Nobody on this cast is purely anything. That’s what makes them worth watching.
Clean categories don’t survive contact with “Calabasas Confidential.” The show is too smart for a straightforward villain, too honest for an untarnished hero, and too self-aware to let anyone off the hook entirely. What it has instead is a cast full of people who are doing their best — and occasionally their worst — and sometimes both in the same episode.
Here is where everyone lands.
The Heroes
People who showed up for others consistently, even when it cost them something.
Jemma Durant
Jemma is the show’s unlikely hero, and the reason she qualifies is the same reason it surprised everyone: she got there the hard way. She was reactive, she clapped in faces, she told Dylan he needed to apologize while refusing to extend the same grace to anyone else. None of that disqualifies her. It makes the ending mean more.
By the finale, she had taken accountability for her own behavior, accepted an apology she’d been waiting years for, and chosen to let go of a narrative that had been defining her since high school. She also spent the entire season being fiercely, sometimes exhaustingly loyal to the people she loves — Nicole, Kimora, anyone who needed a person in their corner. Jemma’s heroism isn’t pretty. It’s real.
Nicole Sahebi
Nicole spent the season absorbing everyone else’s chaos with a patience that occasionally crossed into self-erasure. She was the first one to check in, the last one to leave, the person who made smoothies and sat on the floor and asked “what do you want to do?” when everyone else had an agenda.
Her heroism has a flaw built into it — she carries information between camps and calls it love, which is sometimes true and sometimes convenient. But by the end of the season, watching her stand at a bar crying and wonder if she’s even a good friend while Emma Medrano told her she talked about others because nobody would listen if she talked about herself — that’s not a villain’s moment. That’s someone who gave too much and got told it wasn’t enough. Nicole is a hero. She just needs to be one for herself first.
Preston Pippen
Preston showed up every single time. Cookies, pep talks, a week in Miami when things got too loud, and then back again. He’s not dramatic about his loyalty — he just extends it quietly and consistently to everyone around him, including people who probably don’t deserve it. He spent the season watching Dylan use his name and choosing not to blow up the friendship over it. He mediated without taking sides. He told Alexie he had feelings for her at a county fair and didn’t make it weird when she needed time.
The cookies are a metaphor. He keeps feeding people who haven’t necessarily earned it. That’s a hero thing whether he means it to be or not.
Kimora Lewis
Kimora threw a carnival, left it in tears, and spent the rest of the summer holding her line with quiet dignity. She didn’t go after Emilie. She didn’t trash her to the group. She named what hurt her, set her boundary, and moved forward. She also showed up for Hercy at the finale dinner with the exact right words — “you’re a businessman like your daddy, be proud of it” — when the table went quiet after his announcement. Kimora sees people. That’s a hero quality, even when the people she’s seeing don’t always see her back.
The Villains
People whose behavior caused consistent damage — not always intentionally, but damage nonetheless.
Emilie Nelson
Emilie is the season’s most clear-cut villain, which is uncomfortable to say about someone who is genuinely charming and occasionally self-aware. But the evidence is hard to argue with. She walked out of two apologies. She called Alexie a gaslighter mid-confrontation and told her she needed a reality check. She told the cameras “he chose” while shrugging. She sat at a nail salon saying a lot of the summer’s problems were projection — and then walked into the next episode and projected.
The most damning thing about Emilie isn’t any single action. It’s the pattern. Kimora. Alexie. Hercy. Emma. Every person who came into contact with Emilie this summer left the interaction worse off than when they arrived, and Emilie left it with a shrug and a new anecdote about how drama just follows her everywhere. It’s stuck in her hair, she says. There’s a reason for that, and the show knows it even if she doesn’t.
Dylan Wolf (Early Season)
Dylan earned his villain edit in the first half of the season and it’s important not to let the redemption arc erase it. He showed up to Jemma’s party with Emma. He called Jemma a midnight snack to Suede’s face. He told Emma on a hike that Jemma was an outsider trying to come for the popular kids. He redirected blame onto Nicole after the Yamashiro date. He told Preston that Jemma could kick sand up the coast.
Dylan is not the villain he was in high school, and the finale proves that. But for the first five episodes he was doing a very good impression of that person, and the people who warned Suede weren’t wrong. They were just describing the version of him that the ranch hadn’t fully replaced yet.
The Chaos Agents
People who didn’t set out to cause damage but left a trail of it anyway.
