AP – It’s time to take another trip to Italy, to the charming, cobblestoned streets of the Amalfi Coast, sipping coffee at cafes and looking for the la dolce vita. And it just wouldn’t be fun without our favorite serial killer, right?
Tom Ripley is back for another turn at wearing dressing gowns and having Champagne on the terrace in Ripley, a thrilling new Netflix series based on the enduring character created by novelist Patricia Highsmith in The Talented Mr Ripley. It premiered April 4.
“The idea that we know we’re not supposed to like him, but we do want to see him get away with it is very interesting. What’s it say about us?” asked Steven Zaillian, who created, directed and wrote the eight-episode adaptation.
Andrew Scott steps up to play Ripley, a scrappy check fraudster in grimy New York who is hired to locate a rich dilettante in Italy, but kills him and then impersonates him, leading to more murders and scams.
“Like with any sort of iconic literary character like that, people have very strong opinions – he’s a psychopath, he’s a serial killer,” said Scott. “Part of the challenge was how do you make an audience feel like what it’s like to be Tom Ripley, rather than what is usually done, which is to want to feel like to be a victim of Tom Ripley.”
The eight-hour canvas allows viewers time to watch him figure out how to get out of jams in real time, like a murder he commits in his apartment in the fifth episode. He needs to find the victim’s car, clean up the crime scene, move the body and make it all seem like an alcohol-induced accident.
“I think because we sort of see every little step of how he figures things out and does things that we take part in them,” said Zaillian. “He often doesn’t know what he should do next, and neither do we. And so we become part of the process in that way.”
Scott, known for his stage work, the Emmy-winning Fleabag and recent film All of Us Strangers, said it may take some viewers raised on TikTok a little while to adjust to a more sedate, deliberate storytelling pace – one in which characters climb staircases, look at waves and make small talk. There is time to watch where an ashtray is bought before it’s later used to bludgeon someone to death.
“You have to teach the audience how to watch it to a certain degree,” he said. “There’s certain times the pacing is really quite fast and there’s certain times where you think this would take time and you have to stay with the agony and the thrill and the tension when things aren’t going right. That’s the way life is.”
Zaillian, an Oscar winner for the screenplay of Schindler’s List, refused a suggestion to update Highsmith’s book series and is careful to keep everything very early 1960s, even filming it all in black and white, like Schindler’s List.
“It puts us in that time period effortlessly and immediately. But more than that, I did not want what I would call a color postcard sort of Italy for this story, with sunny blue skies and lots of colourful outfits. That was not something I saw in my mind when I read the book and not something that I wanted to do in the show,” he said.
If other TV shows are dialogue-driven, Ripley is more interested in the spaces between dialogue. It’s all about suspicious looks, wary interactions and putting on a brave face with police inspectors and hotel clerks.
“I was so excited by getting to communicate so much with micro-movements in the face and a look – that thing where you can read someone’s thoughts through their eyes,” said Dakota Fanning, who plays the suspicious girlfriend of the rich dilettante Dickie Greenleaf.
Zaillian is faithful to Highsmith’s novels but adds some of himself into the series, like making Ripley a fan of Italian painter Caravaggio, who worked with intense and unsettling realism and was also a killer. – Mark Kennedy
