by Gill Pringle in LA
The new ten-episode series Cape Fear – executive produced by Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg – takes a classic psychological thriller and reimagines it for a modern audience, inspired by both the original novel, The Executioners, and the more famous 1962 and 1991 film adaptations.
The story follows Amy Adams’ Anna Bowden and her fellow attorney husband Tom Bowden (Patrick Wilson), whose seemingly successful lives are shattered when Max Cady (Javier Bardem), a convicted killer they helped send to prison, is released and begins seeking revenge. This new version updates the familiar premise with contemporary themes involving media manipulation, online harassment, misinformation, and the blurred line between justice and vengeance.
It’s the kind of juicy role that excites the versatile Amy Adams, 51, who has successfully flipped her career from ingenue and sunny screen presence, so that today she moves effortlessly between comedy, drama, musicals, and psychological thrillers, most recently surprising audiences with her role in 2024 black comedy body horror flick Nightbitch.
Immediately recognising the potential for Cape Fear as a TV series, Adams also signed on as executive producer. “I think the ambiguity between the victim/villain aspect with Max and the way that we portray it in this version, is really wonderful and creates a conversation,” says the actress.
“But it also allows you to turn the focus onto the other characters, onto Anna and Tom, and their own moral ambiguity. What did they do? What do they know? How compromised are they? And did they play a part in what happened next?
“It’s really fun to watch not only the characters delve into what this creates for them with their guilt and their shame, but how that affects the people around them, raising the stakes so high as they work to protect their secrets,” says the six-time Oscar-nominated actress whose diverse roles include Doubt, The Fighter and Big Eyes.
But it’s Bardem who takes the heaviest swing, given the daunting task of following in the footsteps of Robert Mitchum and Robert De Niro’s earlier portrayals of Max Cady. “Those are two gigantic performers and iconic performances, so you don’t want to get close to that. I mean, it would be ridiculous to even dare to compare yours to theirs,” says Bardem who manages to balance charm and charisma with utter menace.
“So, what you have to do, or what I try to do, is to do my own thing – and for that, I need new material; material distant enough from those performers that will allow me to do that, and when I found that in the scripts, then I was relieved, like I knew that they were going to ask me to do my own take on it.
“But, in both previous performances, I think that there’s an irony, there’s a sense of humour, and there’s a lack of gravitas, and a playful mode of scaring and manipulating people’s minds, which I think has to be followed by this performance,” says the Oscar-winning Spanish actor.
Created, showrun and executive produced by Nick Antosca, Adams appreciated her position as one of the few female voices in the mix. “I think it’s really important to have female voices in the room, and I’m really lucky on this that Nick, our showrunner, and the other producers really allowed for me to have input on Anna as we built the scripts, and we had a lot of great conversations, spent a lot of weekend days going over the scripts and really working out the best way to help Anna be not only a reactive character, but also have a really deep story in relationship to her family, and create three dimensions.
“And they did such a great job with her anyway, since Nick has done this with female characters in the past with these multidimensional, complicated women, so it was just really wonderful to get to work with them in their openness for collaboration,” she says of Antosca, whose previous shows include The Act, A Friend of the Family and Brand New Cherry Flavor.
“I think, especially for a character like Anna, who has built this wall of lies around her, she’s protected herself by not addressing it and moving forward and trying to atone for the choices that she made in the past and trying to be the best person that she is. But when somebody comes in and holds a mirror to you and reminds you of who you really are and what you haven’t addressed and what you haven’t dealt with and a truth that you haven’t lived – like, you can be your worst nightmare.
“Max wants her to destroy herself and watching everyone turn on her as they discover the truth of her is, I’m sure, thrilling for him. But it’s terrifying to be confronted with parts of yourself you’d rather keep in the past,” she argues.
That fine line between truth and lies – and the secrets that we keep even from ourselves – was exciting for Adams. “I love how this series explores how each person, in their own moment, believes that they might be doing the wrong thing for the right reason and for the better good.
“Who’s wrong and who’s right is a matter of perspective a lot of times, and I think that it’s whose eyes you’re seeing it through, and I love how this explores that.”
Ask if she’s ever trodden that line in her own life, and Adams laughs, “As far as … have I done something? Of course, we’ve all made mistakes, I can’t point to it – because I wouldn’t want to remind my husband or give him any ammunition that I’m wrong ever! I would hate to make that admission!”
Her job on Cape Fear, she says, was made much easier by having Bardem as her nemesis. “I would just like to say, because Javier is very humble, but being on set with him and watching him switch from charming to menacing in like a glimmer … it’s just horrifying. He did it a lot with my character, where I think, ‘Okay, we’re cool, we’re cool, but we’re not cool!’ It’s really fun to watch,” says the actress whose Cape Fear screen family is pushed to breaking point by Cady’s relentless psychological warfare.
With Lilly Collias and Joe Anders portraying Anna and Tom’s troubled teenaged kids, both actors describe their experience on set as being an actors’ dream boot camp, although neither was afraid to add their own input, praising Antosca’s scripts for their realistic portrayal of teenage angst.
“He writes youth so well, which is really refreshing, because sometimes I’ll read scripts where I’m like … they haven’t even interacted with someone young,” says Collias.
“But he was able to show that these kids aren’t just kids, they’re smart and they want to explore. You’re so hungry for life at that age, and in this circumstance, it’s just so isolating and confusing that it makes the kids feel emotions that are not regulated in the way that our parents, I think, could regulate,” she adds.
“I don’t think that there are many very in-depth teenage characters around at the moment on screens,” agrees Anders – the son of Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes, already making his mark on Hollywood having written the script for Netflix movie Goodbye June with which his mum made her directorial debut last year.
“I just feel very honoured that I got to be a part of something and play a character that I actually got to dig into and add layers to him and wasn’t just a surface level sad teenager or rebellious teenager; a character that really had some depth to him,” he says.
For Antosca himself, he has long wanted to re-imagine the Cape Fear story, pitching Scorsese and Spielberg’s Amblin with a modern retelling of the classic psychological story – but with a twist.
This time around, he wanted to reflect the uncertainties and psychological horrors of the 2020s.
“Reimagining the story of Max Cady and the Bowden family as a series gives us the chance to go deeper into the nightmare than ever before. Using the storytelling opportunities of television, we were able to get into the family’s history, Max Cady’s history, and explore a more psychologically complex version of this classic thriller,” says Antosca.
“The original films are about acute fear. But this version, explores a kind of nightmarish paranoia and uncertainty that the family experiences as they are unaware who is terrorizing them.
“Each version of Cape Fear updates the story with the morality of its time, and with this version, we wanted a more complicated and hard-to-untangle morality and backstory, because we live in a time where nobody can agree on what’s true.”
Cape Fear is streaming now
