You wouldn’t read a novel in two hours, actor Andrew Scott says. Why would you rush a good story on screen?
With “Ripley,” an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Scott gets to savor the story over eight episodes.
“Sometimes it’s about the plot and sometimes it’s about the characters,” he says. “I think that’s enormously engaging for the audience.”
Written and directed by Oscar winner Steven Zaillian, the Netflix series lets Scott toy with the lies Tom Ripley tells.
“I don’t think Tom is a natural born killer,” Scott says. “I think he’s somebody who’s very fallible and makes mistakes and we see those mistakes happen in real time. We also see his real talent taking place.”
Scott, the star of “Fleabag” and “All of Us Strangers,” wanted to know how Zaillian was going to make his version different from the 1999 film starring Matt Damon. There, Ripley is hired to persuade Dickie Greenleaf, the son of a shipping magnate, to return from Italy to the United States. The quest, however, becomes far more complicated and deceitful.
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“The opportunity to write it and to tell the story in long-form television was a really interesting dynamic,” Scott says. “(Zaillian) had a very strong vision that he wanted it to be in black and white. The idea that the black-and-white (concept) can be married in some way to the way he wanted to teach the audience how to watch this story was very similar to the way we might read a novel.”
“The eight-episode format suited this book,” Zaillian explains. “It allowed me to get into the details of the story and the changing relationships between the characters in a way that you can’t really do in two hours.”
Andrew Scott plays a mysterious man in the eight-part limited series, "Ripley."
Dakota Fanning, who plays Marge Sherwood, the woman tied to Dickie Greenleaf, says the extra time let her go “toe to toe with Tom Ripley and have a few battles with him.
“It allowed me to create what Marge’s perspective and Marge’s reality is – to see where they intersected and where they diverged.”
Johnny Flynn, who plays Dickie, says Zaillian’s scripts were very precise in terms of story beats. “You don’t need to show too much of (Dickie’s) backstory. He’s just existing in those moments,” Flynn says. “I thought of him as somebody who had run away from his cultural identity because he has a kind of shame around it. He has come to Old World Europe to hide himself in the idea of being an artist in this beautiful place and feed off that. There’s no moral ambiguity around him.”
Scott sees the Netflix adaptation as another artist’s interpretation. “I love the fact that that can ignite something completely different in different filmmakers,” he says.
Anthony Minghella’s film, which also starred Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, played on Ripley’s desires for Dickie.
In “Ripley,” “I’m playing a very solitary, not necessarily lonely character,” Scott says. “Other people have every right to call him a villain, but I think he’s so complex it’s too easy to call him just a villain. I certainly think he’s an anti-hero. The great achievement of the stories – and this version of the script -- is that we really are rooting for somebody that we shouldn’t. We want him to get away with it, for the most part. We question him…and that can only be because we see ourselves in Tom Ripley.”
“Ripley” is now airing on Netflix.