TV

Series Fatal Attraction will Casts Reno Wilson, Alyssa Jirrels, Toby Huss, and Brian Goodman

The series will explore the timeless themes of marriage and infidelity. Alyssa Jirrels, Toby Huss, Reno Wilson, and Brian Goodman have joined the cast of the Fatal Attraction series, Paramount+ announced. They will join the previously announced ensemble cast that includes Lizzy Caplan as Alex Forrest, Joshua Jackson as Dan Gallagher, and Amanda Peet as Beth Gallagher.

The Fatal Attraction series is a deep-dive reimagining of the classic psychosexual thriller of the same name by director Adrian Lyne. The movie cast Michael Douglas as Dan Gallagher, Glenn Close as Alex Forrest, Anne Archer as Beth Gallagher, and Ellen Hamilton Latzen as Ellen Gallagher. The new series will explore the timeless themes of marriage and infidelity through the lens of modern attitudes toward strong women, personality disorders, and coercive control. Jirrels will star as Ellen Gallagher, Dan and Beth’s daughter. She recently played a recurring role in Jason Katims’ series As We See It. She also played a lead role in This Is the Year, directed by David Henrie and produced by Selena Gomez. Jirrels will next appear in the limited series Boo Bitch, opposite Lana Condor and produced by Lauren Lungerich.

Huss will play Mike Gerard, the DA’s chief of investigations, whose friendship and loyalty to deputy DA Dan Gallagher goes back many years. Currently, he’s seen in Dickinson opposite Hailee Steinfeld and Copshop opposite Gerard Butler. Most recently he can be seen in The Righteous Gemstones, The Front Runner, Glow, and the Halloween reboot with Jamie Lee Curtis.

Wilson will star as Detective Earl Booker, a long-standing member of the Los Angeles Police Department with a large personality and an inability to self-edit. He most notably gave voice to the Decepticon Mudflap in the Transformers Franchise. The actor has many TV series credits such as Good Girls, Mike and Molly, Heist, Blind Justice, and among others. His film credits include Bolden, Granddaddy Day Care, and Born a Champion. He will be next seen in Headshop.

Goodman will star as Arthur Tomlinson – warm and kind, Arthur is Beth Gallagher’s best friend and business partner. His film credits include Munich, Catch Me If You Can, and The Last Castle. In addition to acting, Goodman wrote and directed the thriller What Doesn’t Kill You starring Ethan Hawke and Mark Ruffalo, and directed Black Butterfly starring Antonio Banderas and Jonathan Rhys Myers.

Alexandra Cunningham serves as writer, showrunner, and executive producer on the series alongside executive producer Kevin J. Hynes. Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey of Amblin Television serve as executive producers. Silver Tree will also executive-produce and direct.

The Original Ending to ‘Fatal Attraction’ Should’ve Been Left In The theatrical version glosses over a major plot point in favor of turning Alex into a slasher movie villain. Fatal Attraction was made during the “Fuck Period” of Michael Douglas’ career, during which he made a series of films wherein he had sex with approximately everyone who drifted too close to his personal orbit. (Specifically, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, and Disclosure.) Truly, no woman could resist the erotic singularity that was Michael Douglas in the late 80s and early 90s. But even though the argument can be made that all three films of the Douglas “Would You Like to See Me Naked” Oeuvre are about the vilification of women’s sexuality, Fatal Attraction remains unique among them. It was nominated for six Academy Awards (including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress), whereas Basic Instinct only received two technical Oscar nods and Disclosure politely watched the ceremony from home. Glenn Close gives a haunting performance as Alex Forrest, an independent career woman burdened by mental instability and a dipshit attorney who opportunistically sleeps with her for an entire weekend while his family is out of town. Sharon Stone’s portrayal of Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct became similarly iconic, but Catherine is a film noir caricature of a femme fatale, whereas Alex is a real human being. That is, until the film’s ending.

If you’ve never seen it, Fatal Attraction is about Dan Gallagher (Douglas), a successful New York lawyer with a loving, supportive family who randomly decides to have an affair the instant the opportunity arises. He meets Alex, who is an editor for a publishing company whom Dan’s firm represents, and the two spend 48 hours having desperate, pawing sex, as if a planet-killing meteor is hurtling towards earth bearing the judgment of the cosmos. Alex “catches feelings”, and spends the rest of the film stalking Dan in increasingly self-destructive ways, including slashing her wrists, boiling the Gallagher family rabbit, and briefly abducting Dan’s daughter Ellen from school. In the film’s original ending, this spiral reaches a predictable conclusion – Alex slashes her own throat and stages the scene to make it look as if Dan murdered her. Dan is arrested but ultimately exonerated by a tape Alex sent him in which she explicitly threatens to kill herself to ruin him, and in a final flashback we see Alex commit the act while listening to Madame Butterfly. The tragic opera is a repeated motif in the film, so make note of that, because we’re going to come back to it later.

The new ending certainly undermines Alex’s character, both in the way she was written and in the way Close chose to play her. But the new ending also creates some truly horrifying implications that were merely tragic in the original. Partway through the film, Alex tells Dan that she is pregnant with his child. The movie never refutes this claim, and indeed Dan seems to accept it – he calls Alex’s doctor to confirm it, and when he finally admits the affair to his wife, he also tells her that Alex is pregnant. So, when Dan and Beth team up to kill Alex in the film’s climactic handicap match, they’re teaming up to kill a pregnant woman who is carrying Dan’s child.

Test audiences did not care for the original ending, so against Close’s wishes, a new one was shot – Alex comes to the Gallagher house with a knife and tries to kill Dan’s wife Beth (Anne Archer), but Dan intervenes, apparently drowning her in the bathtub. Alex pops back up out of the water like Jason fucking Vorhees and Beth shoots her to death with the family gun. The crowd cheers (presumably), the film fades out on a shot of a framed photograph of the happy Gallagher clan, and the credits roll. Close really did not want to film the new ending, as she felt it turned her character into a slasher movie “psycho killer” stereotype, and not the realistically troubled person she was trying to portray. But the addition of an unsophisticated popcorn ending arguably helped make Fatal Attraction the biggest worldwide box office hit of 1987, which is absolutely wild to think about in 2020, a year in which that honor is reserved for films containing at least one character made entirely of digital effects.

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