When Willow Tait was arraigned for the attempted murder of Drew Cain earlier this week, the proceedings did not at all go the way she expected them to when her mother, Nina Reeves, pleaded guilty to making a false statement, blowing the (admittedly false!) alibi she had provided Willow to smithereens. Nina got off with a slap on the wrist, while Willow was denied bail and remanded to Pentonville to await trial. “It’s not looking good for Willow!” acknowledges her portrayer, Katelyn MacMullen, who spoke to Soap Opera Digest about the latest twist and explained why Willow has been playing nice with Drew.
With Friends Like These
Even before the stunt Nina pulled in court, Willow hasn’t been on good terms with her mother in months. “She’s obviously been very, very angry with her since she found out about her relationship with Drew,” says MacMullen. But despite that tension, it wasn’t anywhere on Willow’s bingo card that after claiming to the cops that they were together at the time of the shooting, Nina would then throw her own daughter under the bus by recanting her statement. “She’s totally blindsided by that,” the actress nods. “At this point, she certainly blames Nina for this whole situation that she’s in because she didn’t ask her to lie to the cops to begin with. Willow is like, ‘Oh, my gosh, she roped me into this alibi and then she left me in the lurch! Now I look so guilty when it was never my idea to lie in the first place!’ It feels like such a betrayal.”
And a confusing one at that. Muses MacMullen, “I think in the moment, Willow is just like, ‘Wait, why would Nina create this alibi on the spot just to take it back?’ Because Willow looks super-guilty now, she’s even thinking, ‘Did Nina set me up to go to prison so that I’d be kept away from Drew? Does she hate us together that much?’ She’s just beside herself. I mean, she’s been sent to prison! And whether or not you did [the crime you’ve been accused of], that’s absolutely terrifying.”
Et Tu, Nina? Willow was gutted by Nina’s (Cynthia Watros, with Cameron Mathison as Drew) courtroom plea.
In the wake of landing in Pentonville, “I would say that complete fear and paranoia have set in,” asserts MacMullen. “She’s been indicted, and there’s not much she can do. She can’t really be like, ‘No, guys, I swear it wasn’t me!’ Nothing about this looks good. She’s hoping and hoping and hoping that somehow she is proven innocent, but all the details look pretty bad for her.”
On the plus side, she now has a very savvy lawyer in the form of Alexis, who has promised to defend her to the very best of her abilities. On the minus side, that lawyer has come to her via Drew, who gave her access to Scout in exchange for Alexis taking Willow’s case. That only makes her more beholden to her former fiancé.
“She’s so defenseless at this point and she needs help. She needs all the help she can get!” exclaims MacMullen. “So she’s definitely aligning herself with Drew.” But to hear the actress tell it, she definitely sees Drew just as a means to an end. “I think it’s a ‘keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer’ kind of thing for her,” she offers. “In her brain, I think she’s like, ‘Okay, the system is rigged.’ She’s believed that to be true since Michael got custody. And with all the corruption in the town, she’s like, ‘I have to be aligned with people who might have pull.’ So, at this point, she’s so desperate to have a dog in this fight that she’s like, ‘Well, I’d rather keep him close to me in case he can actually pull off a miracle [and help her get exonerated]. That’s the better option for her than making an enemy of him, because she believes that Drew kind of always gets what she wants at the end of the day. If she keeps him close, she can have access to his help when she needs it, and she can also kind of monitor him. That’s better than burning the bridge.”
Justice Is Served? Willow is banking on Alexis’s (Nancy Lee Grahn) help in beating an attempted murder rap.ABC
In the meantime, Willow’s focus will be on regaining her freedom so that she can ultimately regain custody of Wiley and Amelia. Says MacMullen, “She feels like she has to prove her innocence because she doesn’t want her kids to grow up and think that this is really what happened, that Willow really did this. She’s determined to get herself out of this situation, and I think her kids always follow at priority one. It’s like, number one, make sure they’re okay after they saw her get arrested. Now it’s making sure that she can clear her name so that her kids don’t think their mom did this. I think all of this is really for her kids, because if she can get her freedom, freedom comes with being able to be with her kids. She’ll do anything to clear her name so that she can be with them on the other side of this.”
Willow has been through a lot since arriving in Port Charles, but MacMullen agrees that this is a particularly rough time for her. “Yeah, it’s not so great,” she chuckles. “I mean, she’s got some people on her side, which is a relief, but overall? I’d give it a 4 out of 10.”
