‘The Perfect Couple’ Cast Had to Be “Arm-Twisted” to Film That Bonkers Meghan Trainor Opening Credits Dance Sequence: “They All Went, ‘We’re Not Doing It!’”

We need to talk about The Perfect Couple‘s insane “Opening Credits” sequence. Every episode of the new Netflix murder mystery features a thirty-second sequence showing the cast locked in a choreographed dance number set to Meghan Trainor‘s “Criminals.” The idea is that this group dance happened during the happiest moments of Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson) and Benji Winbury’s (Billy Howle) rehearsal dinner. That is, all the characters in The Perfect Couple — from haughty crime novelist Greer Garrison Winbury (Nicole Kidman) to her snotty and pregnant daughter-in-law Abby (Dakota Fanning) — happily took part in dancing a modern-day “Macarena.”

At first, I found this bizarre “Opening Credits” sequence to be corny. Then, when I realized it was going to pop up in every episode, I was like, “That’s weird.” Tonally, it doesn’t match up with the very bleak subject matter of a murder mystery. However, by the end of the series, when director and executive producer Susanne Bier joins the fun, I sort of loved it? The Perfect Couple‘s “Opening Credits” sequence, which as IndieWire’s Ben Travers pointed out on X aren’t actually opening credits “because they don’t list any actual credits,” encapsulates this show’s daffy approach to the murder mystery genre to a tee.

Every frame of The Perfect Couple opening credits is perfect. pic.twitter.com/o9O4ybcHnp

— Netflix (@netflix) September 5, 2024

According to Susanne Bier, the Meghan Trainor dance number almost didn’t even happen! When Decider chatted with Bier yesterday, the Oscar and Emmy winning Danish director revealed that “it was kind of my idea.”

“It was never really planned, but there was in the script, there was like a nightmare scene where there was like a dance and it became this weird nightmare,” Bier said. “I did not want to do that because I thought it was too dark.”

“But there was something about dancing that kind of stayed with me. And then I was like, ‘Okay, I want to do a dance scene as a title sequence.’ And everybody went, “No, no, no, no, no, no! Don’t do that.”

Bier explained to Decider that it was a massive upward battle to pull the dance sequence off. Everyone from her editor to the entire cast pushed back on her dream title sequence. Undeterred, she ordered a choreographer to pull a sequence together and sent it to the cast to rehearse.

“They all went, ‘We’re not doing it, we’re not doing it. We are not doing it,'” Bier said. “And I was like, ‘We’re just going to do it. We’re just going to do it on set. Okay? We’ll try it. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.'”

Bier said she shot all the footage for the thirty second sequence in just an hour and a half “to not let anybody think about anything, not let anybody breathe.”

The Perfect Couple stars Meghann Fahy and Ishaan Khatter told Decider that the experience wound up being far less painful than they initially expected.

“I will say that it was more fun than I think we were all expecting it to be,” Meghann Fahy said. “Like we ended up having a blast doing it. It was just so silly. Like it just was silly. 

“This is what I’ve been saying the whole time,” Ishaan Khatter said with a chuckle. “I think that’s kind of what dance does, is it’s very liberating. I think that’s what we all felt towards the end of it, despite the hesitation that everybody walked into it with.”

“Everyone was like, ‘Oh, we’re not doing that.’ I think at the end of the day, we were all sort of arm-twisted to go into it, but no one had to be forced to have fun. And I think we we all had a blast.”

If you watch The Perfect Couple all the way through to the end, you’ll see a reprise of the sequence with one major difference: Susanne Bier joins the cast in the dance!

“When she got in on the action, that was like one of the highlights of my whole summer,” Fahy said.

“Peak career moment,” Khatter said.

“Yeah,” Fahy said. “That was huge.“

As is the response the dance sequence already seems to be garnering on social media…

The Perfect Couple is now streaming on Netflix.