Director Sam Yates and writer Rachel Bennette preserved the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the country-house gathering at the center of the story, and
Director Sam Yates and writer Rachel Bennette preserved the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the country-house gathering at the center of the story, and the script was “very exciting and present,” Matthew Rhys says. Juggling a enormous ensemble isn’t simple, but this adaptation did that gracefully, in the actor’s view—Bennette’s work “made everyone very individual and personable and interesting and deep. There weren’t broad brushstrokes from her.”
Rhys says he very much wanted to collaborate with director Yates, but also took the role of Inspector Leach in part to work with Huston, who plays Strange’s formidable aunt, Lady Tressilian. “It’s Hollywood’s royal family—there’s three generations [of Hustons] who won Oscars,” Rhys says. “I was very nervous. I had a bad first day, you know, a lot of garbled lines. But as you’d expect, she’s the height of grace. She’s everything you’d expect and want her to be.”
The commanding Lady Tressilian is, of course, none too pleased that her favored nephew is embroiled in an unsavory public spectacle. Strange’s first wife, Audrey, is quietly magnetic in her own way, and despite the renowned athlete’s novel romance, he and Audrey have a lot of unfinished business (all of it expertly played by Jackson-Cohen and Hyland, who share palpable chemistry).
Lady Tressilian, a woman who “doesn’t suffer fools,” views all of that with an eye toward preventing further scandal. “She takes things very seriously, whereas most people in the piece don’t,” Huston says. But the grande dame’s attempt to restore order through a family gathering at her stately home, Gull’s Point—let’s just say, as is so often the case in classic mysteries, the event does not go as planned.
Growing up in a country house in the west of Ireland, Huston knew matriarchs like Lady Tressilian, well-bred women who would hunt at the front of the pack and carry a little silver flask. “How can I explain? They were in charge, but they weren’t in charge. They commanded the activities,” she recalls. “They often filled in for their husbands, who were usually semi-alcoholic. And they didn’t make excuses for them,” in part because these women had been forced to become rather tough. They were survivors who orchestrated the social lives of their circles, but they also lived with secrets and pain. Some unsavory or challenging things happened “really without their permission,” says Huston.
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