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\n \u201cWhen you see yourself in the mirror and go, \u2018Man, this is good. I can work with this,\u2019 you know it\u2019s going to be a lot of fun,\u201d says the East of Eden actress.
\n Photo: Geoffrey Short\/Netflix\n <\/p>\n
Spoilers follow for East of Eden<\/a>, which premiered on Netflix on October 1.\u00a0<\/p>\n John Steinbeck wrote Cathy Ames, the antagonist of his novel East of Eden, as the embodiment of original sin, and in Zoe Kazan\u2019s Netflix adaptation<\/a>, Florence Pugh deftly channels the character\u2019s ambition and cynicism. She swindles, steals, and drives a man to suicide. As a teenager, she kills her controlling parents by setting their house on fire so she can run away. Later, after giving birth to twins, she shoots her husband, Adam (Christopher Abbott), in the shoulder and abandons him and their sons. It all leads to \u201cKate<\/a>,\u201d episode four of the seven-episode limited series<\/a>, a complete portrait of Cathy\u2019s capacity for cruelty. Now going by that nickname, Cathy appears on the doorstep of a respected brothel run by the warm madam, Faye (Martha Plimpton). Kate smiles and cajoles her way to Faye\u2019s side, taking over the day-to-day operations of the house and even calling the madam \u201cMother.\u201d Over the course of a year, she surreptitiously and steadily tortures her new benefactor before poisoning her to death with arsenic and lead.<\/p>\n By the end of the episode, Faye is in the ground, Kate has taken over the brothel, and the Rolling Stones\u2019 \u201cPaint It Black\u201d is playing over the credits. Kate tends to tell herself (and us, via her narration) that she acts in self-defense, but that justification doesn\u2019t hold when all Faye wanted was to provide for the young woman. Plimpton is an industry legend with a slew of awards and nominations for her stage and screen work, and though she has played contemporary moms on sitcoms like Raising Hope and The Real O\u2019Neals, Faye is a world away from those matriarchs. Under a red wig and swathed in the mutton-sleeve gowns of the early 20th century, Plimpton\u2019s Faye is genial and unsuspecting, a madam who genuinely believes the men who visit her brothel should be accommodated and the girls who work there protected. She\u2019s slightly mischievous \u2014 Plimpton\u2019s characters nearly always are \u2014 but what makes her downfall so tragic is that she suspects Kate only when it\u2019s too late, and even when she does, she is ashamed she doubted the girl she considers her daughter.<\/p>\n Faye is a victim of Kate\u2019s relentless avarice and her worldview that no one is really good; her murder cements Kate\u2019s transformation into a monster, someone who \u2014 within Steinbeck\u2019s timshel<\/a>, or \u201cthou mayest,\u201d framing of human choice in the novel \u2014 chooses to hurt others. \u201cShe\u2019s a funny sort of character,\u201d Plimpton says of Faye. \u201cShe\u2019s an avatar for the innocence of the businesswoman in that period of time. And Kate comes along to say \u2018No, I\u2019m going to take this. You\u2019re not being careful enough.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n How did Faye come to you?\u00a0 Before East of Eden, the last thing I saw you in was Task<\/a>, and the next was season two of The Lowdown<\/a>. What opportunity did Faye provide that felt different from these two contemporary law-enforcement characters? There\u2019s a side to her that\u2019s very lonely and very much wants to have a family. You don\u2019t get the sense she has ever felt there was someone she could really depend on. That\u2019s completely different from playing a sheriff or an FBI agent. And there are similarities, in a way, in terms of female independence and one\u2019s options in that area as the years have progressed. It excited me enormously to play someone of this period and in this line of work who was not your typical sort of bawdy bordello madam but who is, as Steinbeck imagined her, a woman of graceful taste. Regardless of what her background might have been, she has managed to make a good living for herself. That\u2019s no small feat. There\u2019s a tendency to see a place like this as a house of ill repute, and she would like to contradict that.<\/p>\n I\u2019m curious how you built Faye \u2014 how she looks, moves, and sounds. What was important for you in that process? From the book, I remember Faye is described as getting along with everyone, and she donates to a variety of causes in the town. The contrast between that and what Kate does later, in preparing blackmail material on all the brothel\u2019s clients, is so stark. I love the moment when Faye says to Kate, \u201cDo you think you\u2019re the only one with secrets? You think I use the name I was born with?\u201d She has compartmentalized parts of herself. One defining scene of this episode is when Faye celebrates Kate with a \u201cparty for my dear daughter.\u201d When Kate gets drunk, she reveals more of her true nature, and Faye says to her, \u201cYou look strange.\u201d How did you want to play the arc of Faye through this party as she begins to see Kate differently?\u00a0 After Faye gets drunk at the party, Kate basically conducts physical and psychological torture on her. Tell me about filming that and the register you found for what Faye is feeling.\u00a0 What can you tell me about Florence as a scene partner? The final death sequence is intense. Kate goes so far, and the image of Faye in death \u2014 so still and blue \u2014 is so disturbing.\u00a0 In the series, we follow Kate through the years and see that she thinks about Faye. She is to a certain degree haunted by what she\u2019s done, which is different from the book, in which she never really thinks about Faye again. As someone who has read the book, how would you describe the impact Faye has on Kate over the years? Sign up for the Vulture Daily<\/p>\n An entertainment newsletter for the pop-culture obsessed.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n
