New miniseries chronicles daring, real life prison escape
It was the most daring prison escape in decades. Two inmates serving life sentences for murder mounted a meticulous, detailed plan to bust out of the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York in 2015, tunnelling through a catwalk beneath their cells to a manhole and at least temporary freedom.
Richard Matt and David Sweat were aided by Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell, a flirtatious (and married) employee in the prison’s tailor shop where both worked and had sex with her, and Gene Palmer, a rogue guard who (perhaps unwittingly) slipped tools to the prisoners and looked the other way. On the lam for three weeks, and headed toward the nearby Canadian border, the pair eluded a massive manhunt until one was captured and the other killed.
The incredible story is the subject of a seven-part Showtime miniseries, “Escape at Dannemora,” that begins Sunday (10 p.m.), directed by Ben Stiller and starring Benicio del Toro and Paul Dano as the prisoners and Patricia Arquette as Tilly, who’s now serving a prison sentence for her role.
“If this wasn’t true I might have a hard time believing it,” Dano says. “It was crazy.” Arquette gained 40 pounds to play “femme fatale” Tilly over most of the months-long production.
“It was humbling, humiliating, interesting to go through life feeling like an invisible person,” she says of Tilly, a libidinous philanderer. “But when she’s in (the prison), when she’s at work, she’s so visible.”
Stiller, a comedic actor and director, takes a sharp right turn as director of this dramatic story. “It was the first time I was really shooting anything where there wasn’t that pressure on me to be funny,” he says. “It made me realize how hard that is. It was at once freeing but also a new world.” So was not appearing in scenes he directed: “That was the biggest change I enjoyed.”
But residents of Dannemora, where some of the series was shot, had a different expectation: “The attitude in the town was ... Ben Stiller is going to make a comedy; that was the assumption. Maybe even Showtime had that assumption,” he jokes. But “when I got to the place and started to experience the reality of these people, I just wanted to show what happened.”
Stiller says he didn’t closely follow the case in real time; he was in Europe filming “Zoolander 2.”