An actress known for playing complicated women takes on another in this new TV adaptation. “I don’t think I’d know what to do with a straight-up nice lady,” she said.
Back when actress Lizzy Caplan was in her teens and early 20s, after she’d deferred college to star in a
Despite spray tans and brief stints as a blonde, she could rarely convince producers to see her as the heroine, the nice girl.
Instead she played edgy best friends. “I managed to really stretch my range and occasionally was the slutty best friend,” she cracked. “That’s the journey of every brunette.”
The joke came by way of a video call in early April from her home in North London. (She and her husband, English actor Tom Riley, spend half the year there and the other half in Los Angeles.) She arrived in the window in a PBS T-shirt with a stretched-out neck, that brown hair piled into a messy topknot, talking fast and sharp and bright. Enthusiasm and ironic detachment, skepticism and buoyancy seemed fine-woven in her, even via laptop.
Jesse Eisenberg, her co-star in the FX limited series Fleishman Is in Trouble, expressed a similar observation. “She has such an unusual, distinctive quality of world weariness and humour, jadedness, but also hopefulness,” he said in a phone interview.
This dappled, restless temperament has pushed Caplan, 40, to spend her adult career playing women who resist categorisation in series like Party Down, Masters of Sex, Truth Be Told and Fleishman.
This month, she will appear as Alex Forrest, a famously, lethally difficult woman, in the Paramount+ adaptation of Fatal Attraction. These women aren’t nice, and they aren’t always the heroines. Often they are too unhappy, too volatile, too in their heads to support conventional story arcs. But they are, in Caplan’s hands and outsize blue-gray eyes, compulsively watchable.
An earlier era might have dubbed Caplan a thinking man’s sex symbol (the journey of every brunette). In this one, she is a star for all the men and women who think too much. “I don’t think I’d know what to do with a straight-up nice lady,” she said. “I’m only drawn to the messes.”
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Advertise with NZME.Caplan grew up in Los Angeles, the youngest child in a reform Jewish household. Her parents weren’t in the industry, though her uncle, a crisis publicist, sometimes worked with Hollywood stars.
When she was 13, her mother died of cancer, and not long after, she entered a magnet high school for music and the performing arts. She had applied as a pianist, but her interest in music soon waned. To stay in the programme, she took up acting. “Acting felt like the thing I could fake, because everybody else was so good at everything,” she said with typical self-effacement. But acting also felt like something more. After her mother’s death, she had what she described as “a weird box of demons.”
Acting, she felt, required and rewarded that. “What an amazing thing to find I could put it into acting and that would give meaning to this horrible thing that happened to me,” she said.
She was signed by her first manager at 15. He secured her an audition for the beloved, quickly cancelled NBC series Freaks and Geeks. She appeared in several episodes.
A few years after finishing high school, when she was starting to wonder if that New York University acceptance was still good, she booked the role of Janis Ian, the edgy best friend in the 2004 Tina Fey comedy Mean Girls. Grossing $130 million on a $17 million budget, the movie became a modest sensation. Caplan thought she might become a sensation, too. Instead she didn’t work for a year.
Work remained sporadic until at 26, she was hired onto the Starz show Party Down, a last-minute replacement for an actress who had become pregnant. She played Casey, a struggling comedian killing time and making rent as a caterer. For Caplan, who had worked several service industry jobs, Casey felt closer to her than any character she had ever played. “She’s super cynical and yet optimistic and hopeful,” Caplan said.
If Casey was spikier and arguably sadder than the real Caplan, the role captured her pluck, her smarts. “The thousand-watt intelligence that comes off of Lizzy, that’s impossible to fake,” Adam Scott, her Party Down co-star, said.
In Casey, she could also practice the knowingness that makes her such a superb audience surrogate. She seems to know that being an actor, being a person, is nearly always at least a little embarrassing. In the comedies she does, she cringes before anyone else can.
When Party Down was abruptly cancelled, she began work on the Showtime series Masters of Sex, a drama about pioneering sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson. Michelle Ashford, the showrunner, admired the naturalness that Caplan brought. “You don’t feel like you’re watching an actor; you feel like you’re looking at a friend,” Ashford said. The role earned Caplan an Emmy nomination. Masters of Sex ended in 2016.