Suede Brooks
Suede is the show’s purest chaos agent — and the most fascinating one — because she arrived as the wisest person in the room. She called Dylan a prick on day one. She told Jemma she had her back. She said there is no girl code at a beach day while sitting between the legs of Jemma’s most significant trauma. She FaceTimed Nicole mid-apology-lunch to ask if she’d spread the date story, redirecting Dylan’s blame with good intentions and devastating results.
None of it was malicious. That’s what makes her a chaos agent rather than a villain. Suede operates from instinct and emotion and a self-described inability to resist the bad boy, and when those instincts are pointed at something good — like the apology to Jemma at Sagebrush — she’s one of the best people in the room. When they’re pointed at Dylan — she’s the reason everything goes sideways. Same person. Different day.
Nicole Sahebi (Early Season)
Yes, Nicole is also a hero. She is also, in the first half of the season, a chaos agent, and the show is honest enough to hold both truths at once. She told Emma what Jemma said at the tennis courts. She told Jemma what Emma said getting ready for the party. She did both in the same day with the best intentions and lit the match for a conflict that burned for eight episodes. Emma’s read on her — that she found the perfect position to be inside the drama without absorbing any of the consequences — wasn’t wrong, even if Emma delivered it uncharitably.
Nicole grew out of this role as the season went on. But she spent the first few episodes being the most consequential chaos agent in the group without ever meaning to be.
Ben Favaedi
Ben walked into a rooftop party and cracked two friendships by being attractive and charming and not particularly aware of the ecosystem he was stepping into. He also, as Emma revealed on the beach in the finale, had broken up with his girlfriend the day before the rooftop party and asked Emma not to say anything. He told Emilie he was falling in love with her while that information was still sitting unaddressed.
Ben isn’t a bad person. He’s someone who made a series of choices that will almost certainly become a Season 2 storyline. That’s a chaos agent. A very handsome one.
The Complicated Ones
People who are genuinely impossible to place cleanly — and more interesting because of it.
Emma Medrano
Emma is the show’s most complicated cast member and the one the audience got most wrong for the longest time. She arrived as the potential villain — the girl everyone had a story about, the one Jemma built a season of resentment around. She left as one of the most self-aware people in the cast, having openly discussed therapy, trust issues, loneliness, and what it cost her when her family fell apart and she lost all her friends at once.
The bullying accusations aren’t fabricated — the group’s read on who Emma was in high school is probably accurate. But the woman who came back to Calabasas is the result of that girl doing serious work on herself, and the show is smart enough to show you both versions. Emma is not a hero. She’s not a villain either. She’s someone who was both, in that order, and is still figuring out how to make the second version stick in rooms that only knew the first one.
Hercy Miller
Hercy said he and Kimora were just two kids talking on FaceTime. Kimora had a different read. He pursued Emilie openly while Kimora processed the hurt at her own party. He told the cameras it would be pretty cool if something came from their friendship without seeming to register the cost to someone else.
And then he sat at a dinner table and found out basketball was over, and he held it together with grace and humor and let the people who loved him love him through it. He’s not a villain. He’s not a hero. He’s a 24-year-old man who learned this summer that being a good person sometimes requires accounting for your impact on people who felt more than you did — and that who you are outside of basketball is a question worth answering.
Alexie Olivo
Alexie spent the season being considerate of Emilie in ways Emilie never reciprocated, and by the finale, she’s moving to New York and found a better best friend in Raine and booked a trip to Miami with Preston. She’s not a villain. She’s not a hero in any dramatic sense. She’s someone who kept extending grace to a friendship that didn’t deserve it and finally — quietly, without a confrontation scene — stopped.
The fact that she’s still working through it, still loves Emilie somewhere underneath the hurt, still doesn’t fully know what to do with someone who’s been in her life since she was seven — that’s not a character flaw. That’s just being human about something genuinely hard.
Honorary Mentions
Jodie, Raine, and Sterling each had genuine moments this season — Jodie’s PTSD disclosure, Raine’s conversation with Bret about the fear of the unknown, Sterling’s consistent steadiness. None of them were central enough to the season’s main dramatic arcs to place in any category fairly. Season 2 will almost certainly change that.
Read next:
- The Jemma, Suede & Dylan Triangle on ‘Calabasas Confidential’ Explained — and Where They Are Now
- ‘Calabasas Confidential’ Cast: Where Are They Now After Season 1?
- Who Actually Grew the Most on ‘Calabasas Confidential’? Ranking the Cast’s Season 1 Journeys
- Why Jemma Durrant’s History With Dylan Wolf Still Shapes ‘Calabasas Confidential’
- ‘Calabasas Confidential’ Season 1 Finale: It Really Sparked Some Shit
For more “Calabasas Confidential,” check out our Full Calabasas Confidential Guide here.
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