Rachel McAdams & Dylan O'Brien Defend Linda's Final Send Help Moment With Bradley

Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Send Help.Send Help stars Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien come to Linda Liddle's rescue.

In Sam Raimi's new movie, McAdams plays Linda, who is stranded on an island with her cruel new boss, Bradley Preston (O'Brien), after a plane crash. Between Linda having in-depth survivalist knowledge and Bradley being injured and out of his depth, the power balance shifts in Linda's favor. By the end of Send Help, she beats him to death with a golf club and returns to civilization, where she becomes a beloved celebrity who lies to the world about being the crash's sole survivor.

While speaking with The National, McAdams revealed that she enjoyed portraying Linda's increasingly dark transformation and saw it as a fitting way for Linda to become the kind of monster she resented at the beginning of the movie. She also felt that because of Linda's sympathetic backstory, the ending is initially designed to have the viewer celebrate that she "got away with it,” although this reaction may change the longer audiences sit with it. Check out McAdams' comments below:

I love those moments when you think you’ve landed on solid ground, and then suddenly the rug is pulled out from under you. I loved that this movie had a few of those, when suddenly you feel sick to your stomach. She’s turned rotten, you know? It’s such a rollercoaster.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, O'Brien was asked if he felt Bradley's fate was undeserved, especially since he did save Linda's life earlier in the story when she nearly fell off an island cliff. He confirmed that he does not feel this way since it was made clear that she is a survivor of abuse, but he does enjoy how the movie makes the audience unsure at times whether they should be rooting for Linda or Bradley.

She could have just broken his nose at the end. (Laughs.) We don’t fully know what happened. That’s part of what’s fun about the movie. For me, personally, I ride for Linda. It’s not that I don’t also ride for Bradley, but it’s been really interesting to hear the various reactions that people have. I have been very surprised to hear how many people are like, “Well, Linda is a murderer.” And I’m like, “Well, yeah, but she was abused.”

There’s so many interesting pieces of these characters that provide a certain texture to their choices and make it quite debatable. It’s clearly already drawing sides, but I love that it isn’t so clear cut. I love that it isn’t a black-and-white dynamic. We were conscious while making it that you may be siding with Bradley over Linda at some point in the film, but it’s very interesting to see that scale tip back and forth. It’s one of the most fun parts about the movie.

O'Brien also defended Linda's choice to lie about what happened on the island, as he would not want her to go back to her life before the crash where she was mistreated and unappreciated. Ultimately, though, he hopes that viewers won't side too closely with either Linda or Bradley, as both characters are heavily flawed and make selfish choices.

But Linda has lived her life as somebody who nobody pays an ounce of attention or respect to whatsoever, so I get why she desperately doesn’t want to go back to that world. What are you willing to forgive? What are you going to hang your hat on? She goes to barbaric places, which is what’s really fun about the premise involving these characters. It’s about how much sympathy you have for her, and so I wouldn’t want to go back [to her previous life] either. She’d be rescued and taken back to the prison that they’d already set for her [in a satellite office]. They never paid mind for how they treated her in civilization, and she knows that will be her fate again.

Yeah, I just think they both have points. They’ve both made bad choices. It just depends more on how much you can forgive. I hope that there’s no team anyone, to be honest, and I also hope that there’s no gender factor in it. Sam and Rachel were very conscious about not wanting to be too heavy handed [regarding] women versus men in the workplace. It’s more universal than that. It’s a human thing. Anybody can relate to being on the short side of this dynamic in a human society. Again, it’s where I get sympathy for Linda.

When [Bradley’s fiancée and her tour guide] tell Linda to get onto the boat and leave her mangoes because she’s not going to need them anymore, you see her grasp onto her backpack that she weaved and the food that she gathered herself. You can see her remember how that [old] world didn’t treat her the way it treats others. She drew the short straw in that version of her existence. So it’s interesting to put her character in this new scenario and watch how far she’ll go to hang onto it.

I love watching flawed characters. I love that both of these characters can be the protagonist and easily be the antagonist. I love movies like that. They’re rarer and rarer nowadays.

In ScreenRant's Send Help review, Todd Gilchrist praises McAdams for making Linda sympathetic but not too likable, describing it as "a very skillful choice that McAdams doesn’t downplay, because it makes her a slightly more ambiguous heroine opposite the obvious villainy." With a "Certified Fresh" 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes, this balance has worked well for many other critics as well, most of whom have expressed satisfaction with how Linda and Bradley's stories end.

As O'Brien explained, not making Linda a righteous hero also ensured that Send Help was more universal than an exploration of conflict between men and women in the workplace. It ends up being more about the shifting balance of power while raising complex moral questions in shocking, gruesome, and darkly comedic ways.

Release Date January 30, 2026

Runtime 113 Minutes

Director Sam Raimi

Writers Damian Shannon, Mark Swift

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  Dylan O'Brien

  Bradley Preston