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Lifetime announced Flowers in the Attic: The Origin in August. It will lay the groundwork for the Foxworth family of author V.C. Andrews’ novels. Lifetime already adapted Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, and Seeds of Yesterday. Fans will surely be looking for Easter eggs all over The Origin, and they’ve got you covered. 

'Flowers in the Attic' stars Mason Dye, Kiernan Shipka and Heather Grama sit on a panel with Kayla Alpert
L-R: Mason Dye, Kiernan Shipka, Heather Graham, and Kayla Alpert | Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

Executive Producers Paul Sciarrotta and Jennie Snyder Urman, who previously created Jane the Virgin and co-created the Charmed reboot, were on a Television Critics Association panel on Feb. 2. We’ll have more with the cast of Flowers in the Attic: The Origin when it premieres this summer. But first, here’s an Easter egg to look for when the time comes. 

‘Flowers in the Attic: The Origin’ will have rat poison

In the book, Grandmother poisons the donuts she feeds to the children she’s locked in the attic. The Lifetime movie updated the book’s arsenic poisoning to white powdered rat poison. 

“So there will be little Easter eggs throughout that hopefully the hardcore fans will notice, little things like rat poison, for example,” Sciarrotta said. “It was a big one. Just we tried to lay in some little hints to make it extra special for the big fans.”

Should you read ‘Garden of Shadows’ before ‘Flowers in the Attic’?

Flowers in the Attic: The Origin is also based on a V.C. Andrews book. However, Andrews’ Garden of Shadows was also released fifth, so Lifetime is following the published order. Andrews died before completing Garden of Shadows. Andrew Neiderman would complete it and continue writing under Andrews’ name. Lifetime is also working on adaptations of other Andrews books, including the upcoming Ruby.

“We also came into this knowing that not many readers were familiar with the prequel book called Garden of Shadows,” Sciarrotta said. “So we had an opportunity to provide some new insight to the big fans of the story. So for me it was a lot of working with the producing team and Andrew Neiderman, who’s the ghost writer. He’s written probably over a hundred titles under V.C. Andrews and Garden of Shadows was actually the first book that he wrote in the ’80s. So that was an invaluable resource.” 

Understanding Grandma’s future actions 

Jemima Rooper plays Olivia Foxwood, who would grow up to become the grandmother. Sciarrotta knew Flowers in the Attic: The Origin had a tough job trying to make the villain of the first book understandable. 

“I knew we had to try to create a story that would make us understand her world and understand why she might take the actions that we all know she took, which is locking children in the attic,” Sciarrotta said. “And we went from there. I sort of come from that angle and hopefully the more real we can make her journey, the more understandable, all of the extreme situations that end up surrounding her become.”

Urman added that within the extremes of soap opera drama, a lot of explanations become feasible. Roper was game to explore them.

“You’re going to see a story that has a lot of like big emotional and painful revelations and soap and high extremes,” Urman said. “Willingness to go to difficult places and to dive in is what we responded to, and to bring humanity, and let us into the inner life of how she turns into the person that we all know from Flowers in the Attic. So it’s really the accessibility we’re looking at, not the evil.”

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