Editor’s Note: The following story contains major spoilers for the series finale of “Disclaimer.”
Like great opera, “Disclaimer” reaches a shattering — and unashamedly emotionally overwrought, and series-overturning — conclusion in its final seventh hour. And that’s even well before Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), hyped up on a pitcher of homemade cold brew downed at a junkie’s pace (a hilarious bit of physical comedy, by the way) to dilute the tranquilizers Stephen (Kevin Kline) put in her tea, falls to her knees in a hospital at the notion that Stephen may have just killed her son (Kodi Smit-McPhee).
We learn in Episode 7 that the tell-all book dropped on Catherine’s doorstep in the premiere was indeed an elaborate fiction written by Jonathan’s (Louis Partridge) mother (Lesley Manville). That that summer two decades ago in Italy wasn’t a seduction on the young Catherine’s (Leila George) part but instead a stalking that ended in her brutal rape — leading Catherine to look the other way as Jonathan was swept into the waves and died on the beach trying to rescue her son. Until now, writer/director Alfonso Cuarón‘s series has shown Catherine in freefall over the potential outing of her past. But Catherine’s secret all along was a much darker one, carried on the shoulders of Australian actress George in a harrowing final hour.
“Disclaimer” invited audiences, in the past six episodes, to buy into this idealized version of young Catherine, gorging herself on sex with Jonathan while leaving her small child in the next room. But the reality that emerges from the finale is that Jonathan terrorized Catherine and raped her at knifepoint. A truth Catherine has been decades-afraid to reveal to anyone, but now it’s finally time.
IndieWire spoke with actress George, who gives a complex and multilayered performance as both the fictional Catherine and the real one, and we had to wonder what her reaction was to this idealized version, so hypersexualized, before the final pages of the script reached her.
“The funny thing is that when I read something, even if I try and be completely objective about it, I think if I know I’m going to play a character, then I immediately start even just subconsciously justifying their moves and their motivations and objectives,” she said over Zoom. “So when I read it, I think I was quite shocked at how people were talking about Catherine as evil, and happy that she did this horrible thing, and I thought they’ve been quite harsh because I was making justifications for everything that she was doing. And it wasn’t until I watched it later on for the first time that I realized how evil she was. I think in order to play someone, I have to understand deeply why they’re doing what they’re doing, and so I’m not judging, and then of course, the character is redeemed in the end because that’s not how it happened. But I think reading it and watching it were two very different experiences for me.”
“Disclaimer” is adapted from Renée Knight’s pageturning novel, and George worked closely with Cuarón to telegraph the Catherine we come to know in the final episode even during her more idyllic earlier moments. Much of the audience’s sense of Catherine as this sexually ravenous character comes from photographs Jonathan took of her during his trip in Italy, which give the illusion that she was sexually open to him. But that’s not the truth, as the photographs turn out to have been taken under more menacing circumstances. “Beware of narrative and form,” as the series’ tagline reminds.
The actor and director wanted to “make sure that everything that we were doing was accurate and would make sense for the reality,” according to George, “and especially when we were taking the photographs, it was like we have to make sure that in these pictures that we are taking, that yes, they’re going to look provocative, but they have to be able to match the reality because those photographs are fact.”
George is previously best known for the Aussie crime saga “Animal Kingdom,” where she also played the younger version of a more famous actress, in that case Ellen Barkin. But in “Disclaimer,” she becomes the focal point of a final episode and a long, terrifying scene where (in flashback narrated by Blanchett) Jonathan sexually assaults Catherine in her hotel room.
“A lot of Nancy’s [Manville] story is fantasy, it’s made-up, but those photographs are real. They are fact. So making sure that those aligned with both storylines was probably the trickiest thing,” she said. “There’s a lot of freedom because it is vastly made up from Nancy’s perspective. So there was some things that we knew we had to keep the same, and there were some things that were made up, but stuff like the hotel room and where things were and people that might have seen us and stuff like that [were] definitely very, very meticulously thought of.”
George did not have much of an opportunity to interact with Blanchett during production — they share no screen time after all, and why would they? — but of course knew each other from the Australian theater scene. Blanchett gave script notes to Cuarón early on, and George was able to incorporate that feedback into her own performance during filming.
“We didn’t really get to spend any time together at all. We spent about half a day rehearsing and blocking through some of the major scenes,” George said of the pivotal finale sequence, “and just that I could see what her vision was for those scenes, and that was also my opportunity to pick up on some of the mannerisms that she’d created for this character. And we also worked with the same dialect coach, which was really useful, William Conacher, and that really helped to keep an anchored kind of throughline for the two of us. But really, I just relied on Alfonso’s direction and trusted him to tell me if I was doing too much or too little of Cate’s character because he’d obviously just spent 10 months working with her. And so he was my guide, really.”
George acknowledged that while filming the rape scene took its toll, she’s savvy enough to wash that stuff off after a director calls “cut.”
“I find it all quite therapeutic doing stuff like that. I’ve always been pretty good at leaving those kind of thoughts and feelings on set … I like to just put on a fun song and dance it off,” she said. “I find that it does help me work through things. You kind of just go to these places and just get everything out. And by the time you’ve done that many takes you, your tears are dry, you’ve squeezed out all the possible feelings that could be associated with that. And I find it quite therapeutic. So yes, it is difficult, especially when you’re doing long days of it, it can be a struggle to reach that or find it again, or you have to kind of try and draw on so many different experiences to be able to keep it fresh each day. At a certain point, your body does physically run out of emotion. It’s not natural to feel that much every day for that long. And you can use it all up, and it’s tough, but it’s the job.”
While stressing that a scene like this isn’t something “you want to spontaneously improvise,” George and Partridge did build a rapport across shooting all episodes that lent to a safer environment.
“We shot all of the exteriors on the beach in Italy. Everything outside that hotel room is shot on location in Italy, and so that was all done first for about five or six weeks. So we got to bond and get close and get to know each other and go to the bars in Italy over about six weeks before we had to do all of the more difficult scenes. The most important thing to be able to do that kind of work and those kind of scenes is to be able to really trust and know each other and feel comfortable with each other. I mean, that’s what makes it easy. And then when we got to those scenes, Alfonso asked us if we would prefer doing episodes one through four first or the last one, and we decided that it would be much better idea to do the kind of seduction first and the assault last because… it’s already hard to feel seduced and kind of turned on in a room full of people at work, and it’d be a lot harder to do it after you’ve just shot something that’s as horrific as that last episode.”
All seven episodes of “Disclaimer” are now streaming on Apple TV+.
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