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Advertise with NZME.Caplan has since worked consistently. And if she has deliberately avoided having a type, she has articulated a preference. “The exciting part of the job is taking a woman who at first blush seems unlovable or, God forbid, unlikable, who does things that don’t make sense to the average person, and then figuring out how to make all of those decisions feel very authentic, real and correct,” she said. “Because everybody thinks they’re doing the right thing.”
In Fleishman Is in Trouble, Caplan’s Libby at first appears as a minor character, a sardonic observer of her friends’ breakups and breakdowns. The finale reveals her as the fulcrum of the story and possibly (in a metafictional twist) its creator. The role was offered to her when she was pregnant with her first child, Alfie, now 1 1/2, and she began the shoot when he was just a few months old.
Caplan had worried about what her career would look like after childbirth, and the show, she felt, was grappling with themes that felt acutely relevant to her: middle age, marriage, parenthood, life choices. Yet if Libby feels constrained by the responsibilities of family life, Caplan was in a honeymoon period of babyhood: living in New York, happily losing her mind every time Alfie smiled, working a job she loved.
She was also learning to have a new relationship to work, obsessing just a little less, self-flagellating more lightly. “I see work for what it is, which is one component of a much bigger life,” she said.
Last summer, as soon as Fleishman wrapped (and after she filmed a cameo for the Party Down revival on the sly), Caplan and her family flew from New York to Los Angeles, where Fatal Attraction began its shoot. This meant trading Libby, a married mother of two stifled by the suburbs, for Alex Forrest, a single career woman with some very bad boundaries.
In the original 1987 film, Alex, played by Glenn Close, was a book editor in New York who has a weekend entanglement with Michael Douglas’ Dan, a married lawyer. Alex then stalks Dan, threatening his family and stewing his daughter’s pet rabbit. In this version, set in present-day Los Angeles and the Los Angeles of 15 years ago, Alex is a victims services caseworker. The rabbits are fine. There are other changes, too.
The 1987 film succeeded with test audiences right up until the ending, which showed Dan facing consequences for the affair. These audiences wanted something less evenhanded. (“They want us to terminate the bitch with extreme prejudice,” a Paramount executive said in a widely reported quote.) A reshoot was organised. Close initially refused to do it, feeling that it betrayed Alex, who was clearly afflicted with severe mental illness. Eventually she agreed.
Karina Longworth, host of the Hollywood history podcast You Must Remember This, devoted an episode to Fatal Attraction. The new ending turned Alex into “this banshee figure,” she said. “She deserves more empathy and compassion than she received in the film,” Longworth added. “Even murderers are human.”
Caplan and the showrunner, Alexandra Cunningham, tried to provide empathy, turning Alex from a demon into a complicated woman. Cunningham (Dirty John) wrote the role for Caplan because she believed she could get at “the wit and the intelligence and the humour and the instability and the reactivity and the rage. All of them always there at the same time.” And she suspected that Caplan could make viewers sympathise with a woman they might otherwise condemn.
Joshua Jackson, who plays Dan, admired Caplan’s ability to find something grounded within the character’s turbulence. “You look into those big eyes and you’re like, ‘I don’t know, she seems pretty reasonable to me,’” he said, adding that Caplan made Alex into “a whole human being, which I think makes her so much more terrifying.”
The shoot had its challenges for Caplan. Though she is a veteran of sex scenes — Masters of Sex had many, as the title suggests — making an erotic thriller both erotic and thrilling proved trickier, as her postpartum body was unfamiliar to her and still in flux. (Jackson chivalrously offered to cover any parts she didn’t want to show.) But she didn’t have to plunge very deep into Alex’s fraught psychology to feel for her.
“I can find a lot of compassion for her loneliness,” Caplan said. “I found it not difficult to feel for her, even though obviously some of the things that come later I have a hard time defending.” (What are those things? Let’s just say there are actions more heinous than putting a bunny on to simmer.)
Finding compassion for the lonely, the crazy, the grating, the sad, the women with their weird boxes of demons has defined Caplan’s mature career. But she doesn’t know another way to be, and she doesn’t want another way.
“I do think that’s the secret to everything,” she said, “figuring out how to find compassion for as many people as you can.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Fatal Attraction is available to watch on TVNZ+.
Written by: Alexis Soloski
Photographs by: Charlotte Hadden
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
