THE TALENTED MR SCOTT
As Patricia Highsmith’s classic psychological thriller gets a film noir reboot for Netflix, the star of Ripley reveals the struggles of playing a psychopath during a year-long pandemic shoot, and reflects on just why the character has such an enduring appeal...
TOM RIPLEY is a small-time con artist scratching a living in 1950s New York, moving from petty grift to two-bit hustle, always with one eye looking over his shoulder for the law. Until one day he receives a proposition that will change his life. Wealthy shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf will send him off to Italy, all expenses paid and with a fat salary into the bargain, to track down his wastrel son, Dickie, to try to persuade him to return to the family home.
And so – as recounted in Patricia Highsmith’s enduring 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley, and more recently, in the 1999 film of the same name, starring Matt Damon and Jude Law – we set off on a sweeping, ultimately bloodstained, journey through the Italian countryside.
We travel from the beauties of the Amalfi coast, to the glories of Rome and the darkly twisted romanticism of Venice. Cue swooning scenery, classical architecture and to-die-for 1950s fashions all kissed by the Italian sun? Not quite.
The latest version, an eight-part psychological thriller series – titled Ripley and opening on Netflix next week – is shot entirely in black and white.
The reason, says series writer-director Steven Zaillian, is quite simple. The tale of Tom Ripley – tightly plotted, foreboding, and not shying from physical violence – is a classic example of 1950s-style film noir.
He adds firmly: “That means you shoot in black and white. How something looks is very important to me, and I thought that this would be distinctive in black and white because then it wouldn’t be like some kind of sunny postcard of a story, which I don’t think it was.
“It was rather dark and foreboding. Black and white lends itself to that.”
Ripley – con man, fraud, master of disguise, and murderer again and again – has been fascinating the public since Highsmith’s novel was first published.
The book spawned three sequels and the story has been adapted numerous times for television, radio and film, including the 1999 Minghella adaption, the French version, Plein Soleil, in 1960, and the Indian Tamil-language film Naan in 2012.
Why does the story – and its main character – exert so powerful a hold over people’s imaginations?
FOR THE acclaimed Irish actor Andrew Scott, coming fresh from his triumph in All Of Us Strangers and starring as the enigmatic main character, the answer lies in the very puzzles Ripley poses.
“We have so many questions about him,” he says. “I think that often the reason that we find people fascinating or scary or uncomfortable-making is that we don’t have too much information about them.
“I feel that we don’t know too much about Tom and that the information that he gives off about himself is not necessarily reliable.”
Scott, 47, has previous experience of playing an iconic baddie.
He starred as arch villain Moriarty opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC’s reboot of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. He continues of his new role: “It’s a little bit like holding water – you have to try to get a sense of who he is without knowing for sure his nationality or even his age or his sexuality.
“You have that thing where you can’t quite catch that. I don’t even like to diagnose exactly what is wrong with him.
“With very famous literary characters that people sometimes have a possession of – and rightly so – we sometimes can be overly concerned with the famousness of the character or what the buzzword would be for them, ‘psychopath’ or ‘sociopath’ or ‘serial killer’ or any of those things.
“None of those things are of any interest to me. I think the reason the character is so enduring is that it’s not about encountering him and making him the ‘other’, but in thinking, ‘What part of Tom Ripley is in us?’”
When writing her literary masterpiece, Texas-born New Yorker Highsmith presented the story entirely through the eyes of her protagonist.
In this way, she invited sympathy for her underdog anti-hero, who manages to maintain his good charm and manners despite an awful upbringing with an aunt who labelled him a “sissy”.
In many ways, however despicable his actions, the reader cannot help but root for poor, abandoned, insecure Tom. And Scott adds that Ripley has qualities that could be described as admirable.
“He is actually incredibly gifted,” he adds.
“He’s a con artist, but he’s nevertheless an artist, and in order to survive he has to make his living fraudulently.” Steve Zaillian agrees, chuckling: “What’s not to admire? He’s got a lot of the traits we all have, in terms of having desires and he has his pride and his wants and needs.
“He just wants and needs these things more than we do, hopefully, because it drives him to do some terrible things. “But yes, he’s quite talented. He’s a professional liar. That’s what he does – and he’s good at it.”
Oddly enough, the very thing Ripley is not talented at is precisely the thing that he is best known for – killing people. “He’s not good at it,” continues Zaillian.
“He’s no better at that sort of thing than we would be – he does it in
‘I found Ripley was a very solitary character... not necessarily lonely, but a very solitary one’
the kind of sloppy way that we all might do it in. He’s certainly not a professional killer and I think that is another reason why we relate to him.”
In the 1999 film, Ripley’s first victim, spoiled rich kid Dickie Greenleaf, was portrayed by Jude Law as being both morally corrupt and sexually ambivalent. Johnny Flynn, 41, playing him here, presents a very different creature.
“He’s a nice guy,” he says. “I just saw him as a good guy who’s a little lost, and this other person, Ripley, comes into his life whom he finds intriguing and who is also somebody he can teach about the way he sees the world, and it’s rewarding for him. There’s a sweetness in him that I wanted to bring out.”
Both thespians agree that the year-long shoot, bedevilled by the early days of Covid, was a gruelling one.
“We started this before people were being vaccinated,” says Johnny. “There was a lot of cleaning of the sets and such and the dates would shift because there were restrictions, and things would take longer than they usually would, and all the time we were away from home.
“The thing that kept me sane was the community of friends that we built up, primarily for me and Andrew and Dakota (Fanning, who plays Dickie’s girlfriend Marge Sherwood) and Eliot (Sumner, who plays Dickie’s friend Freddie Miles).
“We were in these incredibly beautiful places, and often unable to enjoy them like the tourists we were watching around us. But we had each other and that was a huge comfort.”
“There was a lot of stamina that was required,” agrees Andrew, who, as the main character, was in nearly every scene of the series. “You’re on all the time, and to perform every day for a year with no breaks, is a lot. Plus, psychologically, I found that Ripley was a very solitary character – not necessarily lonely but a very solitary one.
“And that with being away from home and working with the Italian language was a big dark place to be – it was a huge privilege, but it was certainly a challenge.
“I took great refuge in the fact that when Johnny and Dakota were there, I could be with them, and I really missed them when they weren’t.”
In real life, neither of the two actors could be any less like his on-screen persona.
In sharp contrast to Dickie Greenleaf’s dabbling dilettante, Johnny Flynn is fiercely dedicated to both his acting and his music.
In 2020, he played David Bowie in the 2020 biopic Stardust. He is also a prolific songwriter, as well as being lead singer of the band Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit – and has been since he was at London’s Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art.
“I was running club nights with bands at the same time that I was doing plays,” he once told me of that time.
“And I busked too – I had to because I was so broke!
“Just to be able to afford to live in London, I had three jobs, and I’d be busking on the side to get £15 together to buy lunch or a cup of coffee, and then I’d go to an audition and turn up with my guitar on my back from the busking.
“The first audition I went to, they felt sorry for me because I looked like a tramp – which is, basically, what I was!”
Meanwhile, the enigmatic psychopath we shall see before us in black and white is an open book in real life
Andrew Scott is a nice middle-class boy from Dublin, the middle of three children of an art teacher mother and a father who worked at an employment office.
Although he is firm that he does not want his sexuality to define him, personally or professionally, he is serenely and openly gay.
As for the serial killer part… “I’m not a method actor,” he reminds me, deadpan, today. “And I’ve only killed four people…”
● Ripley starts on Thursday on Netflix