C4 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2020CLUE OF THE DAY
FOR THE CORRECT
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JEOPARDY! TONIGHT
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NOVEL CHARACTERS ART
THIS CHARACTER
FROM AN 1851 NOVEL
“WAS INTENT ON
AN AUDACIOUS,
IMMITIGABLE, AND
SUPERNATURAL
REVENGE”Yesterday’s Response:
WHAT IS
THE MEDITERRANEAN?Grant’s Dr. Jonathan Fraser was the main
suspect, but was that too easy an answer?
What about the son, Henry (Noah Jupe)?
Or the father, Franklin (Donald Suther-
land)? Not even the police detective (Edgar
Ramírez) was completely above suspicion.
Celebrity fans like Kerry Washington, Ava
DuVernay, Kourtney Kardashian and Car-
ole Radziwill joined the de facto national
jury, while Kidman and Ramírez encour-
aged guesswork.
But after a red herring buffet, the final
twist served up the person originally posi-
tioned as the obvious suspect; Jonathan
Fraser turned out to be — yes — a killer.
Jonathan murdered his mistress, Elena,
partly because she wanted to befriend his
wife, Grace (Kidman), and partly because
he was just a narcissistic sociopath who
happened to have a sculpting hammer at
hand. Could it really be that simple?
“One of our goals was to have the audi-
ence experience him as Grace did,” the
showrunner David E. Kelley said. “Our
starting point was to give you the truth of
Jonathan, and then dare you to discard that
truth along the way.”
The timing of the show, he added, fits the
national mood. “The ferocity and the will-
ingness of people to believe in a narrative
when the facts are telling you otherwise?”
Kelley said. “We’re all a little too familiar
with that.”
In separate phone interviews, Grant
(from England) and Kelley (from Califor-
nia) discussed how they shaped the finale,
including the pivotal murder scene flash-
back. These are edited excerpts from the
conversations.
Part of the show plays with our longtime
perception of Hugh Grant and what we
might think of as typical Hugh Grant roles.
‘The Undoing’ weaponizes that charm
against us.
HUGH GRANTHonestly, I wanted to get away
from those characters. I’m more comfort-
able if I’m playing a character that’s far
away from me than some version of myself.
This was subject to some debate because I
could tell that [the director Susanne Bier]
wanted me to do just what you said and
bring some of the old Hugh to this. I think
that was quite clever of her. She thought:
“What fun to have this guy. People will say,
‘Not the guy from “Notting Hill”! Not the
guy from “Love Actually”! He can’t swing a
hammer 14 times into someone’s face.’ ”
DAVID E. KELLEY We put this wonderful,
charming man in front of you, and the show
pointed to him, and it’s a testament to
Hugh’s ability and Susanne Bier’s direction
that the audience held tight to the “what
if ?” of it all: “Maybe he’s innocent.”
GRANTI think Jonathan is one of those nar-
cissists who simply cannot believe that any-
thing negative can happen to them. It can-
not have happened because bad things do
not happen to the great Jonathan Fraser. I
mean, some might say Trump knows intel-
lectually that he lost the election, but when
he’s arguing that it was fixed, he believes
every word of it. That was the fun of the
character.
I read up on the differences between a
narcissistic personality disorder, psy-
chopaths, and sociopaths, and I can’t even
remember the differences now. You can get
your head quite scrambled by all that stuff,
and you’ve got five and a half episodes of
trying not to give the game away. You can’t
do some flicker of quiet anxiety across his
face. In the margins of my script, I referred
to him as two characters. One I called J.B.,
which was John Boy, which is the name I
made up for this spoiled man, and then
there was I. J., Innocent Jonathan, which
was an act.Jonathan’s mask falls when his wife testifies
against him, in an interesting twist to get
around spousal privilege.KELLEYWe wanted the audience to believethat when Grace took the stand, she could
still be corrupted by her own biases. Part of
the title of “The Undoing” refers to the un-
doing of her marriage, her family and her
life, but ultimately it also refers to her salva-
tion. Her husband’s attorney had put on a
masterful defense, and she was going to or-
chestrate the undoing of that defense.
