A too-pure young man, training to be a doctor, scion of the wealthiest imaginable family, meets a smoking hot young woman, but is she who she seems? His mother thinks not. The quickest way to describe The Girlfriend is to say that it’s sort of perfect. The perspectives shift between that of Cherry, the girlfriend (Olivia Cooke), and that of Laura, the mother (Robin Wright, who also directs). Whoever’s take you are watching, that’s who you believe. Baroque events, blood and guts, flagrant lies – it all unfurls in exquisite interiors and idealised London street scenes.
It is compulsive. I bit my nails to shreds. It’s not clear who’s the psychopath, but someone is – and the crisscrossing erotic tension gives it the inevitability of Greek tragedy. People this irresistible to one another never end up at peace.
“This is a triangular love story,” Wright begins, speaking to me from “the countryside”; she is still based in the UK since shooting The Girlfriend last year. “In a different world, Laura and Cherry would have been best friends, because they’re so alike. Their love for this one young man is from two different fields. A mother that’s possessive and overprotective – is she just being paranoid about this girlfriend, or is the girlfriend not to be trusted?”
So far, so universal. “That’s just intrinsic to being a mother,” says Wright. “OK, who’s going to be good enough for my child? And it’s going to be slim pickings.”
It’s not even just a mother-son thing, Cooke says, down the line from Mallorca where she is on holiday. “My mum, with boyfriends that me and my sister have had, has not liked them at all. Once a mum sniffs a malignancy in the person her son or daughter is with, it’s hard for her to brush that aside. And I can read people pretty well – I’ve never been out with anyone overtly hideous.”
But this story isn’t that universal – the super-rich parents, Laura and Howard (Waleed Zuaiter), are in an open marriage, where Howard has a long-term lover but yearns for Laura’s attention. Their son Daniel (Laurie Davidson), meanwhile, either has an earth-shattering connection with his girlfriend Cherry, or she’s playing him. And there is a quasi-incestuous flavour to Laura and Daniel right at the centre.
“We’re in so much competition now with content,” says Wright. “How racy everything is, how much shock value it has. We had to up the ante and have the mother kiss the son, which is so fucked up, so weird. And yet, it happens.”
So much hangs on the physicality of Laura and Cherry, their contrasting magnetism: Wright polished and elegant, always wearing camel; Cherry pneumatic and spellbinding, like a siren. “Her sensuality, and the way she looks, was a whole monster itself,” says Cooke. “Especially for me – I feel much more comfortable when the focus isn’t on how I look. But maybe getting older [she is 31] has made me a bit more comfortable in my body; for a long time I was playing younger than I actually was, so there was more androgyny.”
Cooke’s breakthrough role, 10 years ago, was in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and the contrast between that frailty and this vitality is heady. “She’s a bull, you know – she’s an ox,” Wright says, about Cooke. “She’s an animal. She’s great.”
All I can think is: the intimacy coordinator on this must have really had their hands full. “That is the new world,” Wright says, wearing her director’s hat. “The intimacy coordinator talks to the actor first, then they come to you and say, ‘This is what they’re willing to do, this is what they’re not willing to do,’ and you morph around that. OK, let’s find a way to display what the original thought was, with those restrictions. And it worked out OK, because what we got in the show is enough.”
If Cherry is hiding who she is, says Cooke, who can blame her? “I reckoned with it and thought, ‘Well, the billionaire class, they lie and steal and behave abhorrently all the time. Cherry saying a few half-truths – is it really that bad?’” If Laura, in her late 50s – Wright is 59 – is still rushing headlong at her sexual destiny, that’s “a quality I think the business needs, and I think they’re realising that: get these women that are in their last chapter, don’t curtail it. Just let it live for what it is. Because it is life. Why stop at 40 years of age? Like, get the women at 60, at 70.”
“Robin invented event television, didn’t she?” says Cooke – talking about House of Cards, of course, the US remake of the British political thriller. Wright remembers David Fincher approaching her about it, in 2011, while they were making The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. He said: “It will be a platform there has never been before, called streaming. Anyone and everyone can watch it, whenever they want it, as much as they want it. You won’t know until the end of each season if you get picked up again for the next season. Do you want to be a part of it?” It was a gamble for Wright, who had been celebrated on the big screen since The Princess Bride in 1987; the long-form possibilities of the box set were only just beginning to be realised. “You weren’t expecting art, from TV,” she remembers.
Having watched Wright on The Girlfriend, Cooke would love to direct, herself: “But I wouldn’t want to be in it as well. Robin did it with such grace and effortlessness, but it just looks like so much work.”
Wright’s next project is a film called Bingo, “about a young boy who falls in love with a 70-year-old woman. And they’re soulmates. They both want to kill themselves for different reasons, and they meet in the hospital, and they fall in love. It’s a beautiful story, and no one wants to accept it because of the age difference. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. Love is love. Connection is connection. Go with it.”
