Lady/killer
An heiress accused of murder, the trial of the century and the real-life case behind it all – Trial & Error is in session.
Trial & Error
Season 2 Fridays (from 23 November) M-Net (*101) 22:00
No judge or jury in the small Southern town of East Peck would convict charming, reclusive heiress Lavinia Peck-Foster (Kristin Chenoweth) of anything as tacky as murder. So it’s inconvenient in season 2 of mockumentary Trial & Error’s (2017- current) that she was caught speeding with her husband’s corpse stuffed into a suitcase in the back of her car… and that he was bludgeoned to death with something that left gold flakes embedded in his scalp. Now if lawyer Josh Segal (Nicholas D’Agosto) doesn’t win her trial, he and his team will be run out of town – and he has just the first five episodes to make his case, after which there is a twist in the tale. But kooky, classy Lavinia won’t make his job easy…
DOUBLE JINX
Lavinia’s high gloss glamour – she has a special pair of peacock leather gloves just for slapping people – hides a dark past. “She can’t help but be such a narcissist. I think that she has been locked away in her house for so long, it’s a little bit of Grey Gardens [the name of the house that the Beales – eccentric hoarders with Kennedy connections – lived in] in there. A bad mom and, of course, a father who took his life when she was little. She was born in tragedy. There’s a lot of sadness about Lavinia,” says Kristin. True crime fans will find something eerily familiar when Lavinia talks about feeling jinxed by death in her life – since that’s exactly the claim made by suspected serial killer Robert Durst in 2015 documentary series The Jinx. The tie-in is no accident either. The details Lavinia gives of watching her father’s suicide are a mirror of what Robert Durst told his interviewer.
MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES
Kristin layered humour, ego and charm into her role, with a dash of cannibalistic serial killer. “I based her on Lisa Vanderpump (The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills, 2010- current) – the style, hairdo and ring size. I put Carol Burnett and Madeline Kahn in there. There’s also a little bit of singing; I hearken to Dolly (Parton). And then there’s
Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins in Silence Of The Lambs, 1991,” she adds.