Akiva Goldsman says surviving sexual abuse as a child informed his work on Apple’s The Crowded Room

Apple TV+’s psychological thriller/crime drama The Crowded Room received a… mixed response when it premiered in June (to the point where star Tom Holland said the reviews were a “kick in the teeth”), but either despite or because of that reaction, creator/showrunner/writer Akiva Goldsman decided to open up to Deadline about how his own experiences with childhood trauma informed his work on the show—which, spoiler alert, is inspired by the 1981 non-fiction book The Minds Of Billy Milligan and centers on a character who is gradually revealed to be suffering form dissociative identity disorder.

Goldsman starts off the interview by talking about how he’s glad that the people talking about the show have been able to experience the reveal for themselves (sorry), which creates a different viewing experience for each viewer, and then he goes on to discuss what he says is the “prevalent cause” of dissociative identity disorder: “the sexual abuse of children.” Goldsman has a long explanation for this, talking about how humans are “biologically programmed” to stick to our parents and how “the psyche fractures” when a child realizes that the person they’re depending on to survive is also the one hurting them. He adds that child sexual abuse is “not something we like to talk about,” so we “keep it secret, culturally,” and that sometimes means we “keep it secret from ourselves.”

Eventually, Goldsman notes that he was sexually abused from when he was eight-years-old to his “early 20s” by “someone who was very close” to his family, saying that it’s not something he hides but also not something he typically talks about, but he wanted that experience to be more of a thing in this story because “these secrets can’t be secret” and “we have to talk about the hard things.” He says the show is purposefully “confronting and triggering and profoundly uncool in its emotionality” because it’s “for people who understand.”

Goldsman says his abuser was able to get away with it for a long time because nobody knew it was happening, because he says “so many of us who experience any kind of abuse are trained to keep it secret,” and he says The Crowded Room was specifically written from the perspective of someone “who has lived with that kind of shame.” Goldsman does add, though, that he eventually confronted the person and reported them, saying the abuser faced some sort of justice and has been dead “some decades now,” and Goldsman has been “on a journey of healing” since then.

He doesn’t specifically says this, but Goldsman also kind of dances around the idea that his decision to imbue the series with his real-life trauma may have made it harder to take for some viewers and critics, explaining that “abuse is something we have to talk about, and we have to talk about it in a populist way,” because there’s no way to do it that’s “cool or slick or edgy or trendy.”