[This story contains minor spoilers for the first three episodes of Paramount+ Fatal Attraction . ]
Fatal Attraction is an iconic part of the movie. Adrian Lyne thriller starring Michael Douglas and Glenn Close at topped the box office list after it was released became the annual box office No. Two high movies. It was nominated for six Oscars, inspired decades of stalker movies, and in recent years, reworked the ending around , which was revisited in a thought piece, sparked by Close speaking out about the way the movie didn’t do well with her character Alex Forrest.
“When they asked me to do it, obviously I was like, ‘I’m not going to do that. That sounds absolutely horrible,'” Alexandre Alexandra Cuningham tells The Hollywood Reporter that the film will be adapted for TV. “I was thinking, I’m going to watch this movie again so that I’m a good citizen when I send an email saying I won’t. Then, you get sucked in.”
What attracted Cuningham was to rewatch the movie with a modern eye and imagine what she could do if she had multiple episodes to dive back into. “I would love to see that scene again from another angle. I want to write my own version of that scene,” she said. “One of the things that really moved me this time around, probably because I knew it was possible to consider, was the daughter. I’ve been watching Ellen go through all this emotional trauma and wondering, ‘How is she dealing with all of this?'”
She was also motivated by the idea of showing the villain’s perspective. In recent years, Close has spoken out about her intense preparations for Alex, a character she believes suffers from an undiagnosed mental illness. However, the film never addresses her mental health issues, instead casting her as a damn “murderous psychopath” .
“Read all interviews with Glenn Close , she will be at It talks about all the mental preparation and the work she did to fully portray a real person struggling with pain and isolation, and that’s what I saw when I saw the film and how that translates to the audience”
Cuningham said the adaptation’s tone originally came from Steven Spielberg telling Paramount Pictures, “You should do a A limited series anthology of Fatal Attraction.” and her appearances on the long-running soap opera Desperate Housewives and most recently with Dirty John anthology, makes the idea an appealing one. So she casts an arc for a limited series, like a few years ago Like the movie, there’s an “Oh, damn it! Ending. (Spoiler alert? After the
original ending of the film adaptation – Alex didn’t slit his own throat – she Gets out of bathtub after being shot by Beth when showing up with knife, wrestling with Dan.)
Fast forward to now Fatal Attraction, a seven-part limited series, has launched its first three episodes on Paramount+, and it sets out to answer those questions posed by Cunningham, jumping into the film with Dan Gallagher In the future, Dan Gallagher is Michael Douglas’ character, played by Joshua Jackson, and travel back in time to revisit events from the film and expand perspective, including in Alex here played by Liz Kaplan .
The episode starts today, Dan is paroled for the murder of Alex, and returns to his adult daughter Ellen (played by Alyssa Girelles) to begin a complicated road to redemption, which is laser-focused on clearing his conscience by The name proves he didn’t kill anyone.” Who was Dan she met? What he learned, or didn’t learn, as someone who has his own issues—he’s clearly a narcissist, perhaps undiagnosed—so that’s where all the scaffolding starts to go up with the two timelines,” Can Ning An said.
The series then set up a murder mystery as if neither Dan nor the audience knew who killed Alex. So, are the audience going to enter The series, wipe the slate clean?
“There are obviously a lot of Easter eggs in the original movie – there’s a rabbit, there’s an elevator, and there’s rain. We want people to feel that this homage is complete in terms of the people who have embarked on this journey. But, is it? I can’t say,” she said of whether their ending would reveal the same killer.
For the first time ever, episode three presents Alex’s Opinion, but Cunningham wants viewers to understand that more will be revealed as the series airs weekly from now on. She knows people are watching to see what they will do with Alex’s story.
“Drilling down on motivation and intentions takes longer than an episode. Obviously, there’s a lot to unpack there,” she said. “And there’s such a level of storytelling that there’s a lot going on along the way, and I think you’re sympathetic for a moment, angry and confused for a moment, and there’s an explanation. If it makes you ask more questions, I’m fine with that. “
Cunningham said the original was a sign of the era. “I think my spotlight is good because you should do things that scare you,” she said. Saying, expecting the audience and shutting herself down, she wasn’t involved in the retelling . “It’s more than that in terms of achieving what was expected. Since then, we’ve all moved to a place where we need different things from the narrative. We want to understand emotions and intentions and psychology and neurology; what people think and the narratives they construct for themselves. ”
The first three episodes of Fatal Attraction are streaming now on Paramount+, with the rest of the week Five episodes a week on Sunday.
