New York – The first time Grace Van Patten met Amanda Knox, was a surreal experience. Not because he was playing the very committed as Knox in the Hulu series “The Twisted Tale offenda knox”, but because they decided to go by boat in Echo Park Lake. The activity was Knox's idea, says the actor.
“I remember trying to ask questions, but also trying to keep it fresh because it was the first time we met, and also [I was] So breath for pedaling because I didn't realize how difficult I was going to be, “Van Patten recalls.” I was also so out of body. I couldn't believe what was happening. I didn't feel present. “
A last minute addition to the project after another artist left, Van Patten was only about two months to prepare for the intense filming of six months, in which he had to put himself in the skin of Knox, who was unjustly convicted of the murder of 2007 by his fourth partner Meredith Kercher during his year abroad at Perugia, Italy. Van Patten had to inhabit not only the trauma that Knox passed, in which each movement was analyzed by the world media, but also for the strange fantasy with which he approaches life.
The limited series, which opens on Wednesday with two episodes, offers an opinion on the events narrated by Van Patten as Knox, tracking his youthful joy when he moves to Italy, the terror he felt while he was imprisoned and the last forgiveness he granted to his prosecutor. The project is an important moment for Van Patten, a rupture of the soapy drama of Hulu “Tell Me Lies”, as well as one for Knox, who works as an executive producer. The eight -episodes saga created by KJ Steinberg is an act of recovery for Knox, and believes that Van Patten captured the nuances that so many people lost when it was a regular presence in the tabloids.
Grace van Patten as Amanda Knox. The series follows Knox's arrest, condemnation and its eventual launch.
(Andrea Miconi / Disney)
“She got my tics, makes my snort-laugh, all the little things that make you a person as a totally dimensional person,” says Knox during an interview on New York Press Day of the program. “Honoring that young person who was, the child who had never had anything wrong to happen to them until something horrible happened.”
It is a performance that makes Knox feel grateful. The day before speaking, Knox explains to me that he told Van Patten: “I can't believe how lucky I have to be playing.”
For Van Patten, now 28 years old, obtaining the role was also a destination coup. He had focused on Knox as someone who wanted to portray almost 10 years ago. When Netflix's documentary about Knox, simply titled “Amanda Knox”, came out in 2016, Van Patten had seen it and thought, if they ever made a dramatized story of the story that would love to interpret it.
“I was also so young,” he says, perch with a denim dress in the hotel room in the center of Manhattan. “It was probably like,” Oh, this is such an interesting person and that is what I would love to do as an actor. “
If you look at his curriculum, Van Patten's career began all the way when he was a girl in two episodes of “The Sopranos”, directed by his father Tim van Patten, but that was when he saw the Knox movie that began to follow him seriously.
Although he recently vanished Los Angeles, he grew up in New York. After graduating from the prestigious Secondary School Fiorello H. Laguardia, also known as the “Fame” school, USC postponed for a year. At that time, she began to audition and for 2017, she starred with Adam Sandler in “The Meyerowitz Stories (new and selected” by Noah Baumbach (new and selected). She never started university.
When Grace Van Patten saw “Amanda Knox”, a documentary about the case, he thought he would like to play Knox at some point: “It was probably like, 'Oh, this is such an interesting person and that is what I would love to do as an actor'.”
(Justin Jun Lee / for the Times)
Through his father, whose credits in addition to “The Sopranos” include “Boardwalk Empire”, “Game of Thrones” and, recently, “Masters of the Air”, saw sides of the industry that were not so “glamorous”. Then she received a rhythm to commit to the idea of acting as a job. (His other love was sports: if he had gone to university, he would have liked to play basketball in some way).
“I think it took time to have faith in myself and probably needed some external validation,” she says.
His full circle moment with the story of Knox arrived when he received a meeting with Steinberg and executive producer Warren Littlefield to take care of Margaret Qualley. In a week he had the role and from there he had about two months to align an Italian teacher and do as much research as he could.
“It was nice to have a fire under me,” she says.
The executive producer of the program, Monica Lewinsky, understood the challenges of launching someone to play a subject of real life highly analyzed as Knox. She herself was portrayed in the “Pretty: American Crime Story” by FX by Beanie Feldstein in 2021.
“I have gone through this process as a subject, and I think that when talking with Amanda about almost the most important thing I felt, and that I felt that Beanie Feldstein had captured so well, it is the emotional truth, my emotional truth as a human being,” she says. “Where likelihood can be really important, and we strive to likelihood in this project, I think someone who looks like you, who can evoke you, if they cannot get the soul of you, almost no matter in my opinion.”
Van Patten, he says, was up to the task. “She has just captured my heart on each scene,” Lewinsky adds.
Knox, meanwhile, began to have faith in Van Patten due to the types of questions he asked.
Knox recalls: “She would say things like, 'ok, there are many people who say you are peculiar or whatever, judge you for such things, and I just want to do that right, what do they mean to that?' “(Knox's response:” Like the children of musical theater in school “). Van Patten also wanted to know the nonverbal forms that Knox and her husband Christopher Robinson communicate with each other. (Touching your hands).
“I didn't want to try to do some supplant or impression,” says Van Patten. “I was much more interested in capturing the essence and portraying its emotions authentically.”
In person you can say that they are not one by one. Van Patten's voice has a hoarse that is missing Knox. And while Knox has the carefully chosen words of a public speaker, Van Patten has a chill that permeates.
Grace Van Patten said she was not interested in making an impression of Amanda Knox. “I was much more interested in capturing the essence and portraying its emotions authentically,” she says.
(Justin Jun Lee / for the Times)
Knox did not train Van Patten every second of the exhausting interrogation scene represented in the second episode, which condenses 53 hours of ruthless questions in a heartbreaking scene. “She had very good instincts,” says Knox. “Even the way that scene is elaborated, you realize that everyone in the room agrees with each other, everyone is elaborating this false narrative around Amanda and she is trying to solve it as it advances. It is such a nuanced scene and she took it.”
During the filming, which took place in Rome and Budapest, Van Patten says he did not do much more than work and sleep, although Lewinsky says he contributed heat and genuine joy to the set.
“I was trying to be in his brain as much as possible and trying to see these situations through his eyes as best I could and then get home and make sure that I am accommodating and keeping myself calm and synchronized so that I could be present and open,” he says.
The fact that his sister of real life, Anna Van Patten, played her sister on the screen also helped put her on land, along with visits from her family.
Van Patten did not have much time to recently shoot at “The Twisted Tale Off Mienda Knox” wrapped. Approximately three weeks later, he had to start shooting season 3 of “Tell Me Lies”, where she plays the university student Lucy Albright, who is inside and outside a toxic relationship with the Hunky and Volatile Stephen Demarco (played by Jackson White, who is Van Patten's real boyfriend).
I was grateful that it was a part that I knew well. In her short time of inactivity, she did as little as possible. “I was horizontal for three weeks, she felt like,” she says. “But that's a kind of life when I'm not working.”
Now you are preparing to see how its version of Amanda will be received. “There will be many strong preconceived opinions in this, so I am very curious and I hope people can be open to reconsider their thoughts to see it,” says Van Patten.
Knox already considers that the series is a “dream scenario.”
“The load takes away and explains to Amanda Knox to the world and the fact that Grace would be willing to assume that, she knew my story and knew the type of luggage and challenge that would be to represent me and carry that torch to my side,” says Knox.
Van Patten had waited a decade to do it.
