“ Fatal Attraction,″ the 1987 thriller film, introduced a female character (played by Glenn Close) who has a fling with a married man (played by Michael Douglas) and then obsesses and stalks him and his family after he tries to end it. Close’s character entered a new label for women – “bunny boiler”– into popular culture lexicon.
A Paramount+ TV collection debuting Sunday relies on the film however makes an attempt to make each Dan and Alex — performed by Joshua Jackson and Lizzy Caplan — accountable for his or her actions. Amanda Peet performs Dan’s spouse Beth. The story unfolds over two timelines, following Dan, Alex and Beth on the time of the affair and years later, when Dan and Beth’s daughter Ellen (Alyssa Jirrels) is an grownup.
When Caplan was approached to play Alex, it was not a direct sure, and he or she questioned if the world wanted one other “Fatal Attraction.” Although she loved the movie, the depiction of Alex disturbed her.
“I re-watched the film and I found it very difficult to watch in the spirit in which I assume it was made,” Caplan advised The Associated Press. “I couldn’t see it as, ‘Alex is an evil person who’s trying to destroy this really kind man.’”
Joshua Jackson, who performs Dan within the collection, agrees that the unique character is portrayed as virtually innocent, though he’s married.
“The lack of consequence and even like acceptance of guilt or culpability on Dan’s half is stunning from the lens of 2023,” he said. “We don’t have to dance around it. There’s a underlying misogyny to the film that is just part of the time that it came out of. The sympathy of the story is with the man in this case. It very much paints the Alex character as the villain.”
Caplan and Jackson agreed to signal on once they learn the scripts and noticed they saved the thrills and shock worth of the movie, but in addition received into the “why” of the affair, which there was time to do in eight episodes.
“There’s a lot more space to get into each of the characters’ perspectives,” stated Jackson. “We also see what repercussions look like for Dan. We get into his life and see that these things don’t — no matter how much you want them to — go away.”
This angle is precisely what Alexandra Cunningham and Kevin J. Hynes, who developed this new take, had in thoughts.
After watching the 1987 movie, Cunningham favored the concept of a future timeline for Dan and his household. She was left with questions on what occurred subsequent — significantly with Dan’s marriage to Beth and what turned of their younger daughter Ellen.
“The movie ends with just the camera panning over to a photo of a perfect family,” said Cunningham. “And it’s like, ‘Everything will be fine now that woman’s gone.’”
Cunningham questioned, ‘Is this child going to get any psychiatric help? Are they going to go to marriage counseling? Is Dan going to spend any time thinking about why this might have happened? Will he make this mistake again?’
The TV model additionally provides Alex a previous and touches upon her psychological heath, which considerably explains her conduct. Caplan desires to be clear although that “this isn’t a straight up examination of psychological sickness. It’s ‘Fatal Attraction’, which is a really enjoyable experience… What it’s a full tackle is how we as viewers members have modified. I feel that is the way in which we will maintain a mirror as much as ourselves and be like, ‘This was only this many years ago’… there’s no place for that model of this story in right now’s world.”
There is one scene within the remaining episode that Jackson says was triggering for him emotionally. In the scene, Dan speaks to Ellen, who’s now an grownup, and takes some accountability for his actions.
“Shooting that scene absolutely sucked,” said Jackson. “I’m a father now, and I’m also the child of a man who didn’t want to be in my life, and to be at the crossroads of that conversation, playing this scene… was impactful for me in a way that I wasn’t expecting on that day. It was quite an intense experience shooting that scene.”
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