Alice Birch and Rachel Weisz on DEAD RINGERS and the Female Flip – Beth Accomando interviews
As a lifelong fan of David Cronenberg I was annoyed to hear that his film Dead Ringers was going to be remade. Cronenberg is a unique visionary and the idea of anyone taking material that he put his brand on just seemed ridiculous and on a certain level sacrilegious. I say this as a preface so that you can understand how surprised I was by the series created by Alice Birch and Rachel Weisz.
Actress Weisz was a fan of Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers too. But she looked at the material – a story of twin brother obstetricians – and thought it was ripe for a gender flip. And it was that delicious challenge that attracted the actress.
“At first it was just a practical decision in that I thought it would be interesting to play sisters,” Weisz said via a press day Zoom interview. “Then I thought about twins and the codependent twins in this story. So the short answer is, so I could play them and then it evolved from there.”
The new Dead Ringers series premieres exclusively on Prime Video April 21. It was created, written, and executive produced by Alice Birch who has worked on the series Succession, and has written a pair of powerful Florence Pugh films, Lady Macbeth and The Wonder.
Birch credits Weisz with getting the ball rolling on this reimagining of Cronenberg’s film and confessed, “I hadn’t seen the film before. So watched it, watched it again, thought it was incredible and there’s so much about the tone that’s so interesting, and it looks so amazing, and there was lots that I felt we could really steal from. But really it’s this central relationship, these twins, the most intense, unhealthy, but also beautiful relationship at the center of it that I felt like, okay, I think we could get six hours of television out of that.”
The series is based on both Cronenberg’s 1988 film and the 1977 book Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. The book was inspired by the real life twin brothers Stewart and Cyril Marcus, gynecologists found dead together under mysterious circumstances in Cyril’s Manhattan apartment in 1975.
Cronenberg took the material and made it his own, delivering an intensely insular tale of Elliot and Beverly Mantle (played by Jeremy Irons), identical twin gynecologists running a practice in Toronto. Cronenberg emphasized the similarity of the twins, barely giving us any visual cues (just a pair of glasses at times) to differentiate them. There were repeated references to the famous real-life Siamese twins Chang and Eng suggesting that although Beverly and Elliot were not physically attached, their psychological connection and codependency proved an even more intimate and ultimately damaging bond.
Elliot, presented as the more dominant twin, seduces patients and then passes them off to the more sensitive Beverly. But Beverly becomes obsessed with Claire (played by Genevieve Bujold), whom they diagnose as having a “trifurcated cervix.” After Beverly feels abandoned by Claire, he designs and commissions a set of “Instruments for Operating on Mutant Women,” bizarre, phallic, and ominously Giger-like tools that frighten and hurt Beverly’s patients. But when they complain he dismisses them with the remark, “there’s nothing the matter with the instrument… it’s the women’s bodies that are all wrong.”
The film bears Cronenberg’s unique style of body horror but the gender flip of the new Dead Ringers gives it a completely new and different perspective. And that’s the mark of a good remake. The best reason for a remake is that you feel inspired by the original because you want to take something you love but present it through a fresh gaze and with something new to say. That is why John Carpenter’s The Thing remains a prime example of how to do a remake right.
So for the Dead Ringers series, the body horror is still there but the source and focus is different. The Mantle twins are now obstetricians as well as gynecologists with Beverly dedicated to the idea of creating a new kind of birthing center for women and Elliot focused on radical and potentially unethical research in the areas of treating infertility.
Women’s bodies – pregnant, giving birth, cut open for C-sections – are presented in ways that we do not usually see because it can make people uncomfortable. Movies love to celebrate freshly scrubbed, cherubic babies but rarely do we see intimate shots of babies crowning and emerging bloody from the womb or graphic C-sections.
But that was important to Birch: “It was there from the scripts, from the very beginning. As soon as we knew that they [the Mantle twins] would work in obstetrics, then I think we knew that we were going to be depicting childbirth. And it was just about what was interesting to us. Like you said, I’ve never really seen that on screen, and so I felt interested, too. We see violence all the time. We see death all the time on screen. [Childbirth] is how we all arrived into the world and we never, ever see it. And I find that very interesting.”
From what has been revealed in the trailer, the series looks to make the Mantle twins less identical than the ones played by Irons. Weisz has two distinct looks – Beverly has her hair tightly pulled back with an emotional quality to match whereas Elliot comes across as more unrestrained with her hair down and devouring food and life with more messy gusto.
But the psychological connection and interdependency is still there, and there’s a reference to the fact that the two have never spent a night apart. Playing the dual roles provided Weisz with the kind of challenge actors love to sink their teeth into.
“The characters were written on the page with such psychological complexity and depth and humanness,” Weisz said. “They were flawed and brilliant and dysfunctiona, and they were both completely different to the other and yet totally dependent on the other. So it was very rich food and brilliant writing for my imagination. So that fed me and I shut the door of my office and learnt my lines. That was part of my job as an actor, to do that. And then I just had them both available to me. There was like a little door I could open. That’s Beverly, and there’s Elliot, and I could access them both.”
But having to act with yourself in the same scene, sometimes requiring physical interaction, was also a technical challenge.
“And then there was just the physical production reality of performing them, which was hair, makeup, costume. And whilst I was doing that, the whole crew changed around readiness for the other twin’s lighting, VFX, props, set, dressing, camera,” Weisz added. “The whole production did a swap. So I was supported first by the writing and then by the crew. And we got better and better at it as time went on. At the beginning, it was like a foal learning to walk, and by the end we were galloping through it. Fifteen minutes into the change. And, yeah, it was a really challenging but really joyous group activity.”
Because of the additional time afforded a series, Dead Ringers also gets to explore issues outside of just the intense relationship of the twins. By having them pitching donors to create a new birthing and research center, the series actually gets to tackle ideas about women’s health and challenge how we even perceive the issues.
“They’re both so brilliant and amazing at their jobs. And I think Elliot, that was such a lot of fun to kind of be able to follow her imagination and sort of do the research and hear about some of the amazing scientific things that people are working on in the real world and then kind of push them as far as we could,” Birch said.
And pushing things as far as they could was also key. That is how you enter the realm of psychological thriller and horror.
“We begin in a place that’s really grounded and recognizable,” Birch said. “Then we end up in somewhere that’s really quite heightened and strange and operatic. People are doing things that I think had we started in that place, it would have felt far-fetched but hopefully the time that we had means that we can get there in a way that feels kind of natural.”
Audiences will be able to see how strange and operatic the show gets on April 21 when all six episodes drop on Prime Video.