There is no rule that wives and husbands
can’t testify against each other, but spousal
privilege can be waived if the defense calls
her to the stand. And nothing she testified
went to privileged communications. We
wanted to be accurate, to be able to justify
the mechanics, but we were not intent on
explaining them all.
Do you see the show as commentary about
how the wealthy navigate the legal system?KELLEYWe really did want to suggest the
power that goes with Franklin’s influence.
Power and money accomplish results that
are not available to ordinary people. And
that did offer us a nice helicopter scene!
Were any lines ad-libbed in the finale?GRANTWhen I make Henry sing, that was a
song that my family used to sing in the car
on holidays by the seaside. Effectively, that
is an improvisation.
Not the strange bit about clams?GRANT Clams is very David E. Kelley. There
is a fish theme running through all his se-
ries. He lives somewhere in Northern Cali-
fornia with Michelle Pfeiffer and spends all
day out on a boat catching and stroking and
loving fish. I occasionally would email Da-
vid about lines, but he’s never in the office.He was always out fishing, and he had to
confess to his fish habit.
KELLEYIs Hugh suggesting I was playing
hooky from my job? [Laughs] I wouldn’t
say I have a fish theme! Fishing just comes
up but not in any overriding thematic way.
It’s probably unconscious wishful thinking
on my part that sometimes when I’m at my
desk, I secretly wish I were on a riverbank.How did the murder, finally revealed in
flashback, change in the telling?GRANTIt was kind of ambiguous at first.
KELLEYFrom the original concept, Jona-
than was always guilty. That didn’t change.
But the severity of culpability did. Origi-
nally, Jonathan snapped — one swing and
suddenly she was dead. And Hugh really
did not want it to be gray. He wanted Jona-
than to be a monster. I looked him in the eye
and I said: “Really? Because we can go
down that route.” Most actors want to push
you the other way: “I’m willing to behead
seven people, but can I at least be sympa-
thetic?” Hugh had no such compunction.
He really wanted to go for it. He urged us to
make him a monster.
GRANT It’s more fun if he’s definitely a killer.
And then Susanne Bier wanted to flesh out
the murder scene. That was never in the
script. When we cut away to the actual
killing, that was something she and I put to-
gether because David was off fishing.
KELLEYThe murder itself was always part
of the architecture. It was scripted, but it
was not scripted with a huge amount of de-
tail. That was for Susanne and Hugh to fig-
ure out. It can be folly to marry yourself to
the scripted words because this is such a
heated moment.
GRANT I can’t stress enough, this is David’s
script. I’m just throwing a few currants on
top. We had a long exchange of emails, and
then we had to make Matilda [the actress
Matilda De Angelis, who plays Elena] com-
fortable with the rubbish I’d written. We
were just trying to find out what tipped Jon-
athan over the edge. We came up with a
thing where she says that Henry and Mi-
guel could be friends, she and Grace could
be friends, they could all meet up and have
hot chocolate or something. And that’s what
caused Jonathan to snap, like a dog in a car
when someone approaches. I wrote in my
notes that it wasn’t his first violent episode.
There had been a couple that had been
hushed up, I think.
We went into a rehearsal room with a
hammer, and we just experimented. It could
not have been more awkward because it
was the first week of shooting, and this poor
actress, the first thing she has to do in
America is kiss an old man and then be beat-
en to death: “Kiss me. Smash me on the
head with a mallet.” I felt really bad for her.
And I just didn’t know how the car ride with
my son intercut with brutal sex and murder
would go down. It was nail-biting!
