MOTHER FATHER SON
If you thought The Assassination Of Gianni Versace was intense, wait until you see the writer’s next drama
fresh from turning the real-life stories of Gianni Versace and his assassin Andrew Cunanan into the multiple Emmy-winning American Crime Story, screenwriter Tom Rob Smith now has his own equally ambitious but (mainly) fictional eight-part saga of wealth and power on the way. Set against a backdrop of contemporary media and politics, Motherfatherson (yes, all one word) is, as the title implies, a family saga, with Richard Gere, no less, as a media tycoon, Helen Mccrory as his wife and Billy Howle as their son, primed to inherit his father’s empire,.
The idea of casting Gere was inspired by a viewing of American Gigolo during Smith’s preparation for the Versace series. “He had such an ambiguity and danger about him in that film”, Smith tells us. “For this family story to work you have to love each of the three main characters, and even when Richard’s character is taking ruthless decisions, you want to spend time with him”.
On the surface, the series shares DNA with one of the most critically acclaimed shows of 2018 – HBO/SKY Atlantic’s Succession, in which Brian Cox plays a Murdoch-style media tycoon. But Smith is unfazed by the comparison. “I really enjoyed Succession, and there are several plot points which are similar,” he tells us. “But we spin off in Alice In Wonderland style to
somewhere very different. Succession feels like a very witty dark comedy whereas our show is much more emotional. We’re ripping people down to their core.”
It turns out Smith’s initial inspiration for this series wasn’t really anything to do with its media empire milieu. Instead he was drawn to a traumatic real-life incident that happened to one of his friends. He won’t go into specifics, except to say he’s turned it into “an existential crisis” for Howle’s character which flips the narrative on its head. “The whole country feels the reverberations of this trauma”, says Smith. Rather like The Assassination Of Gianni Versace. And we fully expect Motherfatherson to pack a similar punch.