This text incorporates spoilers for the finale of Prime Video’s “The Girlfriend.”
After studying the pilot for “The Girlfriend,” Robin Wright might see how the whole sequence would unfold. She was initially approached to direct the primary episode, however she was so entranced by the variation of Michelle Frances’ 2017 novel she got here on board not simply as a director, however as an government producer.
And when it got here to casting Laura, a fierce matriarch dedicated to defending her son, Daniel, from his new girlfriend, everybody she pictured within the function was unavailable.
“My dream was Tilda Swinton,” Wright says, talking from the Ham Yard Lodge in London alongside her co-star Olivia Cooke, whose Prime Video sequence premiered Wednesday. “The time crunch was getting narrower, so Jonathan Cavendish of Imaginarium [Productions] finally said, ‘Would you consider playing Laura? You know her so well.’ What interested me was expanding on each character and developing this show beyond the book, which was already very full and rich.”
Cooke was Wright’s first option to play Cherry, Daniel’s working-class girlfriend, who could or could not have suspicious motives and a violent previous. The actors hopped on a Zoom name on the finish of 2023 and had been instantly on the identical web page concerning the thriller sequence. Each had been intrigued by the concept every episode depicted the characters’ particular person takes on the occasions, forcing viewers to continuously change their allegiance about who is correct. Is Cherry deviously attempting to push Laura apart for higher entry to Daniel, or is Laura paranoid and overbearing?
Cherry (Olivia Cooke), Daniel’s working-class girlfriend. (Christopher Raphael / Prime)
Laura (Robin Wright) is suspicious of Cherry and her motives. (Christopher Raphael / Prime)
“I was enticed by the dual perspectives and delving more into that reality because that is how we operate,” Wright says. “That is the human condition. You perceive [something] in a different way than I do. We’re all a hero of our own story and of our own perspective, but we could be the villain in someone else’s perspective. That’s what happens with Cherry and Laura. Jealousy turns into a power struggle.”
“It’s really fun to dial up the maliciousness and the duplicitous nature of a woman,” Cooke provides. “To play all these different sides and all these different faculties. And both our characters contain them all.”
“It was almost like having the variety pack of being a female,” Wright continues. “It’s easy for the viewer to go back and forth, where you’ll be in favor of this one and then not in favor. And it’s always rooted in true emotion. Wherever Laura or Cherry is coming from, that’s her truth. That’s her story.”
“You’ve always got to champion the characters you’re playing in order to play them honestly,” Cooke says. “I completely understood where Cherry was coming from. A lot of that is lack and fear and scarcity. Not having a parachute or a safety net, and having to constantly strive and move forward. She’s a survivor and she’s scrappy, and she will be the quickest and most ferocious to her own defense.”
The battle between Laura and Cherry aggressively ratchets up over the course of six episodes. After a mountaineering accident that places Daniel (Laurie Davidson) right into a coma, Laura convinces Cherry that he’s died. Cherry later threatens Laura with a knife — or does she? Cooke says she cherished “having the excuse to go f— feral.”
“What’s fun about Laura’s perspective is Cherry seems completely unhinged and that there’s a real malevolent undertone to her behavior,” Cooke says. “But in Cherry’s perspective, it’s all coming from a place of just scrambling. She’s tried to put her best foot forward when she meets Laura for the first time and she’s tried to cover up her past a little bit by saying the odd white lie. And a mum sniffs that out immediately.”
“What’s fun about Laura’s perspective is Cherry seems completely unhinged and that there’s a real malevolent undertone to her behavior,” Olivia Cooke says. “But in Cherry’s perspective, it’s all coming from a place of just scrambling.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Instances)
Cooke describes Cherry as an “underdog trying to claw herself up.” “I want the audience to really be of two minds about her,” she says. “And women usually have to be so buttoned up.
“It’s always, ‘You can’t say that or don’t emote that,’” Wright chimes in. “This gave us an opportunity to do what a lot of women would like to say or do, but they can’t. You always have to be a diplomat. This was about being a human being. Women are very layered individuals. We can do 16 things at once. That’s why we can carry children for nine months and then raise them. I wanted to show all of those colors of a woman.”
The function gave Cooke the possibility to showcase her vary and expressiveness.
“Even just for my own personal life, it felt really cathartic to be able to be angry and be able to scream and be a person who wears their emotions so closely to the surface,” Cooke provides. “Cherry is effervescent. It’s always there waiting to come out. She’s so reactive. And I’m hypervigilant for the warning signs before I react. This was like a rage room.”
Within the tumultuous finale, Laura medicine Daniel to maintain him away from Cherry. After Cherry breaks into Laura’s home, the duo discover themselves in a bodily altercation within the basement swimming pool. An addled Daniel discovers them preventing and jumps in to guard Cherry, by chance holding his mom beneath the water for too lengthy. The rapid interpretation is that Laura dies on the hand of her son, which is what the actors shot on set in London final 12 months.
“There was an aerial shot of mom dead in his arms,” Wright says. “It was beautiful. He was holding her and he looks at Cherry and mom was dead in his arms in the way I had held him in Spain. But the [producers] cut it out because it showed that she had died.”
