Twenty-five years after serving as the basis for a film that starred Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow, Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley is now getting a limited series adaptation from the Netflix streaming service. The show, titled Ripley, is set to premiere on April 4th – and with that date just one month away, a trailer for the show has made its way online. You can check it out in the embed above.
Schindler’s List Oscar winner Steven Zaillian has written and directed all eight episodes of Ripley. In the series, Tom Ripley, a grifter scraping by in early 1960s New York, is hired by a wealthy man to travel to Italy to try to convince his vagabond son Dickie Greenleaf to return home. Tom’s acceptance of the job is the first step into a complex life of deceit, fraud and murder.
Dickie Greenleaf is played by Johnny Flynn (The Lovers). Dakota Fanning (The Equalizer 3) plays Marge Sherwood, “an American living in Italy who suspects darker motives underlie Tom’s affability.”
Ripley was originally set up Showtime, where Zaillian was planning to use all of the Ripley novels written by Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, and Ripley Underwater) as “a road map to showcase Ripley’s transformation from con artist to serial killer” over the course of the on-going series. Now that it’s a limited series on Netflix, we’ll have to wait and see if there will be any further Ripley series to cover the stories told in the books beyond The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Ripley is a Showtime and Endemol Shine North America co-production, in association with Entertainment 360 and Filmrights. Zaillian serves as executive producer alongside Garrett Basch, Guymon Casady, Ben Forkner, Sharon Levy, and Philipp Keel of Diogenes. Scott is a producer on the series.
In addition to the 1999 version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Highsmith’s Ripley novels have inspired the 1960 film Purple Noon (where Ripley was played by Alain Delon), the 1977 film The American Friend (with Dennis Hopper as Ripley), the 2002 film Ripley’s Game (John Malkovich was Ripley in that one), the 2005 film Ripley Under Ground (with Barry Pepper as Ripley), and a 1956 episode of the TV series Studio One.
What did you think of the Ripley trailer? Will you be watching this show when it’s available on Netflix? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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