Anatomy of a killer: How Ripley showrunner and Andrew Scott reinvented the infamous con artist

A version of this article originally appeared in Entertainment Weekly's Awardist Emmys Kickoff special print issue.

Killer con artist Tom Ripley knows how to reinvent himself.

First introduced in Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, the character has been adapted for the screen many times, most notably in the Oscar-nominated 1999 film starring Matt Damon and Jude Law. But 25 years later, Netflix’s Ripley starring Andrew Scott (Fleabag’s Hot Priest) once again reintroduces the complex criminal, this time in eight sweeping black-and-white episodes written and directed by Oscar-winning screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List).

"Yeah, that was foolish, right? It’s a good movie," the showrunner tells Entertainment Weekly of adapting the beloved story again. "But I'd read the book before that movie came out, and I think it's the kind of thing that can be made and remade. I could get into aspects of the story and characters in a different way in an eight-hour version."

Below, Zaillian and Scott dissect how they artfully reinvented the infamous conman.

The casting

Ripley begins with Tom living hand-to-mouth in New York City through small cons until he’s hired to convince wayward shipbuilding heir Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) to leave his extended Italian holiday painting mediocre still lifes and return home to his frustrated family. The lucrative assignment catapults Tom into a life of luxury, and he soon decides to steal Dickie’s privileged life and trust fund for himself through nefarious means. Finding an actor who can make viewers understand Tom’s murderous, self-serving choices even if they don’t totally empathize with him was not easy, but Zaillian knew exactly who could do it. 

"Andrew was my first choice," the showrunner reveals. "I wanted somebody who could be charming and, at the same time, sinister and rather dangerous, and he had the range for Tom and the stamina in order to get through what turned out to be 170 days of shooting, in which every day he was working. It’s quite the challenge."

After an initial call with the actor, Zaillian sent him all eight scripts, "which is very, very unusual," Scott recalls. He read all of them on a long-haul flight and remembers being "completely gripped" by the story, but he never once asked Zaillian why he was the first choice for the part. "I thought it wise not to," Scott admits. "It's quite good not to ask, particularly when you're playing somebody as dark as this, 'What did you see in me?'"

The look

The noir tale is equal parts gorgeous and haunting as Tom takes on his new life of wealth and deceit, and Zaillian mirrors that by removing all color from the series. "Of course, I didn't experience it in black and white — I experienced it in full color," Scott says. "There was a question of, 'Will this work?' It was filmed with an idea of, 'This could go either way.'"

Zaillian confirms that the look of the series evolved as they were shooting because he wasn’t using anything as a template. "It was important to me that Italy was not some postcard or some kind of beautiful tourist destination, especially in wintertime," he says of how he eventually landed on the black-and-white visuals. "The story was more sinister than that. The look of emptiness, and overcast skies, wet streets, darkness — those were the kind of images that we were after."

The location

Finding the right places to film on location in Italy took many months — Zaillian and production designer David Gropen made a point of trying to avoid obvious tourist spots. "We were more interested in off-the-beaten-track locations, something grittier than some sort of sun-baked, Amalfi Coast beauty," Zaillian explains. 

And filming in Italy during the height of the pandemic in 2021 wasn’t easy, but it actually provided an unexpected benefit. "There weren't reams of tourists around," Scott says. "I remember very clearly walking to work through San Marco square, and it's just completely empty, which is absolutely wild for Venice in January."

But Scott faced his own Italian obstacle long before filming began. "He didn't speak Italian when we started, and he has to act in Italian," Zaillian says. "He doesn't even speak English with an American accent — he's Irish — so there's a lot of things that Andrew isn't that he had to bring to it."

As if that wasn’t difficult enough, Scott wanted to add another layer to his performance. "I was, maybe stupidly, thinking, but I also had to imagine it's actually an Irishman playing an American speaking Italian, and then it's an Irishman playing an American imitating another American-speaking Italian," he says. "Dickie Greenleaf's Italian would be slightly different to Tom Ripley's Italian. I had so many Italian friends on the crew, and I was always asking them [for help]. And I had a great Italian teacher."

The psychology

Tom’s scariest attribute is not his body count or his ability to lie — although those are quite terrifying. It’s actually how you’re somehow still rooting for him to succeed, even when he’s violently killing innocent people. "It's a magic trick that Patricia Highsmith somehow pulled off to have this amoral, narcissistic character that we want to see get away with murder," Zaillian says. "So I didn't purposely try to get sympathy or empathy for him. I trusted that, just by telling the story, that same thing would happen as it did in the book."

That’s why Scott never tried to "diagnose" Tom with anything so he could just view him as the "unreliable hero" of the story. "I don't see him as a sociopath or a villain or a monster or any of those things," the actor says. "I just really understood the sense of loneliness. The extremism, of course, I don't relate to, but this is a man who's on the outskirts of society, and he's extremely gifted, he's talented, and he moves in the world completely unseen and unloved and unappreciated. And then he's exposed to these people who are just gifted with so many things with half the amount of talent that he has."

The kills

When Tom finally acts on his evil plans to steal Dickie’s life, Ripley spends over 20 minutes showing, in painstaking detail, how exhausting it is to get away with murder. And then another half hour is later dedicated to Tom’s second kill after Dickie’s friend Freddie (Eliot Sumner) begins to suspect foul play. "It's easy to murder someone — I'm not talking from my own personal experience — but [it's] difficult to dispose of a body," Scott says. "And that requires the audience’s time. And I think that's why by the end you go, 'I don't want him to get caught after all he’s been through.'"

Spending almost an eighth of the entire series detailing Tom's two "grueling" murders was what excited Zaillian the most about doing a TV version of this story. "There were a couple of sequences that you could never get away with in a two-hour movie because they would be half the movie," he says. "Those were quite dramatic in the book, and I felt I could do them in a very meticulous way that hadn't been done before. He’s not a professional killer, and he's not particularly good at it. It was important to show that he doesn't plan anything out."

That’s why he "leaves a whole trail of mistakes" in both murders, Scott adds — including bloody paw prints made by his neighbor's cat on the apartment stairs. "Sometimes I imagine the cat to be Patricia Highsmith herself," he says. "But that's just my crazy imagination."

The ending

The novel ends with Tom successfully taking over Dickie's life and riches, having convinced Marge (played by Dakota Fanning in the series) and the Greenleaf family that Dickie took his own life and left his inheritance to him. But Tom's paranoia continues to eat away at him even as he takes off to begin a new life of luxury and lies. The last episode of the Netflix series, however, ends on a different cliffhanger as Inspector Pietro Ravini (Maurizio Lombardi) discovers a photo of the real Dickie in Marge's book, finally getting the pivotal piece to the puzzle he couldn't figure out.

"I felt in the book, it almost was setting up another story somehow, with him going to Greece or something," Zaillian says of why he changed the ending. "I felt that seeing him having achieved what he wanted was the way to end the series, and we could always get into what happens next if there ever is a next."

Check out more from EW's The Awardist, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year's best in TV.

The showrunner does own the rights to the other four of Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels and originally planned to adapt all of them in future seasons. "When I started out, I thought, 'Oh yes, this is just the first of five," Zaillian says. "But this one took me — and COVID came into play as well — all told about six years, so let's see, do the math." He laughs before admitting, "It would be very difficult for me to do the next four, so I don't know."

Scott is also "not sure" if he would be interested in returning to film four more seasons as Tom, considering how long it took to make and release the first season. "And it's a dark place," he adds. "I've been thinking of it as a limited series. But I'll never say never to anything."

Sounds like something Tom Ripley would say.

Check out more of Scott's interview with host Gerrad Hall on The Awardist podcast, below.