It’s a tale as old as time – mother meets son’s new girlfriend, and doesn’t think she’s good enough. But House of Cards queen Robin Wright’s new directorial project The Girlfriend takes this timeless dynamic as a premise and runs with it to some seriously dark places.
Set mostly in a wealthy pocket of London, the TV adaptation of Michelle Frances' novel – starring Wright as overprotective mother Laura and House of the Dragon's Olivia Cooke as her son Daniel (Laurie Davidson)'s new girlfriend Cherry – is about much more than just a tussle between potential in-laws. It explores class, privilege, trauma and grief, and the ways that they can all play into a toxic rivalry between women.
The competition between Laura and Cherry reaches some seriously dramatic, gross-out levels. Think J-Lo's Monster In Law meets Promising Young Woman. And the show's soundtrack is perfectly curated, with The Velvet Underground's Femme Fatale used with artistic precision to illustrate Cooke's Cherry and an aspect of her plight, as well as the blaring of Wet Leg's Chaise Longue during a rather sexy scene – taking place on, you guessed it, a chaise longue.
While its male stars have gone on to win Oscars and direct Netflix movies, the journeys of their female counterparts have been more complicated.
The series switches between Laura and Cherry's perspectives, causing us to revisit certain scenes and question who exactly is in the right, if anyone? Wright's directing inspired her to push the envelope, with the depiction of what she describes as a “perverse” love triangle. Prepare to be shocked, tickled and compelled in equal measure.
GLAMOUR sat down with Robin and Olivia to talk portraying “layered women”, feeling safe while filming sex scenes and the ways in which we demonise female ambition.
In this series, we see both the lead female roles acting horrendously – why is that important and liberating to see on screen? Instead of just being a one-dimensional mother-in-law or girlfriend?
Robin: It's the truth. Women are that way. We're very layered. Cross us, watch out. I think we all have that capability.
Olivia: Exactly. So it's incredibly relatable to watch women being able to go to just the edge of their sanity and then beyond.
Robin: The edge of their sanity. I love that we're all living on the edge of our sanity.
Olivia: Aren't we? We are. I've passed it a long time ago.
We see a lot of female anger depicted on screen – was that empowering to portray? Was there anything in particular you used to channel this emotion?
Olivia: The world that we're living in, it's quite easy to just turn on the news and be like, "Perfect."
Robin: Yeah, ditto. It's also being a mum. It's intrinsic. If you feel that your baby cub is in peril, those horns come out… It's a natural instinct to just annihilate.
There’s a switch in perspective from Laura to Cherry, so we see really important scenes differently according to how each woman experienced it. What does this say about looking a bit closer at each woman’s experience, perhaps with less judgment?
Olivia: We're biased in our perception of events and we're also quick to judge and preconceive. And so I think it's great that we've got two sides of the story, and the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, doesn't it?
Robin: Yeah. There's a great line that I just read. I think Amazon wrote it for the show and it's, "We are all the hero of our story, of our perception, but it might be the villain of someone else's perspective." And that's exactly the format, the theme of the show.
Why did this story need to be set in a wealthy world… there’s something in the schadenfreude of watching rich people’s lives fall apart right? We've seen it recently with the success of The Perfect Couple and The White Lotus…
Robin: Well, it's very delineated here. I have found, working here for the last three years, the delineation of class, it's very in your face in England. I had no idea. It's different in America. Yes, of course, we have class systems and judgment and scrutiny and all that stuff, but it's very clear here. It's like, "What school did you go to?"
It feels to me like it starts out as a mother-in-law meets daughter-in-law premise but then also brings in how wealth and social class impacts a relationship. Particularly how Cherry is from a lower social class and therefore is immediately viewed as a social climber, but she's just someone…
Cherry: Who's ambitious… It demonises women from a lower economical class who want to better themselves. She's not doing anything that a billionaire wouldn't. A billionaire would do it in a much more unethical, corrupt way.
Robin: An ostentatious way.
