A psychological thriller about twin gynecologists losing their minds now has a sibling of its own. And it’s a girl.
The Prime Video miniseries “Dead Ringers” revisits the strange story told in David Cronenberg’s 1988 feature starring Jeremy Irons in the lead roles of Beverly and Elliot Mantle. That film was based on the Bari Wood and Jack Geasland novel “Twins,” itself inspired by the true story of prominent New York gynecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus. The Marcuses were found dead in shocking squalor in their apartment in 1975, following what may have been a drug-fueled, mutual mental collapse.
Rather than seize upon the popular true-crime trend, the miniseries actually treks further from the facts for an entirely reconsidered update of the film. It delves far more deeply into the world of fertility treatment and childbirth and into the very different siblings’ symbiosis — while flipping their gender to sisters, played by Oscar winner Rachel Weisz. Switching their perspective to female couldn’t help but provide fertile dramatic ground.
“It was Rachel’s idea,” says award-winning playwright and screenwriter Alice Birch, stepping into the role of showrunner for the first time. “She had been a huge fan of the Cronenberg film and had been looking for parts she could play that had a central female relationship. So she and I had a conversation in 2018, in the summer.”
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Now, in an April conversation, Birch says she remembers two key thoughts she wanted to share with the actor:
“I’d heard a doctor say, on the news or something, that performing a C-section was like he chose the moment that life began. I think that’s an extraordinary perspective on what that is for that woman and that baby and that family.
“I talked about Hans Rausing, the billionaire whose family owned Tetra Pak. He and his wife were very successful, often at parties. They developed a very serious drug addiction and ended up living in sort of one room in their enormous house. The staff would leave the food [outside], and she died. He concealed her body with coats for months. It was a big thing in the UK. I mentioned those two things, and Rachel felt excited.”
So Birch, winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for her play “Anatomy of a Suicide,” dove in. The first thing to fully conceive was the sisters: their individuality and their almost umbilically tied relationship.
“We wanted them to be as brilliant, as strange, the relationship to be as twisted, if not more” than in the film, says Birch. The gender switch allowed them to plant another seed: Beverly wanting to have a baby.
“Elliot is perfectly content; everything’s just as it should be. Beverly has such a difficult relationship to her own pleasure, whereas Elliot has more capacity for pleasure than any one person can have. So the fact that she can also get it vicariously through her sister is wonderful.
“But Beverly’s looking for windows. I think the baby is a potential window.”
The film lays out a clearly delineated path for the twins’ descent; the series eschews the external force of drug abuse in favor of plumbing the depths of their symbiosis. When one falls in love with a patient who is a famous actor, the umbilicus that had sustained them all their lives is pierced for the first time.
Birch subtly planted thematic Easter eggs throughout the series, including fruit as a metaphor for fertility. The actor character, Genevieve (Britne Oldford), “wears these cherry earrings. There are pomegranates and grapefruits in the show.” Even the name, Genevieve, is a sly reference to Geneviève Bujold, who played the role of the actor-patient in the Cronenberg film. (In the series, the character Genevieve plays in an unseen film is named Claire; in the movie, the actor-patient Bujold plays is named Claire.)
Sibling co-dependency and onscreen birthing are taken to graphic, new levels in Prime Video’s superbly nefarious miniseries drama.
The most dazzling magic trick, of course, is Weisz’s lead performances as cautious, respected Beverly and ingenious loose-cannon Elliot. Birch says the actor-executive producer was “in the writers room every day, by Zoom. She’s read every draft, and she’s written notes in every draft. So by the time we’re shooting, it’s been such a long, complicated discussion — we both know as much as the other. It’s so helpful.
Birch explains, “We would shoot the first side, normally Elliot; she needs more freedom in a scene. She dictates the rhythm. She’s rangier, bigger. And normally eating, as well. The director and I would choose a hero take, and [Weisz] changes while the crew is adjusting, and comes back as Beverly. She has an earpiece. If there are other actors in the scene, they also have earpieces and don’t talk the second time around.”
“It was exhausting, punishing, demanding” being the showrunner for the first time, Birch says. “But the most rewarding, most creatively fulfilling relationship I’ve had with a collaborator was with Rachel.”
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