Watch your step
Drama series follows The life of The woman beTTer known as The boDy aT The boTTom of The sTaircase
Tragic accident or gruesome murder? Who – or what – killed Kathleen Peterson has been a topic of heated debate ever since her husband, Michael, called 911 claiming he’d found his wife lying at the bottom of the stairs of their palatial North Carolina home.
Since that fateful night in 2001, all sorts of theories have emerged about Kathleen’s death. Did she simply slip down the stairs after enjoying a few wines after dinner, as Michael insisted? Or did the crime writer bludgeon his wife with a fire-poker after she discovered he’d been having affairs with multiple men? Or – perhaps strangest of all – was Kathleen the victim of a vicious wild owl attack?
While these mysteries were examined in forensic detail in the 2004 documentary The Staircase, one of the most important questions has remained unaddressed and unanswered, until now.
Who was Kathleen Peterson? Sadly, the woman at the centre of this true crime has remained a bit player in her own murder story, relegated simply to being the body at the bottom of the staircase rather than a fully fleshed human being.
But a new drama series (also called The Staircase) starring Toni Collette as Kathleen and Colin Firth as her accused killer, aims to right this wrong and will, for the first time, seek to present audiences with a clearer picture of Kathleen’s life.
Writer and producer Antonio Campos says they had approached the six-episode series as a “family drama more than a crime show”.
“Exploring the events leading up to that night and after that night, in some way, felt like we were getting closer to something like the truth than sort of staring at a bunch of evidence and going over a lot of the things that people get obsessed about with this case, whether it be the bloodstain pattern or the shape of the lacerations and things like that,” he explained.
This approach is what appealed to Firth, who admits he has never been a true crime buff. Best known for his loveable but straitlaced roles in Pride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones’ Diaries and Love Actually, Firth says he hadn’t actively sought to shatter his nice guy image by playing a convicted killer.
“It was a very simple case of thinking this was a good script,” Firth explains.
“It wasn’t really initially what I thought I was looking for. Truecrime genre isn’t where I go for my entertainment particularly. I just was struck by the quality of the writing, and I found the whole thing very intriguing.”
Of course, because of the intense interest in the case – the Oscar winner was spoiled for choice when it came to researching his character. While he watched the documentary as well as other interviews and outtakes with Michael to get a better sense of his mannerisms and speech patterns, Firth ultimately decided not to meet the man himself for fear it could influence his performance.
“We all know that these characters have names of living people, but it’s very carefully calibrated to tell the story in a certain way, and I felt that I wanted to keep my inspiration, my motivation, and the sense of the source material as much as possible contained within the script and the way it was written,” he explains.
“And I felt that that could have been skewed in some way if I had personal connections during the shooting of this with Michael Peterson or the people concerned.”
Firth emphasises that this drama series does not set out to answer definitively whodunit but rather to explore the different possibilities and give more insight into the people and the relationships behind the headlines.
And the actor certainly has an impressive cast of talent to help tell those stories. Fellow Oscar-winner Juliette Binoche (Chocolat) plays the French film editor who began a relationship with Peterson while making the documentary, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son Patrick and Game of Thrones’ star Sophie Turner play the convicted killer’s loyal children.
While the Peterson family – just like documentary viewers – were ultimately divided over the writer’s guilt, Firth didn’t form an opinion on that front.
“I tried not to judge,” he says. “It’s something that was ingrained into all of us as [acting] students … it’s just not your job. What’s interesting about the approach here is it deftly avoids taking up a single position.”