan Broberg and Mary Ann, her mother, of getting this story out is to show how difficult it might be to recognize grooming or abuse in certain situations,” they say, with Grace adding, “It’s so easy to look on the outside, like that could never happen to me but you don’t know. They didn’t know that it was happening to them.”
“So, by giving this rounded, whole look into the world of these families, hopefully others might take a look into their own situation,” Tipton says. “It might not be as ridiculous as it sounds.”
“It could really happen to anyone,” Grace concludes.
The first four episodes of A Friend of the Family are now streaming on Peacock, with the remaining episodes dropping weekly on Thursdays.
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