Is every bunny safe in Paramount+’s upcoming “Fatal Attraction” series, based on the 1987 thriller of the same name?
Joshua Jackson, who stars in the new show, which premieres on April 30, dangled a carrot at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour on Monday.
In the reimagining, Jackson, 44, plays Dan Gallagher, while Amanda Peet plays his wife, Beth, and Lizzy Caplan plays Alex Forrest (the character played by Glenn Close in the film), with whom Dan has an extramarital affair.
In the Oscar-nominated film, Alex, scorned by their tryst, boils Dan’s (Michael Douglas) daughter’s bunny.
When asked if the bunny will appear again in the new series, Jackson teases, “There is a bunny… there are things that boil.”
Executive producer Alexandra Cunningham, who wouldn’t elaborate, explained her eight-episode version attempts “to represent all of the characters’ point of view, as opposed to just Dan and everyone’s angle on what happens. We’re spending a lot more time with Alex, exploring her thought process and possibly what she wants to get out of all of this.”
Caplan, 40, admitted that when she rewatched the original in preparation for the series, it didn’t sit well with her.
“It’s very difficult for me to watch the film the way I first saw it. “The audience of the 1980s sees this as a very binary, black and white, villain vs. hero story,” she explained. But “if you watch the movie again, I find it very, very difficult to see Alex as a straight villain, to not ask yourself the question as an audience member, ‘Well, what’s going on with her? What about the consequences for him?’ And it’s just that our perspective on things has shifted so dramatically since the 1980s…”
What stood out to Jackson when he re-examined the film was “the lack of responsibility, culpability, guilt that Dan feels. He actually says, ‘Ugh, babe. Are you kidding me? We had a little (affair), and now she’s going crazy.'”
“Dan’s mental health is also in question,” Jackson added. “He is a man who is not being honest with himself and has not really come to terms with some of the darker places inside of his ego. And he allows his vulnerability and privilege to drive him down a path that causes enormous harm to those around him.
“So while he’s not diagnosed,” Jackson continued, “I do think that there is, maybe not (in) equal balance, but there is at least weight given to the reality that it’s not just that Alex has issues and bumped into a person. It’s because Alex and Dan both have issues, and they happened to meet at the wrong time to create this toxic soup together.”