I had just landed in Paris. I was getting ready to take my mother on a two-week trip \u2014 we were going to drive from the South of France back up to Paris and then on to London. My agent called me and said Zoe had asked if I would do this. I had seen the film but never read the book. I ran over to the American bookstore near Notre-Dame and bought a copy and started reading it. I was like, Obviously, I\u2019ll be there. It shoots in New Zealand? Twist my arm.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a period piece, which is not something I\u2019m normally asked to do on film or in television. It\u2019s an incredibly rich and compelling and wonderfully allegorical novel, and the character of Faye is a very guileless woman who cares very deeply about her girls and believes very strongly that it is possible to run a brothel as a beautiful, romantic, elegant place and that sex in this brothel, with these girls who are precious to her, is something any man would feel lucky to experience.<\/p>\n
Having done period work onstage but never onscreen until this, I found it a little challenging. It\u2019s one thing to play a person from the 19th to the early-20th century onstage, where you can be a little broader in your delivery. On film, you\u2019ve got to be more subtle about it and not be quite so loud, for lack of a better word. What was important to me was the clothing, the hair \u2014 I\u2019m a hair actor, and when I get the hair right, it\u2019s usually a big clue for the character. The costumes were all bespoke. The corsets, the atmosphere, the design of this is so completely fantastic. Every single department head working on this is at the top of their field. That was it, and having a notion of what Faye\u2019s aspirations are and how a woman of that time goes about gaining independence and relative wealth.<\/p>\n
Depending on one\u2019s interpretation of the novel \u2014 there are many, and Zoe\u2019s version is just one \u2014 if Kate is the serpent, or the side of humanity that chooses violence, then the allegorical role Faye plays is one of gentility. She wants to provide. She is a figure that Kate finds an opportunity to slowly destroy.<\/p>\n
Absolutely. We never landed on a full backstory for Faye because I wanted her to remain a cipher or at least not have too much specificity about her; she\u2019s good at what she does because she doesn\u2019t reveal much. She knows how to talk to men, but there\u2019s this other side of her that\u2019s yearning to be a mother and have a family \u2014 not necessarily wanting to be a mother in a home with a husband. Clearly, that never appealed to her.<\/p>\n
We rehearsed it quite a bit, which was really lovely. It\u2019s physically challenging; it goes over a whole night. They get drunk, there are confrontations. Faye\u2019s not sure she can trust her own eyes. It\u2019s not so much that Kate looks different, but something in her nature has changed. A shadow has come over her. When you\u2019re drunk and you\u2019re perceiving something like that, it can be very disconcerting and really set you off-balance. Faye\u2019s having these wonderful reveries about Paris and all the things she\u2019s going to do with her beautiful young daughter, and they\u2019re both probably going to quit the brothel and be these wonderful ladies of leisure. That\u2019s the fantasy Faye is in the middle of when Kate just suddenly becomes a stranger. For me, I don\u2019t want to sound glib, but it\u2019s really simple when you read the script and the book and you let both of those things inform and tell you where you need to go and what you need to do. That\u2019s all I was thinking about \u2014 maintaining whatever faith was possible with the original novel amid this adaptation.<\/p>\n
There were certain things we filmed that didn\u2019t make it. For example, the knitting needle that goes into a breast and then there\u2019s a description about it going up my petticoat. We did shoot that, but it got cut, I imagine because it was too much. They had an intimacy coordinator there who was lovely and dear, but I\u2019m not sure completely necessary for that particular stuff. I was playing drunk and out of it. If I weren\u2019t, I don\u2019t see how Kate would be able to do that. There\u2019s a lack of consciousness that\u2019s really important because otherwise Faye would say \u201cGet the hell off me.\u201d She\u2019s guileless; she\u2019s not stupid. She thinks it was all a dream because she just can\u2019t conceive that her precious girl, her child, her daughter, would do something like that.<\/p>\n
She had this in her brain for several years before we shot it. She comes extremely prepared and is wonderfully game. She is ready for pretty much anything, and it\u2019s not mindless. It\u2019s very specific and very purposeful. She has a great sense of humor, and she\u2019s really smart. That\u2019s the best kind of scene partner you can get.<\/p>\n
We had contact lenses for the pinhole eyes, which are due to the specific chemical Kate is giving her. They were fantastic. You can\u2019t see out of lenses like those, which is kind of nice. It\u2019s helpful because you are helpless in a weird way. You have no sight, and you are literally at other people\u2019s mercy. And the makeup and the prosthetics \u2014 when you see yourself in the mirror and you go, \u201cMan, this is good. I can work with this,\u201d you know it\u2019s going to be a lot of fun. And then being given the chance to lie there in the bed and contemplate what\u2019s happening to her, which she is completely unaware of \u2014 for a flash, just for a moment, she suspects. Faye says, \u201cThe more you wait on me, the worse I feel,\u201d and then she feels shame for even saying such a thing. These are all rich, exciting, interesting things to play that I don\u2019t normally get a chance to play. All of us felt that way about this project \u2014 that there were things here we just don\u2019t normally get a chance to chew on. It\u2019s not your everyday project.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re two different things, the novel and the series. Faye plays a lingering role in Kate\u2019s \u2014 I wouldn\u2019t call it remorse or guilt but something. There\u2019s something there that\u2019s not really present in the novel. Some reinterpretations come into play in our version that tell a slightly different story from the novel\u2019s. That said, I think it\u2019s possible that were Steinbeck to have written this at another time, or if women had a different sort of societal edge than they had when he wrote this, I think he might have explored that a little more. That\u2019s purely a guess. One thing is literature, and another thing is a TV show. The extraordinary feat that Zoe, with Florence\u2019s help, has achieved is in examining, from a \u2014 to put it shallowly \u2014 modern perspective, a character who has been a sort of symbol for a lot of things. She\u2019s less of a symbol and more of a full human being in this version.<\/p>\n