The adaptation of Fatal Attraction will soon land on Paramount Plus with its reimagining of the hit 1987 movie starring Glenn Close and Michael Douglas.
This time around, Lizzy Caplan is Alex Forrest while Joshua Jackson plays Dan Gallagher, the man with whom she has a torrid affair.
Presenting the show at Canneseries, showrunner Alexandra Cunningham discussed what interested her in turning Fatal Attraction into a television series, how she decided what to put in the show, and whether Alex is truly the villain of the story…
What led you to adapt the movie Fatal Attraction into a TV show?
"Paramount called me and asked me if I wanted to do it, and my initial reaction was 'no', for all the reasons. It’s iconic and I was scared of a lot of things but then I watched the movie again and read a lot of interviews with Glenn Close talking about all the work that went into her psychological preparation for the character and involved giving her a backstory and speaking to mental health experts.
"That kind of dovetailed with interests of mine. I’m very interested in how people process trauma and in psychology. I’m also very interested in fathers and daughters, and in father and daughter trauma stories that are psychological, rather than tales of physical or sexual abuse. I feel like there are a lot of father-daughter stories out there that are muddier than that."
Which aspects of the story did you think needed to be expanded upon?
"Watching the character of young Ellen in the original movie, with all the terrible things that are happening to her, I wondered how she was processing all of that. When the movie ends on the happy portrait of the family, I thought there was more to be said about how that child is taking everything that she’s seen and heard, how it’s going to affect her relationships in the future and what she thinks love is. Then there is Alex.
"There is a scene where she is running with Dan in the park and he pretends to have a heart attack, then starts laughing, and she says her father died of a heart attack. He says he is 'sorry 'and she goes ‘no he didn’t’. Later in the movie he breaks into her apartment and finds out that her father is actually dead, and that was intriguing to me.
"Thinking about it in terms of how to adapt this into a series I thought 'What is that: she said her father was dead and then he wasn’t, but now he is, what does that mean?' It’s never interrogated in the movie because there is so much plot happening. So there were a lot of things that suddenly I found myself locking into and thinking about what I would do. I also became interested in Dan being a lawyer.
"In the movie, he is an intellectual property lawyer who works with the publishing house that Alex works for, and I felt like there was an opportunity to talk about our justice system in America and how it’s manipulated by people on the inside for their own ends, and how that dovetails with people with mental illness being demonized even when they are the victim."
The original movie pegged Alex as the villain without really taking mental health into account, but that’s something we can’t ignore today. Who is the villain in this story?
"The goal was actually to make sure that sympathies were constantly shifting, as opposed to it being clear cut. If I had to pick a villain, it would be Dan, if only because of the selfishness and the narcissism of making this decision based on being denied something for maybe the first time. Risking to burn your life down is the thing that’s supposed to make you say 'no'.
"The fact that Dan doesn't say 'no' obviously destroys a lot of people in the moment, but it has kept on destroying them for years after so I guess if I have to pick one it’s him. Alex is fighting as hard as she can, in isolation, just to be a person in the world who’s trying to be happy, and she is unable to accept the help that is offered to her occasionally because she can’t recognize that for what it is. She is a traumatized child who’s trying to rewrite the ending as an adult. Instead of finding people who’d be good for her she keeps picking people like the people who’ve hurt her to try to convince them that they should love her, and that just breaks my heart, especially the way that Lizzy Caplan does it.
"So I know Alex does a lot of unconscionable things in a certain light in the show, but for me they’re all psychologically motivated in a way she doesn't understand, by abandonment, lack of self image, and the inability to have relationships."
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Fatal Attraction premieres on Paramount Plus with two episodes released in the US and Canada on April 30. In the UK and the rest of the world, the first two episodes will be available on May 1.
