Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis Wanted to Lean Into Horror for Their Adaptation of ‘Scarpetta’
When it comes to the first season of Prime Video’s mystery and crime thriller Scarpetta, showrunner Liz Sarnoff’s adaptation choices — down to the season’s ending — managed to impress the book series’ own author, Patricia Cornwell.
“When you have Liz Sarnoff in a writer’s room, and these producers, and they’re thinking about how you turn this into a drama on television, there are things here you can ramp up,” Cornwell told The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday night at the series’ NYC premiere about what changes fans can anticipate in the onscreen adaptation of her story about chief medical examiner Virginia Kay Scarpetta. “One of the things that people ask when you think of a medical examiner, a homicide detective or a criminal profiler is what happens when they close the door and it’s just them? The audience is going to get a really wonderful experience with all that.”
Described by Cornwell as being part forensic drama with “a little bit of soap opera,” season one and its eventual finale were about giving viewers a little more than what they might have gotten in the book, especially around the killer, said Sarnoff. “I spent a lot of time with the writers saying ‘Who should it be?’ and when we came to it, it was a clearly obvious decision for all of us. Then it was about how to keep it alive through both timelines.” Added star and executive producer Nicole Kidman of the series, which is already greenlit for season two and starts production next week, “When you see all eight, you’ll see why you couldn’t end it there.”
Hailing from Blumhouse TV and executive producer Jamie Lee Curtis’ Comet Pictures, the series follows Kidman’s Kay and Curtis’ Dorothy, two sisters who witness their father’s murder in their youth. The event, which they experience differently, alters their paths — including their respective relationships to death and each other — forever, said Kidman.
“The way they react to the murder of their father, which they saw and happened to them when they were little, has had massive ramifications on each of them. It bonded them, but put them into conflict as well,” Kidman explained.
In their adult lives, the two have a strained sisterhood, the complications of which seep into their other relationships. There’s Kay’s husband, Benton Wesley (Simon Baker), a criminal profiler for the FBI who moved back to Virginia with her as Kay works to solve a series of gruesome murders similar to the case that launched her career. She’s joined by Pete Marino (Bobby Cannavale), a homicide detective who worked with Kay for decades and is now married to Dorothy. Also caught up in their twisted web of ever-tense familial relations is Dorothy’s daughter, Lucy (Ariana DeBose), largely raised by Kay and who once worked for the FBI. That was before her wife Janet (Janet Montgomery) died, resulting in Lucy making her dead wife an AI program on a computer.
“The medical stuff and the murder stuff is very visceral. That’s a visceral fear — an instant reaction. But the family stuff is the emotional pain, and that is understandable and relatable,” Baker said of how the multi-genre series delivers its twists and relationship drama. “It’s the melding of the mystery and a thriller over here and the family drama over there. You get to see repercussions of this life around death and how that seeps into the core of who these people are. Like they say, a surgeon is this close to a serial killer.”
“A lot of them are afraid because of the life they’ve lived, which is in close proximity to so much darkness that it has, in some ways, infected them,” said Sarnoff. “So it was interesting to me to see how far they could go without acting out. It was great to build that part for Nicole the whole season before she finally goes off. Everybody has a breaking point.”
Simon Baker, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nicole Kidman and Bobby Cannavale
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Prime Video
How each of these characters gets to their respective breaking point is shaped by how the show’s multiple genres — crime thriller and family drama, but also at times mystery and horror with an emphasis on the psychological — are used across eight episodes. The story also unfolds across two timelines, one set in the late ’90s and the other in modern day, allowing Scarpetta to depict the development — or deterioration — of the entire household across two separate murder strings and multiple decades.
Building who these characters are and become across two timelines and two casts, said Sarnoff, was an effort led by Kidman and Curtis. “Jamie had a lot of ideas about how she wanted to look and what she wanted to wear and her hair. Nicole, too. Suddenly she was speaking with a deeper voice. Everybody sort of morphed into their characters and really built them up with us [writers].”
“We also did a great thing, which was we made time to rehearse,” she added. “Two weeks before we started shooting, we had rehearsals with everyone together and separately with people playing the same character past and present. It really created a very familiar dynamic from the get-go.”
The ensemble combined that work with the vision of frequent Curtis collaborator David Gordon Green. “[Jamie and Nicole] really like things that are scary, and they were like, ‘We’re very dedicated to the show staying scary.’ They really wanted it to be a mystery, but also one that was terrifying and beautiful,” explained Sarnoff. “I think because of David Gordon Green, who directed five episodes of the season, we accomplished that because he had a way of just making it so beautiful to look at while at the same time you’re looking at horrible things.”
“He just knows. He knows how to create suspense, but he’s also very loose and very easy, and that’s why there’s humor in this as well,” added Kidman. “I mean, he did The Righteous Gemstones. So you mix that with Halloween, and you’re like, ‘Ok, let’s go. Whatever you want, David, I’m there.’”
As Kidman noted, while gruesome murders and shady family relations abound, Scarpetta isn’t all death, grief and secrets. And for Sarnoff, the AI character — neither alive nor human — is the one that embodies the show’s lighter elements best.
“I chose that specific actress actually because we’re close friends and she’s one of the warmest, sweetest humans,” recalled Sarnoff. “I said to her, ‘You are the heart of this show.’ As she gets into conversation with more and more people, you see that she notices more. She’s honest. Nobody else is being that honest. She became a great character for me because she had nothing at stake. She was dead, so she could speak the truth freely.”
And despite there now being actual AI actors, Montgomery was cast, according to Sarnoff, as Janet had to be as human as the rest of the ensemble. “We don’t want to use it. The whole point of art is that people make it,” the showrunner said, while explaining why they didn’t consider an AI actor. “It’s depressing to me that people think we can be replaced in any way. We’re not going to get a nuanced performance from an AI. I needed to show how human she was and there was no way we were gonna get that from anything artificial.”
Scarpetta starts streaming March 11 on Prime Video.
Nicole Kidman, Peter Friedlander, Kara Smith and Jamie Lee Curtis at the afterparty, held at Cafe Zaffri at The Twenty Two New York.
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Prime Video
