The upcoming “Fatal Attraction” series for Paramount+ has an official release date, and we know who’ll lead it now. Based on the 1987 thriller of the same name, the film follows married man Dan (Michael Douglas) who becomes the target of an obsessive, jilted ex-mistress (Glenn Close). And she will not be ignored, Dan!
In this reimagining, Joshua Jackson will play Dan Gallagher. Amanda Peet will play his wife, Beth Gallagher, and Lizzy Caplan will portray Dan’s obsessed lover, Alex Forrest. The “Fatal Attraction” series will follow two separate timelines, one in 2008, and the other in 2023. It will explore the “timeless themes of marriage and infidelity through the lens of modern attitudes towards strong women, personality disorders and coercive control,” Paramount+ revealed.
The series will be “spending a lot more time with Alex and her point of view,” showrunner Alexandra Cunningham confirmed. This is certainly a change from the binary, black-and-white villian vs victim of the original film. “This property was ripe to be looked at in a different way,” Cunningham said. “In our version, it’s trying to represent all of the characters’ point of view as opposed to just Dan, and everyone’s angle on what happens.”
“I wanted us to go in a slightly different direction,” Cunningham said. “This reimagining of Fatal Attraction shared a lot with the iconic original film, but it also is about entitlement, midlife crisis, and how some of the sausage gets made in our broken justice system, personality disorders, isolation, father and daughters and muder. It’s about how some people just can’t take a win. It’s about self-image and what we’ll do to protect it. And also what happens when someone doesn’t have one. And if we’ve done our job, I think that your sympathies will shift more than once.”
Ideas that are all touched on in the film, the added screen time of a series will hopefully allow for more of a deep dive, which is something Caplan seems excited to explore more. “We’re poised to ask more questions about characters,” Caplan explained. “In this case, it’s not an hour-and-a-half-long film, it’s an eight-hour series. We’ve got lots of time to dig around into Alex’s backstory, her childhood, where she’s coming from, seeing things through her eyes. And yes it’s a remake but it’s really more of a jumping off point. We’re familiar with the characters but what we’re trying to do is ask the questions that would have been impossible to ask in the film because we wouldn’t have had the time, and also, questions that people didn’t care to ask back then.”
“Fatal Attraction” will premiere 2 episodes April 30th on Paramount+. The remaining 6 episodes will be available to stream weekly on Sundays in the U.S. and Canada.
