Flynn brings love of comics to ‘Utopia’
Gillian Flynn is a nerd. Maybe that’s a surprise, considering the exjournalist is best known as the author of sophisticated mysteries about troubled, sometimes wicked women such as “Gone Girl” and “Sharp Objects.”
Flynn was in her element, though, adapting the British television series “Utopia” into an eightepisode American version, which starts streaming on Amazon Prime on Friday, Sept. 25. In it, a group of comics fans tries to stop a pandemicspreading conspiracy that’s somehow predicted in their favorite graphic novel, also called “Utopia.”
“My dad is a huge comic book guy,” Flynn told The Chronicle over the phone from her home office in Chicago. Film professor Edwin Flynn spent weekends combing flea markets and comiccons for collectible issues with his daughter during her Kansas City, Mo., youth.
“I knew the words ‘near mint’ at age 4,” she said, referencing one of the top condition standards for a comic book’s value.
His love of graphic storytelling was passed down to her and now to her own preteen son, Flynn Nolan. And it got her interested in the 201314 series by Dennis Kelly (whose other show, “The Third
Day,” recently premiered on HBO). Flynn began adapting it for “Gone Girl” movie director David Fincher in 2013. That project collapsed, and she went on to executiveproduce HBO’s serialization of “Sharp Objects,” but she came back to run Amazon’s revived “Utopia,” which was shot over six months last year in Chicago.
Flynn added some new things to her version, though: John Cusack plays a pharmaceuticals mogul modeled on reallife tech CEOs like Elon Musk, and there are some weird fanatics from a mysterious place called Home who will stop at nothing to get a newly discovered “Utopia” book’s manuscript.
But Flynn’s real affinity is evident in the writing of the show’s fangirls and fanboys. They’re played by Ashleigh LaThrop (“Handmaid’s Tale,” “Kominsky Method”), Dan Byrd (“Easy A”), Jessica Rothe (“Happy Death Day”), Desmin Borges (“You’re the Worst”) and Javon “Wanna” Walton (“Euphoria”). Sasha Lane of “American Honey” leads them as Jessica Hyde, the brutal and paranoid reallife version of the comic’s heroine. The book’s artwork was made by Joao Ruas, a favorite of Flynn’s whose style she describes as “Arthur Rackham on acid.”
“In the U.K., you don’t really see the book much,” the showrunner said of another key change she made from the original series. “As a fan, I wanted to see this underground cult thing that people are obsessed with.”
The biggest change of all, though, will be how the pandemic plotline, along with the new show’s subplot about whether a vaccine can be trusted, has far more resonance today than it did seven years ago. Flynn is still amazed by how the series she was finishing in
March now plays eerily like the graphic novel within it, as a pop culture portent of reality.
“It’s a very unsettling thing,” she admitted. “I started writing this in 2013, and at the time when I was pushing it to studios it felt like science fiction because, obviously, a pandemic wouldn’t happen.”
After filming wrapped, she flew back and forth to Los Angeles, where all the editing was done. At the time, there were some mentions of a novel coronavirus, but “as a smug American,” she remembered “thinking we haven’t had a pandemic in 100 years.”
“Then I got on a plane at LAX at the beginning of March, saying ‘I’ll see you guys in a couple of weeks.’ All of a sudden I was finishing editing with my laptop at home with the TV news on 24/7,” she said. “I was trying to figure out if I was supposed to microwave my kids, Windex my mail and all that, then looking at these scenes of hot zones that we’d filmed a year before — the definition of surreal. An overused word, but in this case it truly was correct.”
Though not technically a comic book show, “Utopia” shares sociopolitical themes, paranoid atmospheres and outrageous, often gory aesthetics with such acclaimed new superhero series as “Watchmen,” which just won 11 Emmy Awards, and Amazon Prime stablemate “The Boys.”
A former TV critic for Entertainment Weekly,
Flynn couldn’t be more pleased by how one of her favorite genres is developing.
“They’re doing what the best comic books and graphic novels do,” she said. “I feel this way about genre in general, which is why I love writing mysteries; when done well, you can use genre to talk about any number of massive and important societal things, the environment or gender or race. But you attach all of these different viewpoints or thoughts to the engine of a comic book or a mystery, and it doesn’t feel like homework.”