Ripley (TV Program)

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    Andrew Scott’s Best Roles and Moments

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    The star of “Ripley” and “All of Us Strangers” has become one of our most reliably excellent actors.There are some actors who always, no matter the size of their role or the context of their performance, draw the eye. Andrew Scott, who has most recently appeared as the slippery, scheming protagonist in the Netflix series “Ripley,” is one of them. He is enthralling to watch, his emotional notes meticulously constructed, with playful touches of chaos that always leave space for moments of discovery and surprise. Here are a few of Scott’s favorite modes of performance, and how his popular roles reflect an actor excelling at his craft.The MadmanBBC/Hartswood Films for MasterpieceIn Scott’s breakout role, in “Sherlock,” he plays Moriarty, the criminal mastermind opposite Benedict Cumberbatch’s contemporary Sherlock Holmes. From Scott’s first appearance, in the Season 1 finale, he electrifies an already energetic show. Cumberbatch set the tone for “Sherlock” with his brutal, fast-paced wit; deductions tumble out of his mouth with strict precision, and in an impersonal monotone. Scott’s arrival, and his erratic singsong speaking, break this rhythm. There’s a menacing playfulness to not only his rhetorical delivery but also to his facial expressions. It adds a new dimension to the show.In their initial confrontation scene, Sherlock aims a gun at Moriarty, asking, “What if I was to shoot you now?” Moriarty responds with a cartoonish look of shock that starts at the top of his head and ripples down: his eyebrows popping up, his eyes widening, jaw dropping and neck drawing back. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Filmmakers Love to Adapt Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley

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      In the new series and in five previous movies, the character serves as a blank slate to examine the mores and concerns of the time.Tom Ripley’s background is always sketchy. Patricia Highsmith provides only a few rudimentary details in the first few chapters of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” her 1955 novel that kicked off a series of five books about the elusive con artist. Tom lives in New York, in near-destitute circumstances. He has some friends — acquaintances, really — whom he hates, mentally labeling them “the riffraff, the vulgarians, the slobs.” He wants nothing more than to be rid of them, and after the first few chapters, he succeeds. He receives money from an aunt in Boston; she raised him after his parents drowned in the harbor there. He hates her, too.When we meet Tom, he has been committing check fraud through the mail, amassing payments in the amount of $1,863.14 that he does not plan to cash. The con job was, he thinks, “no more than a practical joke, really. Good clean sport.” He’ll destroy the checks before boarding the ship that will take him to Europe, where he’s tasked with hunting down Dickie Greenleaf, the scion of a shipbuilding mogul who’s been wasting time, and money, in Italy.The curious thing about these features of Tom Ripley’s life is that they add up to nothing. Highsmith structures them as telling details, the kinds of specifics that writers employ like shorthand to build a person in the reader’s mind. But in fact, we get very little from them, and at every turn our attempts to wrap our heads around this character are rebuffed. You might think Tom is a man of taste and talent, except he doesn’t exhibit any real taste, and the talent seems limited to a knack for forgery and impersonation. You might think he’s a malevolent mastermind seeking to bilk a wealthy family of their fortune, but he’s really just pathetic, far more concerned with making sure the Greenleafs view him as a man of their own social class. Unfortunately, he’s charmless.Tom is not particularly handsome, clever or well-connected. He’s just miserable, but he doesn’t have much in the way of plans, or goals, beyond getting away from where he is.This does not make Tom Ripley a screen-ready hero. He’s not even really a strong template for an antihero. But that has not stopped filmmakers from trying. Five films and now a Netflix series, starring a parade of alluring actors, have tried out various angles on the Ripley question. Who is this guy, really? A criminal? A climber? A sociopath? A thief?Alain Delon in “Purple Noon,” which offers a French existentialist take on the character.Criterion CollectionWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      In ‘Ripley’ on Netflix, the Con Man Gets the Art House Treatment

