Rachel Weisz reveals her and Alice Birch’s latest take on Dead Ringers .
Amazon’s Modern Gender Switching Makeover by Jeremy Rachel in David Cronenberg’s 450 thriller starring Irons Elliott Weisz now plays identical twin Elliott and Elliott’s dual protagonist Beverly Mantle, a gynecologist at the top of their field in the near future.
The six-part psychosexual thriller describes the pair as “twins who share everything: drugs, lovers, and the unrepentant desire to do whatever it takes to— Including pushing the boundaries of medical ethics—struggling to challenge outdated practices and bring women’s healthcare to the forefront.”
The Academy Award-winning star and executive producer People and showrunner/writer Alice Birch held a media panel Monday, including The Hollywood Reporter , debut trailer (Watch, below) and expand on the theme and what to expect from the remake series, which has been three and a half years in the making. (In light of Monday’s Nashville school shooting that left six people dead, including three children, the trailer’s release was pushed back to Wednesday.)
When taking over the project, Birch says the appeal is capturing “the intensity of identical twins, the godlike powers that come with being a doctor, Cronenberg’s signature body horror and fun
“It is very naughty at times. emotional. move. There’s also some humor — dark, dark humor,” Weisz concluded. Birch described the series as a “twisted, darkly comedic thriller about these two dangerously codependent twins who are obsessed with each other. It’s a very strong relationship. They love each other deeply, but I think they feel everything about each other very deeply, which brings us to a more dangerous place of codependency. “
To illustrate, Birch explained that the twins were never separated overnight. Yet talented OB/GYNs lead the way in their specialty and work to improve how women give birth.To address the latter, the show talks to experts and scientists, and hires experts in medical procedures.
However, the doctor’s motivation depends on the twins.”Beverly is selfless, thoughtful, caring, kind, and has a complicated relationship with pleasure, and she really wants to change the way all women reproduce, regardless What is their economic background and wealth. Elliot is very, very different,” Weisz said. “She loves Beverly, so she will follow her dream and change the way women reproduce, but she’s not selfless. She is passionate about science, she wants to truly change the world through scientific research and discovery, and she is breaking the boundaries of morality and immorality. “
Elliot also has a mischievous sense of humor. “She has a libido, a career drive and a good appetite for food. She likes to eat a lot, so I love it,” Weisz added with a laugh. Birch has previously said that the pleasure of representing women on screen “still feels radical to me — watching Elliot gobble up a burger, Kebabs, seafood platters, seeing them all doing sex that suits theirs, unapologetically theirs Terms are essential to us. Curve, the pair say, describes the technical process of capturing each twin’s perspective in a scene. “It was without a doubt the biggest challenge of my acting career,” Weisz said. “But also the happiest in many ways. It’s hard work. But as Alice mentioned, the whole crew moves like one organism. It’s effects, motion controls, hair, makeup, sets, Props. Everyone is moving from one character to another. I didn’t shoot Beverly one day and Elliott the next. It was in one scene.”
But Weisz said each character was written so differently, so “psychologically layered and deep” that she felt like she was playing “two completely different people on the page before I even started working on it Hairstyles, makeup, clothing, and the ways they might look different. “
Consisting primarily of an all-female creative team, including an all-female writers’ room to which Weisz is a part, Birch says the updated cast of the twins as women “changed everything and nothing. We want it to be as fun and wild as the movie, to let the series grow in its own direction. “
Birch previously said she wanted to be involved in the “horror of the healthcare system that many women and birth attendants find themselves in,” particularly the high maternal mortality rate in the BIPOC community. “To [Series] ends with Elliot’s research pushing the limits of what we can imagine…feeling almost
futuristic, almost at your fingertips. “
In the upcoming episode, the twins switch identities while seeing a patient — which continues the twisted twin-swapping storyline from the original film — And, at a dinner with potential investors, Elliott presented a controversial technique for delaying the onset of menopause.
Weisz and Birch explain that the The series releases all the episodes at the same time and starts more grounded but ends more real.”We wanted each episode to be completely different, we wanted the show to start from a very grounded place that we really knew, like two doctors In and out of a hospital in Manhattan. We want it to feel like today, they met real women with these real problems. At the end of the day, we’re at a higher, more workable place,” Birch said.
The ensemble cast also includes Britne Oldford ), Poppy Liu, Michael Chernus, Jennifer Ehle and Emily Meade.
Dead Ringers is a co-production of Amazon Studios and Annapurna Television. Weisz also collaborates with Birch (the series’ writer), Stacy O’Neil, Sue Naegle, Ali Krug, Sean Durkin, Erica Kay and Anne Carey are executive producers along with James G. Robinson, David Robinson and Barbara Wall from Morgan Creek Entertainment.
All six episodes are released in April on Prime Video.
