{"id":129381,"date":"2025-09-08T18:34:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T18:34:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/129381\/"},"modified":"2025-09-08T18:34:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T18:34:06","slug":"robin-wright-and-olivia-cooke-face-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/129381\/","title":{"rendered":"Robin Wright and Olivia Cooke face off"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate to The Waterboy and Momma\u2019s Man, momma\u2019s boys have been an onscreen staple for decades. And Daniel Sanderson (Mary & George<\/a>\u2019s Laurie Davidson), the med-student son of Robin Wright\u2019s glamorous gallerist Laura in Prime Video\u2019s The Girlfriend, is a textbook case\u2014so much so that when we first meet the close mother-son duo, affectionately wrestling in the indoor pool of their posh London home, you\u2019d be forgiven for assuming they were lovers. But soon enough, Laura\u2019s sweet life in her sweet home with her sweet son sours with the arrival of a particularly tart fruit: Cherry.<\/p>\n

Cherry Laine (Olivia Cooke) is Daniel\u2019s new girlfriend, and Laura doesn\u2019t approve: not of her name (admittedly stripper-worthy), not of her low-cut red dress (admittedly inappropriate for meeting the parents), and not of her son\u2019s hand that Cherry allows to creep scandalously high on her thigh in the middle of dinner. Even when Laura does try to get to know the maraschino-haired young woman, she\u2019s left with even more questions and concerns. Did Cherry really attend St. Florian\u2019s private school? Does she recognize the paintings that line the walls of Laura\u2019s home, or did she just conveniently memorize the excerpts off a nearby coffee-table book? And did she pocket one of Laura\u2019s gold bracelets and not-so-accidentally let the family cat loose? What, exactly, is Cherry hiding?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Helpfully, every episode of the six-part domestic thriller is split into two halves, one following Laura\u2019s point of view and the other giving the same order of events from Cherry\u2019s perspective. That red dress Cherry wears to meet Daniel\u2019s folks? She can\u2019t actually afford it and panics when Laura spills coffee on the garment, which still has its tags on it. You see, while Laura\u2019s moneyed life is as carefully curated as one of her galleries\u2014from her artfully minimalist wardrobe to the family\u2019s sunny vacation home in Spain to even the mistress she allows her husband Howard (Waleed Zuaiter) to keep on the side\u2014Cherry\u2019s working-class background is far less tidy, one marked by scrappy determination and social ambition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Through this dual-narrator format\u2014which faithfully follows the framework of Michelle Francis\u2019 2017 novel of the same name, on which the series is based\u2014we get to see not only how major plot points differ in the women\u2019s minds but also the smaller, knottier stuff: a micro aggression here, a tremor of tension there. A hurtful slight that one finds significant enough to linger on is barely mentioned in the other POV, showing how each mindset, memory, and even ego can bend and buckle the truth. It\u2019s a clash the two actors clearly relish, each gamely playing victim or villain depending on which outlook is at the forefront. (As well as starring, Wright is an executive producer on the project and directed half of its episodes. The others were helmed by Andrea Harkin.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Robin Wright is a chilling boy mom in The Girlfriend teaser<\/a>The Girlfriend Experience season 3 struggles to make the connection between sex and tech<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s in this deliberate gray area that The Girlfriend succeeds: Is Laura simply being protective\u2014an understandable byproduct of tragically losing her first child, Daniel\u2019s sister Rose\u2014or is she paranoid to the point of no return? Is Cherry merely self-conscious of her humble upbringing or is she a manipulative maniac? It\u2019s when the limited series gets too sure of who the bad guy really is that it loses its addictiveness, its pulpy predictability lumping it in with other rich-white-people psycho-thrillers. Speaking of, the show\u2019s soundtrack certainly doesn\u2019t help, echoing both the unsettling vocalizations of The White Lotus<\/a> as well as memorable needle drops from Big Little Lies.<\/p>\n

And while Wright and Cooke are given abundant material to work with as each woman descends further and further into monsters-in-law madness, the rest of the cast is left wanting (though Zuaiter does have several quietly devastating moments as a father dulled by grief). Davidson\u2019s Daniel has boyish charm and Paul Mescal-esque good looks, sure, but the character is so blandly written and improbably oblivious (the dude is supposed to be surgeon-level smart, mind you) that you have to wonder why two alpha females like Laura and Cherry would be at each other\u2019s throats over the dimple-cheeked dolt.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Unburdened by that additional story weight, the increasingly outlandish actions of our leads do keep things light, lean, and moving swiftly along, a plus when the mystery has largely been removed from the narrative. And while most thrill seekers might disapprove of the lack of startling twists and turns throughout the show\u2019s six installments, The Girlfriend finds ripe drama in the interpersonal, offering up fruitful things to say about perspective, prejudice, and possessiveness. Cherry and Laura\u2019s feud alone is juicy enough to warrant a bite.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Girlfriend premieres September 10 on Prime Video\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate to The Waterboy and Momma\u2019s Man, momma\u2019s boys have been an onscreen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129382,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-129381","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}