New York — The primary time Grace Van Patten met Amanda Knox, it was a surreal expertise. Not as a result of she can be taking part in the much-talked-about Knox within the Hulu sequence “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” however as a result of they determined to go paddle boating in Echo Park Lake. The exercise was Knox’s concept, the actor says.
“I remember just trying to ask questions, but also trying to keep it cool because it was the first time we were meeting, and also [I was] so out of breath from pedaling because I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be,” Van Patten remembers. “I also was so out of body. I couldn’t believe what was going on. I didn’t feel present.”
A final-minute addition to the venture after one other performer dropped out, Van Patten had solely about two months to organize for the extreme six-month shoot, wherein she needed to put herself within the pores and skin of Knox, who was wrongfully convicted of the 2007 killing of her roommate Meredith Kercher throughout her yr overseas in Perugia, Italy. Van Patten needed to inhabit not solely the trauma that Knox went by way of, wherein her each transfer was scrutinized by worldwide media, but additionally the unusual whimsy with which she approaches life.
The restricted sequence, premiering Wednesday with two episodes, presents a tackle the occasions narrated by Van Patten as Knox, monitoring her youthful pleasure when she strikes to Italy, the fear she felt whereas incarcerated, and the final word forgiveness she bestowed upon her prosecutor. The venture is a serious second for Van Patten, a breakout of Hulu’s soapy drama “Tell Me Lies,” in addition to one for Knox, who serves as an government producer. The eight-episode saga created by Okay.J. Steinberg is an act of reclamation for Knox, and she or he believes Van Patten captured the nuances that so many individuals missed when she was an everyday presence within the tabloids.
Grace Van Patten as Amanda Knox. The sequence follows Knox’s arrest, conviction and her eventual launch.
(Andrea Miconi / Disney)
“She got my tics, she does my snort-laugh, all of the little things that make you a person like a fully dimensional person,” Knox says throughout an interview on the present’s New York press day. “Honoring that young person I was, the kid who had never had anything bad happen to them until a horrific thing happened.”
It’s a efficiency that makes Knox really feel grateful. The day earlier than we communicate, Knox explains to me that she informed Van Patten, “I cannot believe how lucky I am that you were playing me.”
For Van Patten, now 28, getting the function was additionally one thing of a stroke of destiny. She had honed in on Knox as somebody she wished to painting practically 10 years in the past. When the Netflix documentary about Knox, merely titled “Amanda Knox,” got here out in 2016, Van Patten had watched it and thought, in the event that they ever made a dramatized account of the story she would like to play her.
“I was so young then too,” she says, perched carrying a denim gown within the downtown Manhattan lodge room. “It was probably just like, ‘Oh this is such an interesting person and that’s what I would love to do as an actor.’ ”
If you happen to have a look at her resumé, Van Patten’s performing profession started all the best way again when she was a baby in two episodes of “The Sopranos,” directed by her father Tim Van Patten, however it was across the time she watched the Knox movie that she started to pursue it critically.
Although she lately decamped to Los Angeles, she grew up in New York. After graduating from the distinguished Fiorello H. LaGuardia Excessive Faculty — in any other case often called the “Fame” college — she deferred USC for a yr. In that point, she began auditioning and by 2017, she was starring reverse Adam Sandler in Noah Baumbach’s “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected).” She by no means began school.
When Grace Van Patten watched “Amanda Knox,” a documentary concerning the case, she thought she’d wish to play Knox sooner or later: “It was probably just like, ‘Oh this is such an interesting person and that’s what I would love to do as an actor.’ ”
(Justin Jun Lee / For The Instances)
By her father — whose credit in addition to “The Sopranos” embody “Boardwalk Empire,” “Game of Thrones” and, lately, “Masters of the Air” — she noticed sides of the trade that weren’t so “glamorous.” So she took a beat to commit herself to the thought of performing as a job. (Her different love was sports activities: If she had gone to school she would have wished to play basketball indirectly.)
“I think it just took me a while to have faith in myself and I probably needed some external validation,” she says.
