As a lover of the 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley, Andrew Scott had a few questions before agreeing to star in Oscar winner Steve Zaillian’s macabre mini-series based on Patricia Highsmith’s classic novel. “One of my first questions was, ‘Why do this?’” Scott recalled while appearing as a guest on Still Watching. Thankfully, Zaillian was prepared for Scott’s query.
“Zaillian was very clear about the kind of vision that he had for this version of the story,” Scott said. That’s not to say that Zaillian had all the answers from the jump. “He didn’t immediately say that he wanted to do it in black and white, but that sort of emerged. He mentioned aging up the characters—I’m older than the actors who played the character before in previous iterations of this story. You gotta bring your your own stuff to it or else it’s pretty pointless to me.”
What they brought became the moody period piece Ripley, which has remained on Netflix’s top ten list since it premiered April 4. In Scott’s capable hands, Tom Ripley, memorably portrayed by Matt Damon in Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film, becomes a colder and more calculating con artist, willing to do whatever it takes to get away with the murder of dilettante Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) and evade capture in Italy.
“I think what’s fascinating and enduring about this character is that he’s sort of like water,” Scott says of the elusive Tom. “There’s a fluidity to him that we can’t quite put our finger on. For that reason, he holds a sort of power over us.”
Below, Scott chats with Still Watching about the murkiness within Tom, doing Ripley drag, and pulling off those complicated murder sequences.
In Ripley, I really felt the striver in Tom: the class consciousness, his desire to enter a new station in life. How much were you thinking about politics and class?
Andrew Scott: For me, the story is so much about somebody who hasn’t been given access to the beautiful things in life, even though he’s deeply talented. We say he’s a con artist, but he’s nevertheless an artist. We see him at work and how unobserved he is and how dismissed he is by society. The only way he has to survive is by defrauding people, by turning to crime. That’s not obviously an excuse for him, but, you know, you look for ways to advocate for the character. And then he’s submerged into this society where people who have half the talent that he has are given access to all the beautiful things in the world. They could call themselves artists—they have everything at their disposal—and a sort of rage begins to emerge within him.
There is a notion of class and morality, and also about sexuality as well. I think there’s a kind of murkiness to Tom’s sexuality, whether it’s envy or lust or love or obsession. Something about the “Dickiness” of Dickie gets him obsessed in some way, and he wants what he has.
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