‘The Watcher’ Stars on How They Fictionalized True Events in Ryan Murphy’s Latest Netflix Series

The Watcher is a show that occupies an interesting space, in that it both is and isn’t a true crime adaptation. It’s based upon a hauntingly true story about a series of threatening letters that were actually sent to the new homeowners of 657 Boulevard in Westfield, N.J., throughout 2014. But it’s also not, because the crimes at the center of this case never led to the perpetrator being caught and because Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan‘s thriller changes this central story on nearly every level. Given all this, The Watcher stands as an excellent, relatively low-stakes gateway to talk about our relationship with true crime adaptations.

Our obsession with adapting scandalous and criminal cases into television and film is nothing new. Going all the way back to 1899, The Dreyfus Affair was released, a series of shorts that depicted the French scandal of the same name at the same time the actual event was taking place. But lately the conversations around these stories has changed. Most recently Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story — another production from Murphy and Brennan — has sparked multiple conversations about the merit in portraying these cases, what they cost their victims, and who should be involved in telling those types of stories. It’s a huge conversation that bucks against one of Hollywood’s favorite storytelling pastimes, and we’re just in the beginning stages of it.

The Watcher doesn’t take the same positioning as Dahmer. While Dahmer was dedicated to accurately representing its central case at nearly every level, The Watcher is a show that takes bold liberties in the name of amplifying its horror. Though the same figures that appeared in the New York Magazine article are present, all names have been changed, their roles have been altered, and the actual plot of what happened has been drastically changed. In that way, The Watcher feels like it belongs more in the universe of American Horror Story than American Crime Story. To see how The Watcher’s cast handled this story, Decider asked several stars the same question: What do you think your responsibility was in portraying this true crime case?

“Well, for me, I feel we were in the very trusted hands of Ryan Murphy. He knows this genre so well,” Namoi Watts, who plays homeowner Nora Brannock, said. “It was based on this story that could be anyone’s story, really: this family that worked towards achieving this dream, and they got it finally, and then it turning out not the way they expected it to. That is something that is so easily imagined for anyone, I think. Ryan offered this text that was loosely based on this family, and creative license was taken… It was important for [Murphy] to pull out as much tension and mystery as possible and keep an audience engaged. But yeah, the responsibility is there. You want to honor it as much as you can.”

Bobby Cannavale, who plays Nora’s husband Dean, approached the project a bit differently. “The only source for any of that story is that one piece in New York Magazine. That’s it. Many people read that story, and it’s a pretty rich story, but in the end, it’s only however many pages it was,” Cannavale said. “My thing is just being faithful to whatever the script is, whatever the person who created this story that we’re trying to tell and not so much faithful to the actual story. I mean, as an interpretive artist you just have to be faithful to whatever the creator’s vision is.”

Cannavale also highlighted that The Watcher is a series that revolves around powerlessness. That, more than anything else, is the theme he believes was taken from the original story. “I think [Murphy] was interested in exploring those themes. So, for me, the actual story was sort of secondary to that,” Cannavale said.

Noma Dumezweni, who plays an entirely fictionalized private investigator by the name Theodora, admitted that she typically stays away from the true crime genre. But her understanding of why these stories are so appealing mirrors Cannavale’s sentiments. “There is something in the need for us human beings to watch and try and figure out, why would somebody do that? I think that’s just natural,” Dumezweni said. “That kind of goes into old stories in terms of the history of us as human beings wanting to figure out what is the darkness? In this sense, Ryan and Ian are trying to figure out what is the darkness of this story in terms of community and places and people and families? That came up in the sense of the pandemic: How do you keep your family safe?”

Some of the actors interviewed for this story returned to that same point that was perhaps best summarized by Margo Martindale, who plays the Brannocks’ neighbor Mo: “The true crime aspect of this is that it was based on this true story, and then it’s a jumping off place for Ryan Murphy’s imagination.”

Knowing that their characters were fictionalized actually allowed some actors to fully focus on their jobs rather than get swept up in the hand-wringing these projects often inspire. “If I’m made up, then I have really no obligation to anyone except Ryan Murphy and people who trusted me with playing this part of Pearl,” Mia Farrow, who plays another one of the Brannocks’ neighbors, said. “I’m at least pretending I’m a made up person. I don’t think Pearl exists. I mean, I think she exists because I’m playing her… One really can’t think too deeply about it. You just have to go about your work, you know?”

All that aside, there’s another wrinkle in this already complicated topic, one that will be familiar to anyone who has done any reading about the behind the scenes of Ryan Murphy projects, and one that was emphasized by Jennifer Coolidge, who plays the fictionalized real estate agent Karen Calhoun. “We were getting the scripts just one at a time, so we we couldn’t tip off if we were the watcher if we wanted to cause we didn’t know,” Coolidge said. “But it ended up being this huge advantage, I thought, because we were in real time and you could just sort of play. You’re getting information so slowly that you could actually play a real person and then do Ryan’s brilliant dialogue. But I really liked that. I mean, they gave me a really cool part. There was a lot to play, and I like that I was guessing. We’re all written as complicated people.”

The Watcher is streaming now on Netflix.