‘The Night Of’ navigated a maze of its own
Miniseries endured a long road to the screen
HBO’s The Night Of, an eightpart miniseries that premiered Sunday (9 ET/PT), has a history almost as labyrinthine as the justice system explored in the murder mystery.
Based on Criminal Justice, a 2008 BBC miniseries that starred Ben Whishaw about a case wending its way through the justice system, the plot follows the son of a cab driver who is headed to a party and takes the taxi, picking up a woman seeking a ride. Then, after a night of drinking, drugs and sex, he wakes up in the kitchen with no memory of what happened and finds her stabbed to death in bed.
Panicked, he flees with the murder weapon and is arrested after being stopped for drunken driving. And a disheveled ambulance-chasing lawyer with a bad case of eczema who has never defended a murder suspect winds up handling the case.
James Gandolfini appeared briefly in a 2012 pilot for the series — most of which makes up Sunday’s premiere — as the lawyer, John Stone, who surfaces after college student Nasir “Naz” Khan is arrested.
In early 2013, HBO passed on the project but changed its mind three months later when rivals pounced, and the network ordered it as a limited series. The next month, Gandolfini, 51, died unexpectedly while vacationing in Italy.
After pausing, HBO decided to continue, lining up Robert De Niro to replace Gandolfini, but he wasn’t available for the length of time needed to shoot the series. So John Turturro stepped in.
“James was a dear friend of mine,” Turturro says, “so I was kind of watching (the pilot) with one eye closed. It was hard to watch, but I was relieved he hadn’t done that much so I didn’t have to erase anything in my mind.”
All that change was daunting: “I’ve really thought about nothing else for five years,” says screenwriter Steven Zaillian ( Moneyball,
Schindler’s List), who created the adaptation with Richard Price ( Clockers) and directed almost every episode of his first TV project.
They were fans of true-crime stories and inspired by The Staircase, a 2004 French miniseries about the murder trial of a novelist.
It was Price’s decision to reframe the series for its New York setting by casting British-born Riz Ahmed, of Pakistani heritage, to play the lead role. Since the pilot, he appeared as Jake Gyllenhaal’s assistant in 2014’s Nightcrawler and has roles in the upcoming Jason Bourne and Star Wars: Rogue One.
“Growing up as a Muslim-American, post-9/11, you kind of have a very (unpleasant) relationship toward the authorities; you are told you are automatically a suspect,” Ahmed says. “It certainly does play into what you can expect in the criminal justice system. People view you as a threat.”
Zaillian, a fan of true-crime stories, finds the genre “fascinating. ... If I wasn’t a screenwriter, I wouldn’t mind being a police detective: solving problems, getting answers to questions ... putting a puzzle together. This one became not just about the police but about lawyers, the justice system, the corrections system, racial questions, all kinds of things” that would have been impossible to cram into a two-hour film.
“It was so finely etched and well-observed,” Turturro says. “Here’s a guy who has all the capabilities of being a perfect lawyer, and yet he doesn’t have the stomach for it. Some people don’t want to have someone’s life in their hands.”
As for the debilitating eczema, yet another obstacle faced by Stone, Turturro insisted on having extensive makeup applied to his feet, even on days he was filmed from the waist up. “He’s a serious guy, and he took it very seriously,” Zaillian says.
Turturro says he had to commit to portray Stone as the “shambling mess of a human being ” he was.
“I’m sure Jimmy would have been a perfect mess, too.”