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After a whirlwind year of professional accolades, actor Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”) is turning his attention to portraying perhaps one of the most memorable literary figures of the 20th century: Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. In the new Netflix series “Ripley,” from screenwriter Steven Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”), Scott delivers a fascinating performance as the queer-coded killer and master manipulator who is the protagonist in five thrillers by the lesbian novelist. Piercing through the series’ intense black-and-white palette, the Irish actor delivers a Ripley that is, at least according to the star, more relatable than his cinematic forebears.
“We shot it for almost a year, and the murderous elements took a month of that, and, actually, a lot of the rest of the scenes are quite domestic scenes about awkwardness between friends, about social anxiety, about pleasure, about travel — things that are quite relatable,” Scott told NBC News of the period drama premiering April 4. “You’re looking at this character and you’re understanding he’s trying to fit in, or he’s not wearing the right clothes, or whatever it is. Or he’s walking upstairs in Italy and becoming exhausted. They’re not necessarily scenes that you would associate with a ‘psychopath.’”
Scattered among those domestic scenes, however, “Ripley” — which Scott describes in the press notes as a story about kindness and casual cruelty, about how “if you hold somebody down, bad things can happen” — has plenty of unsettling moments to satisfy fans of darker fare.
The eight-part limited series set in the 1950s follows much the same plot as Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” which begins with her elusive antihero being recruited by a wealthy shipping magnate to go to Italy and convince his playboy son, Dickie (Johnny Flynn), to return to New York. Upon arriving in a small town on the Amalfi Coast, Ripley quickly ingratiates himself with the gregarious golden boy and is invited into an exclusive world of luxury villas, lazy lunches and flowing martinis, much to the distaste of Dickie’s girlfriend, Marge (Dakota Fanning). But it’s not long before the novelty of the situation wears out and Ripley is cast out of Eden, setting off a chain of scams and murders that take place across Italy and attract the attention of a hard-boiled inspector (Maurizio Lombardi).
Unlike Anthony Minghella’s Oscar-nominated 1999 film adaptation starring Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwenyth Paltrow, which went the route of a sun-kissed thriller, the Netflix series paints its protagonist’s endeavors, literally, as a noir. Trading the colors of the Mediterranean for dramatic black-and-white, the slow-moving drama follows Ripley across the seas, through storied train stations, up ancient stairways and into elaborately decorated interiors, as he transforms from a slouching, amateur con man to an elegant, haunted serial killer.
“There’s something about the fact that we are able to have eight hours with this character that is similar to reading a book,” Scott said, comparing the experience of watching the show’s episodes, which happen to be titled with Roman numerals, to reading the chapters of a novel. “For that reason, you can go into a very specific part of Tom’s world, [like when] he’s on a boat for half an hour and you are following his thoughts. In the same way, when you’re reading a book and they describe a room for four-and-a-half pages, you’re invited to go into that world. And that’s the great pleasure of reading.”
Scott, who’s indicated in the past that he’s less interested in popular opinion than in projects that attract him, added that: “We live in a time now where it’s, like, ‘faster is better’ and ‘get it over in 15 seconds.’ So it’s actually quite radical to me that we have a degree of variety in the pacing of the show. Some of it is as it would [be with] filmmaking of old, Fellini-esque or film noir.”
It’s not just in the pacing — or palette, costuming and set design — that “Ripley” reaches back into the cinematic past for inspiration. The series’ portrayal of Highsmith’s titular antihero takes a page from the troubled figures at the heart of 1940s and ‘50s films like “The Night of the Hunter,” “The Maltese Falcon” and Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Highsmith’s debut novel, “Strangers on a Train.”
For one, there’s the sheer physicality of the character, who hardly has a moment to sit still amid all of the coming and going — as well as the packing and unpacking of suitcases, lifting of murdered bodies and covering up of crime scenes. It’s a dizzying amount of activity that’s enough to leave the audience — and Scott, who’s a one-man show for much of the series — exhausted.. But the actor plays the scenes, which he described as requiring “a huge amount of stamina,” with the resilience of Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart and Robert Walker stalking their targets in the classic, black-and-white thrillers.
But even more than the physical demands of the role, Scott channels the old Hollywood stars in their ability to craft an unsettling queer-coded killer. Layering sardonic humor on top of a suspiciously keen appreciation for aesthetics and disdain for feminine wiles, the star paints a picture of Ripley that feels true in many ways to Highsmith’s original — a man whose talent for deception may come from pathology or, according to Scott, a deep understanding of how secrets can work to his advantage in the coded atmosphere of the ‘50s.
“He’s very aware of the way people might be sneering or suspicious or silent about same-sex relationships — and that, actually, you can get away with something by inferring something about the relationship that two people have, because nobody really wants to unearth that soil,” Scott said. “Does that mean that he is necessarily a queer person himself? I don’t know. But I certainly think that he’s queer in the sense that he’s ‘other.’ Do I think he would be comfortable in a gay bar? No. Do I think he would be comfortable in a straight bar? No. And I’m not sure that diagnosing him is going to be helpful.”
Scott said he felt the same way about Ripley’s nationality, age and upbringing when it came to his approach to keeping the character fluid.
“I think those questions are sometimes just a little bit more interesting than the answers,” he added.
In addition to working in a nuanced portrayal of the famously coded character’s queerness, Scott set himself the task of challenging other labels that have often been attributed to Highsmith’s antihero — discarding what he calls “big words like ‘psychopath’ or ‘sociopath’ or ‘monster’ or ‘villain.’”
“The reason that the character is so enduring is because we recognize the character,” Scott said, adding that the natural inclination is to root for Ripley to get away with his crimes. “We may not be murderous, but we do all have darkness within us, and there’s a certain blankness, or inaccessibility, within an awful lot of us.”
Of portraying his character’s particular brand of inaccessibility on screen, Scott added, “The big challenge of it was that there’s a kind of unknowableness to the character that I think you have to acknowledge. Once you acknowledge that, you’re not trying to diagnose him with anything that might actually reduce the very thing that we’re interested in.”
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