New ‘Fatal Attraction’ digs more deeply into mental issues

“You’ll be familiar with the characters,” says Lizzy Caplan, who plays the Close role. “But what we are trying to do is ask the questions that would have been impossible to ask in a film because we wouldn’t have had the time.”

Chief among them: Ones related to mental illness. Close, Caplan says, saw Alex Forrest as someone struggling with mental illness. “She was asking those questions. If you re-watch it knowing all that work that has been put into it, you see just how layered the performance is.”

In the eight-hour limited series, the relationship is revisited through a different prism. Dan Gallagher (the character played by Douglas) is up for parole. He has served 15 years for the murder of Forrest, his stalker, and is trying to redeem himself.

“The only redemption is through his family,” says Joshua Jackson, who plays the role in the series. “The man has gone through this entire process without truly taking responsibility. While the repercussions of his act spiral out of control and he’s not directly responsibly, he did set the process in motion.”

Key to the new version is Gallagher’s daughter, Ellen. “She’s the kid who gets her bunny boiled but nobody asks if she’s OK,” says Alyssa Jirrels, who plays the role. “From an actor’s point of view, you get two timelines. It’s really important to come up with those back stories and those core memories.”

To understand the young woman’s mindset, Executive Producer Alexandra Cunningham put Jirrels in touch with a clinical psychologist who talked about compartmentalization and intellectualization. Ellen, she says, “has dealt with this her whole life, but she’s on a quest to understand it herself.”

When Caplan first saw “Fatal Attraction,” she saw it in a villain-versus-hero way.

“If you watch the movie again, I find it very, very difficult to see Alex as a straight villain,” she says. “The lens in which we view things now has altered so dramatically from the ‘80s. It’s not an hour-and-a-half-long film. It’s an eight-hour series. We’ve got lots of time to really dig more deeply into Alex’s backstory and see where she’s coming from.”

Jackson says Dan’s mental health is also questionable. “He’s a man who is not being honest with himself and has not really come to terms with some of the darker places inside his ego. He allows his fragility and privilege to drive him down a path that causes immense damage to the people around him.”

A car accident provides a clue to Dan’s behavior. “Dan’s immediate response is to get out of it really efficiently,” Caplan says. “Moving through the world as a white, privileged guy is an avenue that exists for him…but doesn’t exist for other characters.”

It becomes a slippery slope and, finally, Jackson says, he finds himself in a situation “he can’t just slide out of.”

Cunningham says the story – the reimagining – affords her a chance to address entitlement, midlife crises, the justice system, personality disorders, isolation and murder.

“Your sympathies will shift more than once,” she says.

The original film had a different ending, initially. Then producers changed it for something more shocking. “Glenn Close was very invested in (the original) ending because she felt like it was the emotional through line for the character,” Cunningham says. “It was all wrapped up very quickly. But we’re spending a lot more time with Alex and her thought process.”

Caplan says she sees Close’s point. “We decided she wasn’t actually diagnosed with some of these (illnesses). So there’s a lot of responsibility to not play somebody who is just an unhinged crazy woman. The challenge is finding out how we make Alex a sympathetic character.”

“Fatal Attraction” airs on Paramount+.