By Beatrice Verhoeven
Jessica Biel has been drawn to psychological thrillers as of late.
“I have been [interested] in these types of projects with complicated humans, exploring the question: Why do people do the things that they do?” Biel tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re all capable of goodness and evil — it’s all inside of us — so it’s hard to say, ‘Well, I would never do that,’ because maybe I would.”
Noting she often turns that question on herself, asking, ” ‘What if I was in this situation?’ ” Biel adds, “I like exploring [those ideas for myself] in a safe place where nobody actually gets hurt and nobody’s life is actually ruined.”
That desired self-examination is reflected in her most recent TV projects: In 2022, she starred in Candy as the real-life Candy Montgomery, who was accused of killing her best friend with an ax in 1980. This year, she’s back on TV screens in Craig Gillespie’s The Better Sister, an adaptation of the book of the same name that focuses on estranged sisters (played by Biel and Elizabeth Banks) and how their lives intertwine when one of their husbands is murdered.
But there’s more to the Prime Video series than just murder and deceit, says the actress, whose credits also include The Sinner and 7th Heaven. “The show we made is about these two sisters,” Biel adds. “The interesting thing about my character, Chloe, is that she’s really so many things at once, kind of like we all are: her publicly facing persona and who she is privately … and I like that tension inside of someone, where two things are pulling on her at once. That’s intriguing to me.”
Who Chloe is privately is a woman who would do anything for her son. Being a mother to two boys herself, Biel could instantly relate to the character and the work-life balance Chloe grapples with. “It’s dealing with your own guilt and shame of being away, but also knowing that that’s important to you and you want to show your kid that it’s important to be out in the world. … Everything she does is all done for Ethan [played by Maxwell Acee Donovan], and I think every parent can relate to that on some level.”
Protecting her son, no matter the cost, gets tested when — spoiler alert — Ethan gets accused of murdering his father, Adam, played by Corey Stoll. As the show unfolds, more secrets get revealed, resulting in emotionally and physically taxing scenes for the actors.
“We rehearsed quite a lot with anything that was physical or re-creating violence, so there was a real understanding of what was going to happen, and a deep trust was built with everybody around those moments,” Biel, who also served as an executive producer on the series, explains about preparing for the more arduous sequences alongside Banks and Stoll. “Corey is an amazing actor and incredible scene partner who, even though he’s a really big person, you feel really safe with and know that he will support you, no matter what happens.”
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By Beatrice Verhoeven
When the trailer for the Netflix limited series Sirens dropped, a viewer commented, “This is the third show I’ve seen where Meghann Fahy is losing her mind on a beach but looking great while at it.” That lavish coastal settings and excessive wealth is a common thread of her latest projects — The White Lotus, The Perfect Couple and Sirens — is not lost on the actress.
“I guess audiences want to see rich people behaving badly in nice places!” she tells THR with a laugh. “I didn’t realize I had done three of those shows in a row until someone pointed it out to me after Sirens. Then I was like, ‘Oh shit, I gotta do something else.’ ”
Here, Fahy, who played Daphne on the Italy-set season two of The White Lotus, talks about her Emmy contenders The Perfect Couple and Sirens, whether she feels typecast and why she might be done with water work for a while.
Let’s start with The Perfect Couple. What made you want to play Merritt?
Merritt seemed like somebody who desperately wanted a family. To me, that’s her motivation, and I found that really fascinating. Obviously, she has a really bad weekend, and the affair is horrible, but I was approaching it from a standpoint of, this is just a girl who’s really lonely, who doesn’t have a family to call her own, and she really wants to create that for herself.
I read that the flash mob scene in the opening credits was not something you all wanted to do. Is that true?
Oh, it’s very true. None of us wanted to do it. I really struggle with learning choreography. That’s kind of my Everest, but yeah, we were all like, “This is insane!” We were all really surprised that on the day of doing it, we were just having so much fun, and it was effective in its way. People talked about it — I guess that was what they were going for. But we were just like, “Whose idea was this? This is so random.”
Talk to me about your dead body cast.
One of the crazier experiences of my life was getting a “lifecast” [a body dummy]. It took all day — they do your head first, then your arms, midsection, legs, your feet and your hands separately. They pour thick silicone, and then they put plaster on top of that, which creates a chemical reaction that causes intense heat. It was really uncomfortable. I had to meditate through it. … But it’s great, because then you don’t have to be in the water as much, which is also really hard. The first time I ever had to do anything in the water was The White Lotus, the opening when I’m running. That seemed like not a lot of water work, as it’s called, but we filmed that for so many hours, and at the end of the day, my whole body was shaking. In The Perfect Couple, Dakota [Fanning] and I had to do so many different versions of walking into the actual water, and then we had a whole day where we filmed at a pool, and then it cuts together and it looks like not that much time in the water, but it was. I had never experienced that before. Jack Reynor [Fahy’s Perfect Couple co-star] was like, “If I read a script and there’s water in it, I’m not doing it.” He was like, “I’ve done my time.” It’s really tedious. I definitely will be paying more attention in the future to anything that involves water in the script.
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By Brande Victorian
From the moment Rashida Jones first watched the U.K. version of Black Mirror in 2011, she had to know more about its creator, English screenwriter Charlie Brooker.
“I muscled my way into his life,” the self-professed Black Mirror superfan says with a laugh. “I had a friend who knew him and worked with him, and I asked if I could email him, then I just cold-emailed Charlie. We were friendly for a couple of years, so when he did his first season [of Black Mirror] with Netflix, he called me to ask if I wanted to write ‘Nosedive.’ “
The episode, starring Bryce Dallas Howard, about a society in which people are rated on their every social interaction — which in turn affects their socioeconomic status — was one of the most-talked-about of season three. Audiences have had a similar response to season seven’s “Common People,” in which Jones steps in front of the camera as Amanda Waters, a teacher who, after suffering a brain tumor, gets a second chance at life through a health tech startup app, Rivermind, only to be met with ever-increasing subscription upcharges to maintain a reasonable quality of life.
“It was a really nice surprise to just get an offer,” says Jones of being on the receiving end of an email from Brooker this time. “I was in anyway just because it’s Black Mirror, but I felt well suited for the script, and it was a challenge in a way because it was a lot of things that I’ve never done before as an actor.”
Jones reunites with her Cuban Fury co-star Chris O’Dowd for the emotionally taxing episode. O’Dowd plays Amanda’s loving husband, Mike Waters, a welder who starts making money on the side through the streaming site “Dum Dummies,” which pays users to undertake dangerously humiliating dares, to keep up with Amanda’s Rivermind expenses as they balloon from an initial $300 a month to $1,800 a month for the Lux tier. Without the funds, Amanda is subject to repeated downgrades that limit her travel coverage area, require her to sleep up to 16 hours a day and cause her to spew Alexa-like voice ads during routine conversation.
“There was a lot going on with her because she has so many modes,” says Jones of her character. “There’s kind of the normal relationship mode, which I think the most important part was just for Chris and me to feel like we were in a real, authentic, meaningful relationship. Without that, you can’t really have all of the other elements.
“Beyond that, I had to sell these ads, and they kind of come from an unconscious place in me, so it was yet another part of my brain. And then there’s another part, which is when I’m on the Rivermind drug. That’s me, but it’s the enhanced version of me in whatever direction the drug is pushing me. And then there was the reality of the technology taking its toll on me and making me feel fatigued and not connected with my life. Trying to find the connection between those four modes was really the challenge.”
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A version of this story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.