Let’s address a few loose ends. What did
Jonathan do with the $500,000 loan? A
small chunk was used to pay for Miguel’s
tuition, but what about the rest?GRANTI think he might have been in quite a
lot of debt. I wonder if Fernando [Ismael
Cruz Córdova], once he found out that I was
having an affair with his wife and that the
baby was mine, if the loan was used as hush
money.Jonathan’s a doctor, yet he never seems to
use condoms. Shouldn’t he know better?KELLEY I don’t know! [Laughs]
GRANT I asked myself that question, too.
Why do Grace and I have only Henry? I
wondered if there had been a problem. And
I think in one draft of the script, there was a
mention of some drug that helps you con-
ceive, and you’d see it in the medicine cab-
inet. One of the appeals of Elena was that
she was sort of fecund in a way that maybe
Grace wasn’t.Why didn’t Jonathan dispose of the murder
weapon in a body of water? Why leave it on
his family’s property?GRANTDo you remember a moment on the
beach when Grace looks up, and she sees a
figure in the distance? I told myself that
she’d seen Jonathan, and so he quickly got
rid of the hammer in the fireplace instead of
doing something better with it. What a mo-
ron.The ‘Undoing’ Whodunit
CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
Top, Nicole Kidman; above,
Hugh Grant; and left, Noah
Jupe in “The Undoing.”PHOTOGRAPHS BY NIKO TAVERNISE/HBO‘The murder itself was
always part of the
architecture.’Elliot Page, the Oscar-nominated star of
“Juno,” announced on Tuesday that he is
transgender.
“Hi friends, I want to share with you that I
am trans, my pronouns are he/they and my
name is Elliot,” Page, who as Ellen Page
starred in several critically acclaimed films,
wrote in a statement that he posted on Twit-
ter and Instagram. “I feel lucky to be writ-
ing this. To be here. To have arrived at this
place in my life.”
Page, a 33-year-old Canadian actor and
producer, is also known for roles in the mov-
ies “X-Men: The Last Stand,” “X-Men:
Days of Future Past” and “Inception,” as
well as the recent Netflix series “Umbrella
Academy.” Page debuted as a director last
year with the documentary “There’s Some-
thing in the Water.”
“I can’t begin to express how remarkable
it feels to finally love who I am enough to
pursue my authentic self,” Page, who mar-
ried the choreographer Emma Portner in
2018, went on.
“I love that I am trans. And I love that I
am queer. And the more I hold myself close
and fully embrace who I am, the more I
dream, the more my heart grows and the
more I thrive. To all trans people who deal
with harassment, self-loathing, abuse and
the threat of violence every day: I see you, I
love you and I will do everything I can tochange this world for the better.”
Page came out publicly as gay in 2014. “I
am tired of hiding, and I am tired of lying by
omission,” he announced at a Human
Rights Campaign conference in Las Vegas.
“I suffered for years because I was scared
to be out. My spirit suffered, my mental
health suffered and my relationships suf-
fered. And I’m standing here today, with all
of you, on the other side of all that pain.”
In September 2019, at the Toronto Inter-
national Film Festival, Page addressed the
progress of L.G.B.T.Q. people in Hollywood
— “There’s just so far to go,” he said — and
whether he ever felt typecast. “You would
never ask a heterosexual actress that, as
being typecast as straight,” Page said.
“Why would I not want to play those roles?
Quite frankly, I would be thrilled if it’s every
role I ever played again.”
In a statement on Tuesday, Nick Adams,
the director of transgender media at Glaad,
said of Page: “He will now be an inspiration
to countless trans and nonbinary people. All
transgender people deserve the chance to
be ourselves and to be accepted for who we
are. We celebrate the remarkable Elliot
Page today.”Star of ‘Juno’ Announces He Is Transgender
By MAYA SALAM“I can’t begin to express how remarkable it
feels to finally love who I am enough to
pursue my authentic self,” Elliot Page wrote.RICH POLK/GETTY IMAGESThe actor and producer
Elliot Page posts a statement
on Twitter and Instagram.
‘I love that I am
trans. And I love that
I am queer.’