The Good Place’s Kirby Howell-Baptiste Still Doesn’t Know How Simone Died

At the beginning of last year, The Good Place came to an end after four seasons. The final season saw Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) and friends attempting to conduct an experiment to prove that people can experience moral development in the afterlife. Things got complicated when one of the test subjects ending up being Simone (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Chidi’s (William Jackson Harper) ex-girlfriend. During the season, we learn that Simone died in a “hilarious” way, but we never learned the details. Recently, ComicBook.com had the chance to chat with Howell-Baptiste about her upcoming movie, Cruella, and she revealed that she still doesn’t know how Simone died.

“I love The Good Place,” Howell-Baptiste said when we brought up the series. “I was not given that information and actually, what’s really fun, is there’s like so few surprises as an actor because you read every script and you’ll, you know, you see everything. And even when you’re watching films, you know how it’s done because you’re there. So you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I can see that that extra was told to walk across there,’ and things like that. So for me, not knowing how she dies and just me trying to, like, piece it together is … one of the few mysteries that are left.”

She added, “I had my thoughts of how she died in a hilarious way, I guess I’ve just had nights and thinking about what would be the funniest way to die. But I think that it’s really fun. I don’t have a definitive answer. Maybe I should actually text someone and ask them. Maybe no one has it. Maybe they were just like, ‘a hilarious way.’”

During the chat, Howell-Baptiste also talked about playing Anita in Cruella and making the character who originated in 101 Dalmatians her own.

“What’s interesting is I’ve obviously been doing all these interviews and Paul [Walter Hauser] was talking about this. He was like, you know, for their character, for Paul and Joel’s [Fry] character of Jasper and Horace, there wasn’t a lot of meat on the bone is how Paul described it. So they kind of had to build and I feel similarly to Anita,” Howell-Baptiste explained.

She added, “It’s like, we have definitely seen Anita. There’s no shortage of her in any of the stories, but I think we see kind of one side of her, we see her as this very kind gentle mother homemaker figure. And I think in some ways, actually, that was beneficial to me because I got to make Anita to the way I wanted her to be. I wasn’t trying to recreate anything that I had ever seen before. I got to go, ‘Who is this Anita for this generation and who is Anita to me.’”

All four seasons of The Good Place are currently streaming on Netflix. Cruella will be released in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access on May 28th.