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Behind the scenes production images by various Ripley crew members.

It's so weird seeing them in color. It makes me glad they went for black and white.

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New behind the scenes video (yes another one) from the Art Streiber photoshoot for Emmy Magazine.

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Ripley (2024) dir. by Steven Zaillian

Sempre la luce...

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Behind the scenes production images and video, taken by various Ripley crew members.

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Never has a man looked so deeply uncomfortable, but still undeniably hot as he does in the speedo scene.

RIPLEY (2024) Episode I: A Hard Man to Find

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I feel like I should add this to the list.

Andrew Scott is NOT PLAYING 25.

According to Steve Zaillian, he intentionally aged the characters up because he thought Dickie lazing around beaches pretending to be an artist, but mostly drinking and being idly rich is more pathetic if he's pushing 40 and makes the situation for his father MORE desperate.

(If you're reaching retirement age and your wife is in declining health, you might be desperate enough to resort to even a tenuous connection to someone your playboy son knows, if they might help you finally get him home to take up his responsibilities with the family business before it's too late.)

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All of Us Strangers isn't out in Japan until April 19th, so that means we get one more Paul and Andrew press junket video, as a little treat.

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emiliomadrid: Andrew Scott in Vanya on the West End. Directed by @samyates2020 and adapted by @simonwstephens. Now the winner of the Olivier Award for Best Revival of a Play.

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VANYA understudy "Sister" Victoria Blunt & "hot priest" Andrew Scott at the 2024 Olivier Awards after-party.

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Some additional photos of Andrew Scott by Ward Ivan Rafik for The Sunday Times Style.

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Andrew with his sisters at the 2024 Olivier’s

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Hannah Waddingham fangirling over Andrew Scott at the 2024 Olivier Awards and who could blame her 😍

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Congratulations to Co-creators Andrew Scott, Simon Stephens, Sam Yates, Rosanna Vize, and the whole VANYA crew for their Olivier Award win for Best Revival!

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Andrew Scott, The Sunday Times - Style

📷 Ward Ivan Rafik

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'Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was the author largely of books ubiquitously described as psychological thrillers, but the adjective is doing much more work than it usually does in such descriptions. The psychological depths tend to be far deeper than just a worry about being caught for assorted misdeeds. It’s no surprise that her works have proven appealing to all sorts of directors. When your first novel is adapted a year after publication by Alfred Hitchcock, you know you’re doing something right. Strangers on a Train is about much more than just a macabre plan. Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, Claude Chabrol’s The Cry of the Owl, and Todd Haynes’s Carol are all very good.

Tom Ripley is Highsmith’s best-known creation. Turning a Henry James plot into pulp fiction is not the sort of thing that’s usually advisable, but she did it extraordinarily well. The plot of The Ambassadors, an industrialist hiring a man to seek to induce her son to return to America from expat indolence, is cribbed here as a foundation. The James protagonist finds Europe much to his liking, as does Highsmith’s Ripley. When the European idyll is threatened, Ripley has a novel thought: Why not bump the young scion off and take his place?

This sounds like a preposterous plan to execute. And it is! That’s why it’s entirely engrossing. Her aim was, she wrote, “showing the unequivocal triumph of evil over good, and rejoicing in it. I shall make my readers rejoice in it, too.” Netflix‘s new series, Ripley, succeeds in replicating exactly this feat.

The trouble with prior screen adaptations of Highsmith’s Ripley stories has been that he’s always been made far too pleasant. If René Clément’s French language 1960 Purple Noon and Anthony Minghella’s star-studded 1999 The Talented Mr. Ripley are both credible adaptations in their own way, there’s something askew about both matinee idol Alain Delon or effortless everyman Matt Damon as Tom Ripley. Dennis Hopper and John Malkovich both had elements of the Ripley persona down in adaptations of later novels (Barry Pepper did not), but there still seemed to be elements of the portrait missing.

I’m sure I’m not the only reader to find the versatile con man who appears across five Highsmith novels initially repellent. He is not enthusiastic, loathing nearly all of the effort involved in his cons. And he is not loquacious or charismatic as we might expect from a grifter. In almost his very first deception at the start of The Talented Mr. Ripley (the subject of this adaptation), he himself notices the cracks in his crocodile grin: “When he looked into the mirror, he found that his face had turned down at the corners.” Most frauds will say nearly anything to wheedle their way into favor. Talk is normally very cheap when you have no regard for truth. Ripley can’t bring himself to muster more than the mildest of faint praise for execrable paintings by his main mark. Almost every decent person has told white lies with less hesitation.

