Denton, Englert reinvent a dangerous game
Actors play young versions of literary poisonous power couple in TV series
It could never work between them, Alice Englert insisted during a recent interview. In a relationship this toxic, she said, they would have no choice but to ruin each other, slowly or all at once.
Nicholas Denton was sitting beside her. “That’s the game of it,” he said, grinning.
The game is power. The field is pre-revolutionary France. And the contestants are the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, arguably literature’s most poisoned and poisonous power couple. Or not quite. Not yet. In “Dangerous Liaisons,” a decadent drama that recently debuted on Starz, Englert and Denton play much younger versions of the characters introduced by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in the epistolary 1782 novel.
In the book, these characters are aristocrats, with decades of conniving and debauchery underneath their wigs and powder, who conspire to corrupt a chaste woman. In the show, they are barely out of puberty, seducers in their youth. Even before its premiere, the series had already been renewed.
The couple — lovers who treat each other with anything but love — have fascinated readers and audiences for two centuries and counting, popping up in plays, operas, ballets, radio plays and movies, including the 1988 Stephen Frears film starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich. All of which makes reinventing them a very tall order. The height of the wigs alone!
But Englert and Denton were willing to try. “We’re both quite rough and tumble,” Denton said. “We’re willing to get on the floor in this garb and try and really knock this out and go to hell for it.”
A television version of “Dangerous Liaisons” has been in development for nearly a decade, under the partial auspices of
Colin Callender, a distinguished
producer. Christopher Hampton, who wrote the screenplay for Frears’ film and the stage adaptation that is often revived on Broadway, was attached at one point. Then he wasn’t. When writer Harriet Warner came on, she went looking for a fresh way into the material, and she found it in one of the novel’s letters, which seemed to imply that the Marquise hadn’t been born into nobility, that she had clawed her way into it. She shared that insight with Callender.
“The interesting thing was, how did these characters become who they were?” Callender explained in a recent interview.
Warner began to devise some answers. Earlier, younger riffs on “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” like “Cruel Intentions” (1999) and a recent French film adaptation, moved the story into modern high schools. But Warner decided to keep to the period of the novel, more or less, while aging
the Marquise down into Camille, a sex worker, and Valmont into Pascal, a mapmaker exiled from the aristocracy. First they go to bed. And then they go to war.
With that decision made and scripts written, casting could begin. The producers saw about 200 actors for each role. Denton,
30, an Australian actor, went through at least a half-dozen auditions and tests, beginning early in 2020. At times, in quarantine, his sister had to read the steamier scenes with him. “Disgusting,” he said. “Bless her soul.”
Englert, 28, also from Australia and the daughter of filmmaker Jane Campion, put herself on tape later, toward the end of 2020. With the pandemic in full swing, the two of them couldn’t meet for a chemistry read. (Although Denton had met with other actors, a Plexiglas barrier between them.) So they had their joint audition in separate hotel rooms on Zoom, trying to steam up their
relative screens.
“It was so funny,” Englert said.
Apparently it was more than just funny. “It was better than you could have imagined,” Warner said during a recent interview. “You just knew they were going to elevate each other and escalate the drama and yet keep all this wonderful raw energy of the fact that they are still kind of unsullied by the industry.”
Denton and Englert met in person a few months later, in spring 2021, on set in Prague. Englert had just emerged from hair and makeup with a temporary wig balanced precariously on her head. (“I was dreaming that I looked like a flat-chested version of Dolly Parton,” she said.) Wary of COVID-19 protocols, they patted each other on their respective shoulders. A few days later, they were rolling around the rehearsal room floor together. A few days after that, they were filming one of Pascal and Camille’s incendiary fights.
“I actually cried at the end of that day,” Englert said, “just from knowing that we were going to go on such an odyssey.” The constricting costumes — “they just hurt sometimes,” Englert said — may have moved her to tears, too.
The sex scenes could have made for more mortifying stories. But the actors worked closely with the show’s intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien, to make them feel safe and liberating. “It was actually a really good bonding thing,” Denton said. And with sex out of the way — lots of it, especially in the first episode — they could navigate the riskier contours of Camille and Pascal’s relationship.
“What’s always appealed to me about ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ is that the fantasy of the love is shattered,” Englert said. She was speaking to the novel, although it’s true of the show, too. “It’s in pieces from the beginning,” she continued.
Denton saw it just the same. “It’s so refreshing to watch something that doesn’t get glossed over,” he said, “that doesn’t become a glossy Disney version of what love is. Because I don’t think that’s what love is. Love is elusive, dangerous, corrupt.”
The goal of the series was to keep the period details as accurate as possible while ensuring that the emotional atmosphere felt urgent and contemporary. Otherwise, it might read as just another polite costume drama, however luxe the costumes. You had to see the real people underneath the corsetry.
For Denton and Englert, that meant bringing their own hearts to the roles. It also meant a lot of pretending, because they harbor a shared belief that perhaps they aren’t quite as sexy or as lethal as their characters.
“We’re betas pretending to be alphas,” Denton said.
Englert agreed. “We’re exceedingly embarrassed all the time,” she said. “But it’s how we go. We enjoy it.”
Denton smiled at his friend. “Alice always says, ‘We’re just Aussies in cossies,’ ” he said.