Laurie Davidson, who performs Daniel, and Robin Wright in a scene from “The Girlfriend.”
(Christopher Raphael / Prime)
The choice to have Daniel by chance kill (or not kill) Laura resulted from a “big discussion,” as Wright places it. The plain conclusion was to have Cherry purposefully homicide Laura, however Wright pushed towards that.
“I said, ‘It needs to be the son that kills his mother because he will never get out of her clutches when she’s alive,’” Wright says. “He’s going to be in the middle of this war zone for the rest of his life. When he comes down [to the pool], he’s in a stupor. He’s almost hallucinating. When he dives in the pool and he sees [Laura] trying to drown his girlfriend, he doesn’t know what’s happened prior to that moment, which is she’s tried to kill mom. He has no sense of time and space because he’s under the influence.”
Cooke says she didn’t play the scene as Cherry wanting Laura to die. “Maybe people will read it as that, but I didn’t,” Cooke says. “She knows it’s gone too far. That’s what I played in the moment, shouting at Daniel to snap out of it. But, you know, she did get the house.”
Taking pictures the pool altercation was a difficult day. A lot of the sequence was filmed in a personal home in London’s St. John’s Wooden neighborhood, which had an precise swimming pool within the basement. Though the pool was supposedly heated, the actors didn’t expertise any heat.
“It was f— hard,” Wright recollects. “For me, it was like waterboarding. People think, ‘Oh, my God, so much fun to act in those scenes.’ No, it’s not. It’s really tough. We were all drowned rats and freezing cold.”
Nonetheless, Cooke says it was pleasant to go to such intense limits emotionally.
“It’s fun being able to go to the very edge of your emotional capacity in a very safe, fun, embracing environment,” she says. “We wouldn’t have been able to do that in the pool, and be able to try and murder each other and then laugh, if it wasn’t built on trust and love. … These characters do very heightened, crazy stuff, but it’s still seeped in honesty and naturalism, which you need in order to go on this journey.”
Robin Wright recollects how tough capturing the pool scene was: “For me, it was like waterboarding.” However, Olivia Cooke says it was “fun being able to go to the very edge of your emotional capacity.” (Jennifer McCord / For The Instances)
“We wanted to leave it a little bit open,” she says. “You see the pregnant family living in the Sanderson house and mommy’s gone. Could Laura still be alive? Did she really die? Has she just been shunned to the priory?”
Wright says they needed to go away it to the viewers to resolve what occurred.
“But Daniel is awakened,” she provides. “If Laura is alive, he could go back to her and say, ‘I now believe you and now I’m with a crazy woman and afraid she’s going to kill me in my sleep.’ There are many iterations where it can go if there is a Season 2.”
As of this interview, no announcement has been made about one other season. Cooke, who additionally stars as Alicent Hightower in “House of the Dragon,” says she must get permission from HBO to be a part of a concurrent episodic sequence. Plus, as Wright notes, it’s all concerning the algorithm. “You always have to wait and see if it’s a semi-success,” Wright says. She provides, turning to Cooke, “If there is a Season 2, I think you should kill the cat in Episode 1, gut it and wear it as a hat.”
For Wright, that’s a part of the attraction of being an government producer — she might brainstorm all of the unhinged issues that might occur between the characters. She cherished developing with story concepts and character backgrounds, and serving to to sculpt the ending, which differs from the novel, was pure pleasure.
“This was my first opportunity to develop something from the ground up,” says Robin Wright, who government produces and is a director on the sequence. “I took a bunch of personal stories, things that I’ve heard, and threw them in there.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Instances)
“This was my first opportunity to develop something from the ground up,” Wright says. “I took a bunch of personal stories, things that I’ve heard, and threw them in there. Like Laura kissing her son on the lips — that came from a friend of mine. And Laura spraying Cherry with her perfume in a shop and saying, ‘Daniel loves this,’ came from someone on set. Things were constantly percolating.”
Wright directed the primary three episodes, setting the visible and thematic tone for the sequence, whereas Andrea Harkin took on the latter three. The actor says there was an actual freedom on set, which was helped by the rehearsals the forged was in a position to do earlier than filming. She made it a degree to all the time give the actors their very own take for every scene.
“Generally, I’d use the take where they went for a free-for-all,” she says. “You get locked in a box as actors. We all do. You pick a choice and you stick with that choice. But when you throw that out the window, the s— that comes out of actors is amazing. That’s what’s so beautiful about being able to direct and being an actor myself. I love watching how it evolves and the light that comes out of them and the emotion that’s brought to the surface.”
“I’ve never acted opposite my director before,” Cooke provides. “The chain of command was so short. Robin was acting with me, but also watching to see what I do and changing her performance to my reaction, which was amazing. It makes it very alive and kinetic.”
In the end, it’s as much as the viewer to resolve whether or not Laura or Cherry is the villain of “The Girlfriend.” And, as Wright says, it’s merely a matter of the way you see issues.
“You as the viewer get to decide: Is there a truth, or is it just subjective?” she says. “Because it is subjective for each of our perspectives and we own it. It happened the way you personally know it happened. But the truth lies somewhere in between.”
