FOOD FIGHT
Corey Stoll, Nicole Beharie play a fiery couple in ‘Scenes from a Marriage’
THERE’S TROUBLE in paradise. Corey Stoll and Nicole Beharie light up the premiere episode of HBO’s “Scenes from a Marriage” as a couple who get into an explosive fight during a dinner party.
“The idea of just being able to hang out with a few people around the dinner table who aren’t your family was a novelty [because of the pandemic]. So, I had a certain giddiness to be able to finally be at a dinner party, even if it was a fake one,” Stoll, 45, (“Billions ,”“Midnight In Paris,”) told The Post.
Premiering Sept. 12 on HBO and based on the 1973 Swedish miniseries by Ingmar Bergman, “Scenes from a Marriage” is helmed by Hagai Levi (“In Treatment”) and follows married couple Jonathan (Oscar Isaac), a philosophy professor, and Mira (Jessica Chastain), a tech executive, in slice-oflife segments examining their relationship, including fights and infidelity. The latter topics take center stage in the premiere episode, which features a dinner party that Jonathan and Mira throw with their friends, longtime couple Peter (Stoll) and Kate (Beharie, “Sleepy Hollow”).
“I had just seen the original version maybe a month before I got the call for this one,” Stoll said. “And I remember really loving this scene. Because it’s so painful and the awkwardness and the resentment and the acid just notches up more and more as it goes on. The polite veneer of the dinner party disappears by the end of this extended scene. And so, I was so excited to be able to do our version of it.”
As they cheerfully wine and dine, Peter and Kate reveal that they have a nonmonogamous relationship in which they agree to date other people even though they’re still married to each other. However, Kate is depressed after a recent breakup, and Peter, in turn, is depressed that Kate was in love with her ex-partner — when he maintains that he hasn’t fallen in love with anyone else. The tension culminates in Kate storm
ing away upstairs to cool off with Mira, while Peter stews about it downstairs with Jonathan.
“It’s just the kind of nuance and delicate, really personal storytelling that I never imagined that I would get the opportunity to be part of. We’re getting to see what’s beneath what they present, and I’m fascinated by that. It’s reading between the lines and picking up little clues,” Beharie, 36, told The Post.
Although Peter and Kate’s sequence on the five-episode show is only in the premiere episode, both Stoll and Beharie speculate that their characters have a good chance of staying together, in the long term.
“I think the beauty of it is that they’re dealing with their dysfunction in real time,” said Beharie. “There’s a lot of dysfunction in relationships that people aren’t willing to face head on. This couple is trying by any means necessary — maybe even in odd ways to some — to figure out what works for them. So, I think they probably will stay together and figure it out.”
Coming up, Stoll is also set to co-star as Junior Soprano
in “The Sopranos” prequel film “The Many Saints of Newark,” premiering Oct. 1 (in theaters and on HBO Max).
“There’s something really interesting about playing the older brother who is working for his younger brother,” he said. “By all rights, he should be the head of the crime family. But somehow he wound up in this subservient position, which led to his entire personality, I think. What does that mean, what is that resentment like? These characters are all so rich. There’s an endless exploration.”