New York — The primary time Grace Van Patten met Amanda Knox, it was a surreal expertise. Not as a result of she can be enjoying the much-talked-about Knox within the Hulu collection “The Twisted Story 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 keep in mind simply attempting to ask questions, but additionally attempting to maintain it cool as a result of it was the primary time we have been assembly, and likewise [I was] so out of breath from pedaling as a result of I didn’t understand how exhausting it was going to be,” Van Patten remembers. “I additionally was so out of physique. I couldn’t imagine what was happening. I didn’t really feel current.”
A final-minute addition to the challenge after one other performer dropped out, Van Patten had solely about two months to arrange 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 12 months 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 collection, premiering Wednesday with two episodes, gives 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 challenge is a serious second for Van Patten, a breakout of Hulu’s soapy drama “Inform Me Lies,” in addition to one for Knox, who serves as an govt producer. The eight-episode saga created by Ok.J. Steinberg is an act of reclamation for Knox, and he or she 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 collection follows Knox’s arrest, conviction and her eventual launch.
(Andrea Miconi / Disney)
“She bought my tics, she does my snort-laugh, the entire little issues that make you an individual like a totally dimensional individual,” Knox says throughout an interview on the present’s New York press day. “Honoring that younger individual I used to be, the child who had by no means had something unhealthy occur to them till a horrific factor occurred.”
It’s a efficiency that makes Knox really feel grateful. The day earlier than we communicate, Knox explains to me that she instructed Van Patten, “I can not imagine how fortunate I’m that you simply have been enjoying me.”
For Van Patten, now 28, getting the position was additionally one thing of a stroke of destiny. She had honed in on Knox as somebody she wished to painting almost 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 used to be so younger then too,” she says, perched carrying a denim gown within the downtown Manhattan resort room. “It was most likely identical to, ‘Oh that is such an fascinating individual and that’s what I might like to do as an actor.’ ”
If you happen to have a look at her resumé, Van Patten’s appearing profession started all the way in which again when she was a toddler in two episodes of “The Sopranos,” directed by her father Tim Van Patten, but it surely was across the time she watched the Knox movie that she started to pursue it severely.
Although she not too long ago decamped to Los Angeles, she grew up in New York. After graduating from the celebrated Fiorello H. LaGuardia Excessive College — in any other case referred to as the “Fame” college — she deferred USC for a 12 months. In that point, she began auditioning and by 2017, she was starring reverse Adam Sandler in Noah Baumbach’s “The Meyerowitz Tales (New and Chosen).” She by no means began school.
When Grace Van Patten watched “Amanda Knox,” a documentary in regards to the case, she thought she’d prefer to play Knox in some unspecified time in the future: “It was most likely identical to, ‘Oh that is such an fascinating individual and that’s what I might like to do as an actor.’ ”
(Justin Jun Lee / For The Instances)
By way of her father — whose credit apart from “The Sopranos” embody “Boardwalk Empire,” “Recreation of Thrones” and, not too long ago, “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 concept of appearing as a job. (Her different love was sports activities: If she had gone to school she would have wished to play basketball ultimately.)
“I believe it simply took me some time to place confidence in myself and I most likely wanted some exterior validation,” she says.
Her full circle second with Knox’s story got here when she bought a gathering with Steinberg and govt producer Warren Littlefield to take over for Margaret Qualley. Inside every week she had the position and from there had about two months to line up an Italian trainer and do as a lot analysis as she presumably may.
“It was good to type of have a hearth beneath me,” she says.
The present’s govt 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’ve been by way of this course of as a topic, and I believe in speaking to Amanda about nearly a very powerful factor that I felt, and that I felt Beanie Feldstein had captured so effectively, is the emotional fact, my emotional fact as a human being,” she says. “The place verisimilitude will be actually necessary — and we strived for verisimilitude on this challenge — I believe that somebody who appears to be like such as you, who can evoke you, if they will’t convey out the soul of you, it nearly doesn’t matter for my part.”
Van Patten, she says, was as much as the duty. “She simply captured my coronary heart in each 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 issues like, ‘OK, there are lots of people who say such as you’re quirky or no matter, they choose you for that type of factor, and I simply wish to get that proper, what do they imply by that?’ ” (Knox’s reply: “Just like the musical theater children at college.”) Van Patten additionally wished to know the nonverbal ways in which Knox and her husband Christopher Robinson talk with one another. (Touching arms.)
“I didn’t wish to try and do some impersonation or impression,” Van Patten says. “I used to be a lot extra eager about capturing essence and portraying her feelings authentically.”
In individual you possibly can inform they aren’t 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 mentioned she wasn’t eager about doing an impression of Amanda Knox. “I used to be a lot extra eager about capturing essence and portraying her feelings 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 actually good instincts,” Knox says. “Even the way in which that scene is crafted you understand everybody within the room is type of being gaslit by one another, everybody’s type of crafting this false narrative round Amanda and he or she’s attempting to determine it out because it’s going. It’s such a nuanced scene and he or she carried it.”
Throughout filming, which happened 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 used to be very a lot attempting to be in her mind as a lot as doable and attempting to see these conditions by way of her eyes as greatest as I may after which getting residence and ensuring that I’m settling again into me and staying calm and winding down in order that I may simply be current 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 Story of Amanda Knox” wrapped. About three weeks later, she needed to begin capturing Season 3 of “Inform 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 temporary downtime she did as little as doable. “I used to be horizontal for 3 weeks, it felt like,” she says. “However that’s type of life after I’m not working.”
Now she is prepping to see how her model of Amanda shall be acquired. “There shall be a number of robust preconceived opinions going into this, so I’m actually curious and hoping that individuals will be open to reconsidering their ideas on it by way of watching it,” Van Patten says.
Knox already considers the collection a “dream state of affairs.”
“The burden is taken off me to be and clarify Amanda Knox to the world and the truth that Grace can be keen to take that on — she knew my story and he or she knew the type of baggage and problem that it might be to symbolize me and to hold that torch alongside me,” Knox says.
Van Patten had waited a decade to take action.