Things are different in Ripley, the best adaptation of the novel to date, thanks in considerable part to the casting of Andrew Scott (familiar from a variety of things but most germane to this particular role as Moriarty in the BBC Sherlock series) as Ripley. Scott telegraphs unease and strain with great facility. Sometimes, he’s vaguely normally personable. At many other points, his strained effort seems entirely transparent. This sort of calibration captures in excellent fashion the frank distaste that Ripley feels for almost everyone in the source material, a difficult thing to pull off in a book largely composed of his own train of thought. He is terrifically bored by most of his targets and doesn’t work all that hard to conceal the fact. He succeeds somehow with most people. It’s reliably a surprise that only a few see through him.

If the promise of streaming television has been tarnished by countless long-winded series that have no idea how to pace themselves or end, this one makes excellent use of an eight-episode frame to tell the tale of the novel basically in full. Prior adaptations simply couldn’t do that within a feature film length. Purple Noon opens in media res. The Talented Mr. Ripley condenses a number of things. There are some minor emendations, most of which are actively good and almost all at least forgivable.

The book dedicates an enormous amount of time to Ripley’s scheming and improvising. His plans are usually not airtight. Much of the riveting character of the book is how easily he might be caught at almost any moment. A number of sequences whose dramatic tension is contained in their great length are presented in white knuckle effulgence here. Two very lengthy corpse disposals are engrossing. Conversations are lengthy, full of pregnant pauses. There’s even high drama wrought out of multiple bank scenes in which we find Tom feloniously drawing funds.

Steven Zaillian, who wrote the screenplays for Schindler’s List, The Gangs of New York, and The Irishman, provides an excellent script and credible direction. The work of cinematographer Robert Elswit (whose credits include There Will Be Blood) is great. Ripley’s early miserable life in New York is presented well. The tenements are squalid and subways sweltering. La Dolce Vita-era Italy looks all the more rapturous afterward, with shadows and light in various palazzi motivating almost anyone to murder. Locations across south Italy, Capri, and Venice are excellent.

Casting beyond Ripley himself is very strong. Johnny Flynn’s Dickie Greenleaf is a perfect, vaguely dim, but charismatic offspring of privilege. Maurizio Lombardi, perhaps familiar as a cardinal in The Young Pope, is a very strong inspector on the case. Playwright Kenneth Lonergan (who also co-wrote The Gangs of New York) is an ideal Herbert Greenleaf. The casting of Freddie Miles is one substantial deviation, here not the churlish porker of the novel (Philip Seymour Hoffman was about ideal) but rather an androgynous proto-Eurotrash wisp. Dakota Fanning’s Marge Sherwood, Dickie Greenleaf’s tedious paramour, is rendered more truly than any prior. She’s no stunning beauty but a rather average girl in “naive clothes” with “windblown hair and her general air of a Girl Scout.”

Now, Ripley is not exactly a fan of any women if Marge is particularly low on the list. Ripley is very deliberately rendered as sort of gay in the novel. He finds Dickie handsome and Marge repulsive. At a key juncture, he notes he “could have hit Dickie, sprung on him, or kissed him, or thrown him overboard.” This is not the range of options most people consider in a social dilemma, no matter their sexual orientation. Purple Noon basically omitted this element, while The Talented Mr. Ripley camped it up. Ripley replicates the novel’s deliberate ambiguity. He seems devoid of almost any active sexuality and likes almost no one, with exceptions for a handful of men.

What Ripley does like are the finer things in life. He thrills to travel, fine clothing, beautiful objects, and art. These things receive all sorts of close cinematic attention. There is a Hitchcockian cinematic focus on pens, an ashtray, and other talismans of the good life (that also might be used to kill).

Ripley contains a cameo from Malkovich (who portrayed Ripley in another earlier adaptation, Ripley’s Game) as a character from the next novel, and Zaillian optioned all five Ripley novels. Let’s hope that the viewers stream in, as it would be nice to see more of this Ripley.'

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thestyle: A tease, you say? Go on, then. Coming in tomorrow's Style...a sneak peak from our exclusive Andrew Scott cover story. You're welcome