| “ | Oh, you do not want to be friends with me. Trust me. | „ |
| ~ Emily's most famous line. |
Emily Nelson (real name: Hope McLendon) is the main antagonist in the 2018 comedy thriller film A Simple Favor and its 2025 sequel Another Simple Favor, as well as the novel it is based on. She is a seductive, murderous con-artist who ensnares her best friend Stephanie and her husband Sean in a plot to fake her death and scam her insurance company.
She is portrayed by Blake Lively, who also played Ladypool in Deadpool & Wolverine.
Personality[]
Emily is extremely intelligent and effortlessly charming, projecting the image of a confident, successful career woman with a happy family.
Beneath the glamorous façade, however, she is manipulative, calculating, and self-absorbed. She is a pathological liar, con-artist, and thief who uses and destroys people, even her own family members, for her own amusement and profit. Her marriage is also not what it seems; she torments and lies to Sean repeatedly, at one point stealing her mother-in-law's wedding ring and threatening to leave Sean if he tells her.
Emily's one redeeming quality is her love for her son Nicky, who she admits deserves better than her.
Backstory[]
Hope McLendon and her triplet sister Faith and Charity (who was stillborn) were born into an abusive family; their mother was cold and cruel, while their father beat them. When they were 16, the twins set their family's house on fire, killing their father and faking their own deaths in order to escape; they then went their separate ways. She reinvented herself as Emily Nelson, a PR executive, and married Sean Townsend, a wealthy has-been author with whom she has a young son, Nicky.
In A Simple Favor[]
Emily meets Stephanie Smothers, a reserved vlogger and the mother of Nicky's best friend Miles, at their sons' school. Stephanie is immediately fascinated by Emily's fearlessness and unapologetic sexuality. They become best friends and tell each other their secrets: Emily admits that she and Sean are on the verge of bankruptcy, while Stephanie confesses that she once had sex with her own half-brother.
One day, Emily calls Stephanie and asks her to pick up Nicky from school because she has to fly to Miami for a work emergency; she then disappears. Stephanie and Sean call the police, who search for Emily for several days until they find her drowned in Michigan, the apparent victim of a car accident. As they both mourn Emily, Stephanie and Sean become lovers.
The police inform Stephanie that Emily had heroin in her system and severe liver damage from alcoholism; Stephanie insists that Emily was neither a drug addict nor an alcoholic. The police also inform her that Sean had taken out a $4 million insurance policy on Emily just before she disappeared. When Stephanie questions him, Sean admits that Emily was a thief and a pathological liar. Stephanie travels to Michigan to investigate, and she learns of Emily's true identity and apparent death from her mother and a former lover whom Emily eventually robbed. Convinced that Emily is alive, Stephanie lures her out of hiding by dedicates an episode of her vlog to her, hinting that she would be at her grave.
Sure enough, Emily returns to her former home, surprising Sean at their favorite restaurant and secretly recording him admitting that he still loves her, and that he is using Stephanie for sex and someone to look after Nicky. Emily meets with Stephanie and explains that Faith, who had become an alcoholic and a heroin addict, had contacted her and threatened to tell the police about killing their father unless Emily gave her $1 million. Emily lied about the "work emergency" in Miami; she had in fact gone to Michigan and drowned Faith, and then put her body in a rented car and crashed it in order to fake her own death, get the insurance money and disappear.
They go to Sean's house, where Emily threatens to kill Stephanie and Sean. However, Stephanie reveals that she had recorded Emily's confession and threats on a webcam, and that the police are on their way. Panicked, Emily tries to escape, but not before pulling a gun on Stephanie. At that moment, however, one of Stephanie's fellow PTA members, who had seen Emily's confession, runs Emily down with his car.
Emily, severely injured, makes one last attempt to kill Stephanie, but the police arrive just in time and take her into custody. She is found guilty of murdering her father and sister, sentenced to 20 years in prison and adjusts to prison life.