Riverdale actress Mädchen Amick: Alice is 'blind to a lot that happens'

Warning: This article contains spoilers about the latest episode of Riverdale. Read at your own risk! (Seriously, ’cause Alice Cooper will come after you!)

Alice Cooper definitely isn’t in the running for winning mother of the year anytime soon. When a shady character arrived at the door she thought posed a risk to her long-lost son Chick, Alice killed the man — and then grudgingly allowed her daughter Betty into helping her clean up after the crime instead of calling the police.

“As usual, [Alice] didn’t make the right choice,” Mädchen Amick, who portray’s Riverdale‘s crumbling Stepford wife, tells EW. “Alice and Betty are two peas in the same pod. Betty is absolutely so much like Alice is and was and that frightens Alice. She’s constantly walking that fine line of not pushing her daughter too far away but trying desperately not to let her make the same mistakes that she has.” In this case, it means the mother-daughter duo — so frequently at odds — teamed up to bleach the kitchen of any blood residue and roll a corpse into a rug to dispose of in an open sewage pipe.

But the episode ends with the revelation that the man Alice killed might not have been quite as sinister as he seemed. “Chick is a way for Alice to fill a void that has been there, which is not having her sweet little kids under her wing anymore,” Amick says. “It makes her blind to a lot of stuff that happens.”

Whereas Betty is haunted by their actions, Alice is an expert at repression: “She likes to shove things away as deep into the closet as she possibly can. From a dark past and troubled youth, she’s built this perfect little persona and bubble and has just tried to forget all of it, and now all of her past is catching up with her and she can’t stay ahead of it.”

Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.