Nicholas Hoult and Toni Collette explain ambiguous ‘Juror #2’ ending

Warning: This article contains spoilers about Juror #2.

Nicholas Hoult and Toni Collette had to start at the end.

The actors, who are reuniting in Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 over 20 years since they shared the screen in About a Boy, actually shot the film’s final scene on their first day working together. Hoult had already been working for a few weeks when he and Collette shot the scene, but it was her first day on the job.

“The whole thing was intimidating,” she tells Entertainment Weekly. “It’s Clint Eastwood. I admire him so much. I have so much respect for him — he’s a living legend, an iconic cinematic figure. And then, suddenly, you’re on his set.”

The scene itself is fairly ambiguous and features no dialogue. After Collette’s prosecutor, Faith, wins her case, she starts to put pieces together and realizes that Hoult’s juror, Justin, is actually the culprit behind the murder case she was trying (though his role was accidental). Justin, now living happily with his wife and new baby, believes he may have successfully gotten away without anyone knowing the truth — until Faith shows up at his door and stares him down. Then, it cuts to black.

So, what’s next? Is she there to arrest him? Does she want to hash it out before taking more extreme measures? Is he screwed from this moment onwards? Hoult says it’s clear those were the questions Eastwood wanted his audience to ask.

“Clint likes to not over explain,” he says. “One of the things that makes him masterful as a director is that he gives space for the audience to think and work a little bit for themselves. It’s not spoon-fed to them.”

To that end, Hoult reveals that they actually shot the scene several different ways, some more conclusive than others. “We did a couple of different versions,” he notes. “One was just [Toni], one where [Toni] had police officers on either side, one where there was police cars behind her. There’s different elements, so that there were potentially different conclusions that you could draw. But the ones that are more mysterious are the ones that work better because the audience can then sit there and be like, ‘Okay, what is going to happen next?’ And what is the right thing to happen next?'”

Still, Hoult and Collette were very clear in their own minds about what they believed would be going through their characters’ heads at that moment — and what they intended to do next. They both believe that Faith is there to see this through and get justice for the victim.

“This woman’s dedicated her entire life to justice and doing the right thing,” Collette says. “To uncovering the truth. And there’s so much at stake for her. There’s actually a lot that will be compromised, and she may lose a lot, but she still has to do the right thing. That’s just an innate part of her.”

“Justin sees his world crumbling,” adds Hoult. “He is grasping at straws and panicked. Like, ‘Well, hang on, what am I going to do here? Can I put out this fire? What’s the next way? Or how can this be spun?’ His brain’s going into overdrive along with panic.” 

There’s also a slim part of Justin that has been holding out hope that he isn’t the one responsible for Kendall Carter’s (Francesca Eastwood) death. Out one night spiraling over his wife’s miscarriage, he drops his phone and collides with something in the dark. But when he gets out of his car, he doesn’t see anything and chalks it up to clipping a deer because of a “Deer Crossing” sign on the side of the road.

It isn’t until he’s a juror serving on the trial for Kendall’s murder that he realizes he may have hit her and not a deer. He grapples with whether or not he should reveal this truth, struggling with what is morally right.  “The thing that I battled in his mind is whether he could still potentially be like, ‘Oh, maybe there was a deer as well. Maybe this is a coincidence that this happened,'” Hoult says. “I was always playing with the idea that he still believed that it could not have been him. Yes, obviously, there’s a fear and panic that, like, ‘Oh, it could have been me, and I could go to prison for this, and it doesn’t look good that I was at a bar beforehand, even if I didn’t drink.’ But, as a human, you always give yourself any possible little glimmer of out that you could in that scenario to help yourself sleep at night.”

There’s also the outstanding question of whether or not the truth is buried somewhere in the recesses of Justin’s memory. “There is a potential scenario that you could say in that brief glance where he looked up before the impact, did that blur of whatever it might have been, could it have been not a deer?” Hoult asks. “That’s something that I feel like is probably deeply rooted within his memory. And even he could probably deny because our memory is not memory.”

Still, regardless of what he remembers, the film also presents Justin with the moral quandary of whether to turn himself in, knowing he has a wife and child at home who need him. It’s something that eats at him throughout the film, but there was also a deleted scene that made this push-and-pull even more explicit.

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“There was a scene that was cut,” notes Hoult. “He goes to turn himself in, and then his experience at the police station, he sees what’s happening there, and it terrifies him. Then he leaves. That was an interesting idea that he did instantly have that reaction of like, ‘Okay, I should go and talk about this and explain it.’ And is that the right thing to do? Probably. But I don’t think until anyone’s in that situation, you can judge it and say what you’d do. It’s nearly impossible.”

Juror #2 is now in theaters.