Her full circle second with Knox’s story got here when she received a gathering with Steinberg and government producer Warren Littlefield to take over for Margaret Qualley. Inside every week she had the function and from there had about two months to line up an Italian trainer and do as a lot analysis as she presumably might.
“It was nice to kind of have a fire under me,” she says.
The present’s government producer Monica Lewinsky understood the challenges of casting somebody to play a extremely scrutinized real-life topic like Knox. She herself was portrayed in FX’s “Impeachment: American Crime Story” by Beanie Feldstein in 2021.
“I have been through this process as a subject, and I think in talking to Amanda about almost the most important thing that I felt, and that I felt Beanie Feldstein had captured so well, is the emotional truth, my emotional truth as a human being,” she says. “Where verisimilitude can be really important — and we strived for verisimilitude in this project — I think that someone who looks like you, who can evoke you, if they can’t bring out the soul of you, it almost doesn’t matter in my opinion.”
Van Patten, she says, was as much as the duty. “She just captured my heart in every scene,” Lewinsky provides.
Knox, in the meantime, began to place confidence in Van Patten due to the sorts of questions she requested.
Knox recollects, “She would say things like, ‘OK, there are a lot of people who say like you’re quirky or whatever, they judge you for that kind of thing, and I just want to get that right, what do they mean by that?’ ” (Knox’s reply: “Like the musical theater kids at school.”) Van Patten additionally wished to know the nonverbal ways in which Knox and her husband Christopher Robinson talk with one another. (Touching fingers.)
“I didn’t want to attempt to do some impersonation or impression,” Van Patten says. “I was so much more interested in capturing essence and portraying her emotions authentically.”
In particular person you possibly can inform they don’t seem to be one-to-one. Van Patten’s voice has a huskiness to it that Knox’s lacks. And whereas Knox has the fastidiously chosen phrases of a practiced public speaker, Van Patten has a chillness that pervades.
Grace Van Patten stated she wasn’t occupied with doing an impression of Amanda Knox. “I was so much more interested in capturing essence and portraying her emotions authentically,” she says.
(Justin Jun Lee / For The Instances)
Knox didn’t coach Van Patten by way of each second of the grueling interrogation scene depicted within the second episode, which condenses 53 hours of ruthless questioning into one harrowing scene. “She had such really good instincts,” Knox says. “Even the way that scene is crafted you realize everyone in the room is kind of being gaslit by each other, everyone’s sort of crafting this false narrative around Amanda and she’s trying to figure it out as it’s going. It’s such a nuanced scene and she carried it.”
Throughout filming, which occurred in Rome and Budapest, Van Patten says she didn’t do a lot apart from work and sleep, although Lewinsky says she introduced real heat and cheeriness to the set.
“I was very much trying to be in her brain as much as possible and trying to see these situations through her eyes as best as I could and then getting home and making sure that I’m settling back into me and staying calm and winding down so that I could just be present and open,” she says.
The truth that her real-life sister, Anna Van Patten, performed her on-screen sister additionally helped floor her, together with visits from their household.
Van Patten didn’t have a lot time to recenter herself after capturing on “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” wrapped. About three weeks later, she needed to begin capturing Season 3 of “Tell Me Lies,” the place she performs school pupil Lucy Albright who’s out and in of a poisonous relationship with the hunky and unstable Stephen DeMarco (performed by Jackson White, who’s Van Patten’s precise boyfriend).
She was grateful it was an element she knew effectively. In her transient downtime she did as little as attainable. “I was horizontal for three weeks, it felt like,” she says. “But that’s kind of life when I’m not working.”
Now she is prepping to see how her model of Amanda might be obtained. “There will be a lot of strong preconceived opinions going into this, so I’m really curious and hoping that people can be open to reconsidering their thoughts on it through watching it,” Van Patten says.
Knox already considers the sequence a “dream scenario.”
“The burden is taken off me to be and explain Amanda Knox to the world and the fact that Grace would be willing to take that on — she knew my story and she knew the kind of baggage and challenge that it would be to represent me and to carry that torch alongside me,” Knox says.
Van Patten had waited a decade to take action.
