With Fresh Takes on a Famous Case, Colin Firth and Toni Collette Spiral Spectacularly in THE STAIRCASE

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede There are many steps in THE STAIRCASE, and OSCAR® winner Colin Firth is ready to climb them all. But it’s the manner in which OSCAR® nominee Toni Collette’s character tumbled down a staircase, to her death, that is at the heart of the mystery. THE STAIRCASE – an eight-episode HBO Max limited series that debuts Thursday, May 5, only on Crave – is based on the true story of Firth’s character Michael Peterson, and his wife Kathleen, played by Collette. Following Kathleen’s death and Michael’s arrest in late 2001, Michael, a novelist, agreed to the filming of a documentary, which has been updated periodically through the years, and made the case famous around the world. But this scripted version of THE STAIRCASE combines everything that has come before, and attempts to tell the tale from fresh perspectives. “I would say the majority of it is not just dramatizations or recreations of the documentary,” said co-showrunner, executive producer, writer, and director Antonio Campos during a virtual panel interview. “We were very interested in what happened leading up to the night of (Kathleen’s) death, and then sort of from there, after the documentary was over, and what was going on when the cameras were off. The documentary is just one source. It’s kind of where the journey started for us, but it wasn’t the only thing we were referring to.” For reference and research, there was also the 2005 nonfiction book by Diane Fanning called Written in Blood, plus countless articles, all the information from the investigation and trial, outtakes from the documentary, interviews that Michael Peterson (who is still alive) has given, things he has written, plus plenty of new interviews that the makers of THE STAIRCASE conducted themselves. “We didn’t invent anything just out of thin air – we took cues from what we knew, and created scenes based on that,” Campos said. “One of the approaches that I think every actor took, and that we took in every aspect of the show, was that we didn’t want to just replicate things. We wanted to find things where the storytellers and reality kind of met. We didn’t want any actor to be forced to just be whatever characteristic they were playing. We wanted to find, where do that person and that actor meet? Where do we find this sort of beautiful combination of the two? So we were not trying to recreate what you’ve seen. We really wanted to create a whole new story.” Firth admitted that the “true-crime genre isn’t where I go for my entertainment, particularly.” But he quickly was hooked by the many possibilities in THE STAIRCASE, which also stars Michael Stuhlbarg, Juliette Binoche, Dane DeHaan, Olivia DeJonge, Rosemarie DeWitt, Tim Guinee, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sophie Turner, Vincent Vermignon, Odessa Young, and Parker Posey. “I think this was unique in my experience, in that it’s hard to construct a biography of a character that’s, to some extent, hard to understand,” Firth observed. “But I was less interested in finding a way to mimic anything, or assimilate his mannerisms for the sake of it. I was looking for codes. I was wondering what you can find out about a person by the way they speak, by the way they phrase things, by means of body language, that sort of thing.” Looking for “codes” is what everyone has been doing with this case for more than two decades. Firth said he didn’t want to meet with Peterson before filming THE STAIRCASE, because the actor knew he would have a reaction one way or the other, and he didn’t want that to cloud anything that he was doing professionally. “I tried not to judge, which is something that was ingrained into all of us as (acting) students – it’s just not your job,” Firth said. “I mean, as a person you can walk away afterwards and judge all you like. But it’s a subjective job. It certainly would have defeated the purpose of the exercise if I did take up a single position and impose my judgment, because then I wouldn’t have been free to explore an alternative interpretation. And it does play with different interpretations. So the whole business about not judging your character, but justifying your character, isn’t a moral one. It’s stagecraft. It’s a creative necessity, really.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv