My dear friends
At the beginning of last year, in the bright, blue-skied Athenian winter, I spent a week with Natalie Dormer, talking about her character. Natalie Dormer is an English actress who was in the Hunger Games movies and Penny Dreadful and played my favourite character in Game of Thrones, and almost exactly a year earlier she had read the scripts of a crime series I’d written and agreed to play the lead, triggering whoops and huzzahs in my rented cottage in the Stygian depths of a Devon winter, followed swiftly by the opening of bottles of terrible Prosecco scrounged from the Co-Op in Buckfastleigh.
Five years before, Jo and I had mapped out the series in two sleepless, hallucinatory days during the ferocity of a July heatwave in Istanbul, in a flat in Cihangir with a broken air-conditioner and a view across the rooftops of Cukurcuma to the Pera Tower and the Golden Horn. For the next five years I wrote the damn thing in different countries between other projects, in drafts upon drafts, in fits and starts, in cycles of enthusiasm and sloughs of despond, pitching it in phone calls and Zoom meetings and in person in London. I noodled around Cape Town, staring up at blocks of flats, thinking, “That’s where Edie lives”, or wading into the sea murmuring “This would be a good place to drown.” On more than one occasion I was reconciled to the thought that it would never be made, but now all of a sudden it was January in Athens, and shooting was scheduled for the Cape Town autumn, and I was talking to Natalie about her character.
I have never met anyone who reads (and re-reads and re-reads) a script as carefully and scrupulously as she does, nor who treats it with as much respect. She would want to discuss a specific sequence of sibilants and plosives in her speech in episode 2 that sound fine on a page but are difficult to utter out loud when running down stairs, or debate the difference in register between sarcasm and irony, or query whether I might adjust the rhythm of a particular sentence in episode 6 so that the emphasis more easily falls on the second syllable of the seventeenth word. She would challenge me on chronology and wrangle about back-story; once we spoke for four hours about whether her character would be more likely to jog or to swim. We both agreed: she would have nothing but disdain for yoga. Does any of this sound as though I am complaining? I am not. It was astonishing, it was wonderful: for a writer it was like receiving a gift.
Most of our conversations – long, meandering chats in pursuit of nothing in particular but sharing life views and experiences, aligning our sensibilities – circled around Edie, her character. Everyone (agents, managers, executives) who had read the scripts agreed that it was very brave of a star like Natalie to accept the role of Edie, because traditionally stars prefer roles where they’re likeable, and the consensus was that for at least the first half of the series, Edie’s does not set out to be especially likeable: she’s abrasive and insulting, defended and defensive, uncomfortable with intimacy, rejecting before she can be rejected, using humour as both a tentative invitation to intimacy and as an escape route to distance.
Personally I never found Edie unlikable – I thought she was vastly misunderstood, although admittedly she does seem to go out of her way to make things worse for herself – and Natalie didn’t think she was unlikable either, but we spent much time discussing exactly why Edie is like that, where it would have come from, why she can’t just wise up and let people like her. Then one afternoon, as we were discussing a traumatic event in Natalie’s own life, one of those events you can’t make a joke about, I made a joke about it and she looked at me and I saw a light go on in her sea-blue eyes. “Oh!” she said. “Edie’s you!”
Of course, I persuaded her that she was wrong. If there’s one thing I know about Hollywood stars, it’s that they’re not flattered by the thought of bringing to life the inner world of the schlub writer whose job it is to make them bigger, not reduce them to his dimensions. And truthfully, Edie isn’t me – they’re all me, in various ways – all the characters in White Lies, none of them wholly heroes or villains but all somewhere awkwardly in-between, trying their sorry best in different ways, who have for one reason or another erected walls against the threats they perceive in the world, built safe spaces in which they can’t bring themselves to stay, constructed the self-defeating fronts they present even to the people trying to love them. Anyway, we’re all of us so complicated, how can any single character on a screen or a page be any of us? Each of us is a scattered sky of broken stars and dust.
But still, as I watched one of the later episodes at the first preview screenings last week, I found myself blushing unexpectedly at moments no-one would else would have noticed, as though I had suddenly stood up naked in front of the screen. I’m sometimes asked about the difference between writing prose and writing for the screen, and often the easy reply is about how intimate and revealing prose is, how close the “I’ of the page is to the “I” of the writer but how there’s no “I” on the screen, how it’s an impersonal medium, mediated through commerce and compromise and through other artists and their own ideas. But sometimes, under the right circumstances, the most personal writing hides in plainest sight, pretending to be something very different, dressed as someone else who doesn’t look like you at all.
White Lies is a crime show – there’s a murder in Bishopscourt, and I’m pretty confident you won’t work out whodunnit (and if you do work it out, and can show your reasoning to me in advance, then a bottle of champagne’s on me – let’s make it two bottles, if I can drink it with you) – but really it’s also something else. It’s a series of discoveries, made by fumbling over five years following the light of a waxing moon, about the various ways we trap ourselves. By the end of episode eight, I think it’s also about the breaking dawn, the rising hope, of starting to discover how we can escape.
White Lies is already in parts of Europe, and we’re currently signing the deals that will take it to the rest of Europe and the UK and to one of the prestige American streamers, but it premieres in South Africa on M-Net on Thursday night, 7th March, at 8pm. I know there’s a good chance you won’t watch it – we South Africans take a peculiar pride in not watching locally made television, and given our history, I can’t really blame us – but if you do, I’d love to hear from you. I think it’s a good show, and I’d love to know how you like it, or why you don’t, or just to shoot the breeze about whodunnits and crime and TV. And if you get the killer right, there’s some good champagne in it for you too – we’re a long way from that Co-Op in Buckfastleigh.
With much love
Darrel
Cape Town
March 2024