Olivia: Yeah. She's just using what she's got.
Robin: Cherry's drive is to have a better life. What's wrong with that? So there's that fine line of reality in this show where it doesn't bleed into melodrama because it's very rooted in emotion. There's nothing wrong with her drive being that. And there's nothing wrong with Laura's drive being, "I need to protect my baby because of my loss in the past."
GLAMOUR: It's the clash of the two.
Robin: It's the clash of the two truths.
The music in the series is sensational – how key was it in setting the scene and mood of the story?
Robin: Well, just watching the enormous amount of content that we have out there to choose from, shows, more and more recently, have become about the needle drops. And that's what pulls people in… This is, I think, what is being generated by the algorithms. This is what people like. I tuned into that show because I love the music. So we're just following the path of, "What do you guys like? What's enticing to you? What keeps you engaged in that episode outside of the story that's going to go somewhere, and you don't know where it's going to go?" So you have to temper the music, pump it sometimes, and then bring it down and make people think about the lyrics and how that fit with the scene. Yeah, that's a whole other direction to do on a show.
Robin, how do you feel about the opportunities you were given to push boundaries from behind the camera, as well as in front of it, as a female director? Particularly the love triangle of sorts between mother, son and girlfriend…
Robin: Let's tell the truth. It's perverse, the relationship between mum and son, and there's a bit of Oedipus in the atmosphere.
Olivia: It all felt really free flowing, and there was great chemistry and communication between us all. I've done some scenes where it's not been like that at all. It's not fun.
It was very easy. You don't feel like you're leaving the day with chunks being taken out of you and you forfeited something too intimate. It felt really right for the characters as well. I just love that Cherry is so in touch with her sensuality and uses it and she's so embodied and I love that we really got to capture that.
Did having intimacy coordinators and having a woman behind the camera facilitate this atmosphere?
Olivia: Yeah, for sure. It's just a comfortability. And also, Robin has been acting for a long time before intimacy coordinators... I'm just imagining it would've been terrible.
Robin: It was horrible because you would get almost gaslit like, "No, no, no, no, no. Of course, I'm not going to shoot it from that angle." And then they would and you'd see the final product and like, "I didn't want to show boob." So I'm glad that this has been enforced just because there is an ease and a safety net.
Because the intimacy coordinator comes to me first as the director and says, "What would you like to achieve?" I write it out. Separately, they go to Olivia and Laurie and say, "Are you comfortable with this, this, and this?" And they have the choice to say I'm not comfortable with this or this. And then I go, "Great, no problem." Then we rearrange how we're going to shoot it. So that even is a blessing to have that kind of collaboration and there's a professionalism in that. And security.
Olivia: Back then you were probably the only women in the crew and cast weren't you?
Robin: Yeah, exactly.
Olivia: You had to stand up for yourself amongst all these men. You're just like “get them out!”
We see a pretty central relationship between two queer middle aged women, as well as a depiction of an open marriage between Laura and her husband Howard. Why were these less “conventional” relationships important to show?
Olivia: Just to watch it, it's like, "Yes, women continue to be sexual beings who are multifaceted way beyond f**king 35 [years old] in this industry. Just show that. There's a full life that doesn't stop." So for me, incredibly refreshing to read and watch. [To Robin] How is it to direct them to do that?
Robin: I will tell you, darling… I just wanted to show exactly what Olivia said. I think it's what a lot of women would love to do, but they can't do it. They can't have an open marriage, they can't have a lesbian affair. Maybe all of those truths that each and every one of us love to [live out] but we can't do it, all comes out in the show. We got to live it out through each character.
Olivia, your character really takes on the “femme fatale” archetype and flips it on its head with her vulnerability – why was that important to show that duality?
Olivia: I think that's the beauty of the perspectives. Our characters can't be one thing. They're incredibly nuanced people that have great, great flaws, but great capacity for love and generosity as well.
Robin: In a different world, they would've been BFFs…
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
The Girlfriend drops on Amazon Prime Video on 10 September.