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      Andrew Scott stars in a Netflix series that looks like what you might get if Antonioni or Resnais had directed a season of “The White Lotus.”Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” sets its dark action in a succession of colorful Italian locales: the Amalfi coast, San Remo, Rome, Palermo, Venice. Movies based on the book, like René Clément’s “Plein Soleil” (released in the United States as “Purple Noon”) and Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” have taken the opportunity Highsmith gave them to capitalize on sun and scenery. The audience gets its brutal murders and brazen deceit wrapped in bright visual pleasure.For “Ripley,” an eight-episode adaptation of the book that premieres on Netflix on Thursday, Steven Zaillian has decided to do without the color. Shot — beautifully — in sharply etched black and white by the Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit (“There Will Be Blood”), “Ripley” offers a different sort of pleasure: the chilly embrace of the art house.Reflecting what the more high-minded filmmakers of the show’s time period (it is set in 1961) were up to, Zaillian, who wrote and directed all the episodes, takes an approach that harmonizes with Elswit’s austerity. The entire season moves along sleekly — you could say somnolently — at the same measured pace, with the same arch tone and on the same note of muted, stylish apprehension. Highsmith’s pulpy concoction, with its hair-trigger killings and sudden reversals, is run through a strainer and comes out smooth. It feels like what you might get if the early-’60s Antonioni or Resnais had directed a season of “The White Lotus.”And Zaillian appears to have asked his actors to practice a similar restraint. Their overall affect isn’t flat, exactly, but it’s within a narrow range, with physicality tightly reined in and the eyes asked to do a lot of work. When you have the eyes of Andrew Scott, the gifted Irish actor (“Sherlock,” “Fleabag”) who plays Tom Ripley, that’s not a big problem.Zaillian has been faithful, in broad outline, to Highsmith’s story. Ripley, a slacker and a con man grinding out a living in postwar New York, is sent to Italy to try to persuade a trust-funded idler to come home and take over the family business. He has only a passing acquaintance with his target, Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn), but in the first of a long series of misunderstandings and lucky strokes that go Ripley’s way, Greenleaf’s father thinks they are good friends.Highsmith’s novel is a training manual for the sociopath: Once Ripley sees the indolent lives led by Greenleaf and his sort-of girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning), in a picturesque fishing village on the Amalfi coast, he ups his game from tedious grifting to full-contact identity theft. Wedging himself between Dickie and Marge, he becomes obsessed — an obsession in which the lines between befriending Dickie, sponging off Dickie and becoming Dickie are progressively erased.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      As ‘Ripley’ Revives the ‘Talented’ Con Man, Here Are Earlier Versions

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      “Ripley” on Netflix is the latest riff on the con-artist character the author Patricia Highsmith invented in the 1950s. Here’s a look at the earlier versions.One of fiction’s most famous impostors returns on Thursday with the debut of Netflix’s “Ripley,” the latest adaptation of a character invented in the 1950s by the author Patricia Highsmith. In eight episodes, all written and directed by the Oscar-winning screenwriter Steven Zaillian (“Schindler’s List,” “The Night Of”), a classic chameleon changes colors yet again, returning to a few core elements of Highsmith’s original creation while also boosting the creepiness quotient.Over nearly seven decades, Tom Ripley has appeared in five books by Highsmith, five films, multiple television episodes and even a radio show. He has been played by interpreters as varied as Matt Damon, Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper, John Malkovich and now, Andrew Scott. What has made him so enduring?The details change, but the foundation of the character remains the same: a con artist who becomes a killer, someone so enamored by upper-class comfort that, once he experiences it, will do anything to hang on to it. Ripley dreams of a better life for himself, which makes him relatable. What makes him fascinating is his willingness to go to murderous lengths to secure it.As a new version of Tom Ripley arrives, here is a look at how this grifter has evolved over the generations.The BooksThe character debuted in Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” in 1955.By the time Highsmith created Ripley, she was already an accomplished writer. She burst onto the scene in 1950 with her first novel, “Strangers on a Train,” which would be adapted into the Alfred Hitchcock film a year later. Other acclaimed Highsmith works include “The Two Faces of January,” made into a 2014 film starring Viggo Mortensen; and “Deep Water,” adapted into a 2022 film starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas. Using the pen name Claire Morgan, Highsmith also wrote “The Price of Salt,” renamed “Carol” for Todd Haynes’s 2015 film adaptation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More