![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/c8e0d8818ae8829a264b8dea45c53eb46d-Merritt-Weaver-Lede.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Primetime is in theaters September 25.\n <\/p>\n
\n Photo: Victor Llorente for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
Talking to Merritt Wever, 46, is an adventure in radical honesty. She\u2019s a successful, thoughtful, in-demand actress who seems to be in a state of constant negotiation between the exhibition that comes with her art and her industry and her own impulse to keep some part of herself to herself. \u201cI sometimes wish I could do my work,\u201d she tells me, \u201cwithout an audience.\u201d\u00a0When my colleague Kathryn VanArendonk went on a walk<\/a> in 90-degree weather with her in Prospect Park in 2019 to discuss her work in the Netflix true-crime miniseries Unbelievable, Wever spent much of the interview professedly miserable about having to talk about her own life and craft. This time we\u2019d planned to meet at Rucola, the Italian restaurant where you can regularly spot artsy-chic Boerum Hill folk like Bobby Cannavale and Rose Byrne. When Wever arrives in a simple black dress and Birkenstocks, she tells me she\u2019s already gotten anxious about how the noise of other diners might muddy my recording and suggests we switch over to the wine bar Ana\u00efs a few brownstones down the street, where the vibe may be more quiet. There, the AC is dead, but we find a table outside, and Wever orders a matcha latte \u2014 she jokes it\u2019ll make her sound interesting \u2014 and announces that she really wishes she\u2019d stuck to her first idea of swimming laps together in a public pool in Sunset Park. \u201cI kept thinking of locations where this wouldn\u2019t have been present,\u201d she gestures toward the phone I\u2019ve been using to record her, \u201cwhich defeats the whole purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n The tricky thing about Wever\u2019s ambivalence toward being watched is that she is thrilling to see at work. She has built a career marked by performances that are both raw and precise and remarkably alive from moment to moment. A Merritt Wever character can be broadly comic, like her earnest sidekick on Nurse Jackie, or gritty and laconic, like her gun-toting widow on the western Godless or her detective in the true crime Unbelievable; but those characters always seem to lack a membrane between themselves and the world. She\u2019s responsive, surprising \u2014 you can watch her awkwardly attempt to slip Adam Driver divorce papers<\/a> in Marriage Story over and over and discover a new interesting choice each time. In the last two years, she\u2019s won a guest-actress Emmy for her heartbreaking performance on Severance<\/a> as a woman who falls for the Innie version of her husband and been nominated for another by playing Carrie Coon\u2019s d\u00e9class\u00e9 sister who barges into the starchy world of The Gilded Age. (Wever insists she can\u2019t say whether those characters might return in the future.)<\/p>\n Wever was drawn to her latest role, in A24\u2019s film Primetime<\/a>, for its darkness. After playing a series of openhearted women, she was interested in someone who \u201calmost willfully wants to deny her own humanity and the humanity of the people around her,\u201d she said in a press conference about the film. She plays a TV news producer \u2014 the character, named Andie, is an invention based on real people \u2014 behind the 2000s pedophile-hunting series To Catch a Predator alongside Chris Hansen, played by a haunted Robert Pattinson. Andie is a creature of pure ambition and nearly blank morality, a sweatshirt-wearing, 2000s-era daughter of Lady Macbeth and Faye Dunaway in Network, though Wever purposefully didn\u2019t revisit that film to keep her own performance distinct. Wever\u2019s Andie projects her thoughts through the pace at which she constantly chews nicotine gum. Over the course of Primetime, Pattinson\u2019s Hansen goes to Captain Ahab\u2013esque lengths to trap targets and catch them on-camera. Sometimes Andie has qualms, often practical or logistical ones, but she doesn\u2019t abandon ship even as Hansen\u2019s quest for bigger ratings gets more desperate and ethically twisted. \u201cThere\u2019s a part of her that doesn\u2019t want to leave this world,\u201d Wever says, \u201cshe\u2019s attracted to mess, to nastiness.\u201d<\/p>\n \n With Robert Pattinson in Primetime. When we talk, Wever has recently returned from a trip to the Venice International Film Festival, where Primetime premiered and plunged itself straight into the fall awards-season race. Pattinson got rave reviews, as did Wever. New York\u2019s Bilge Ebiri called<\/a> her \u201castonishingly good,\u201d while Variety\u2019s Jessica Kiang said<\/a> she \u201chas never not been good in anything\u201d but \u201cis absolutely blistering here.\u201d Both actors have very different processes, but, according to director Lance Oppenheim, they were united in the fact that they both preferred not to rehearse before filming. Onscreen, you see those styles collide. Pattinson throws his version of Hansen into scenes like a rogue squash ball \u2014 in one, he suddenly curls up on the floor in pain. Wever rallies back, getting down beside him like a wrestler and shouting for him to get up. But Wever says she\u2019s still getting a sense of her own performance in the finished film. Primetime is Oppenheim\u2019s first narrative feature; he\u2019s known for documentaries, including a tantalizing upcoming project about Elizabeth Holmes with Nathan Fielder. In one scene in Primetime, Hansen and Andie head to a meeting with the head of NBC, Jeff Zucker, who plays himself. It\u2019s a delicious amalgam of fiction and v\u00e9rit\u00e9: Zucker announces that he\u2019s going to move their show to prime-time television, the big leagues, to run it against Lost, slapping its name over the flailing Aaron Sorkin drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. In real life, To Catch a Predator didn\u2019t actually replace Studio 60, but they were on the air at the same time, and Wever herself had an early career break playing a downtrodden assistant on the series. She remembers flying from New York to L.A. to film episodes, crashing on friends\u2019 couches, and discovering, as the ratings sagged, that the spirit on set was getting increasingly grim. But she also doesn\u2019t know if her own experience of that time matters.<\/p>\n \u201cLance gets excited about those overlaps, when there\u2019s a bleed of what he considers to be real and not real,\u201d Wever says. \u201cBut I see acting as trying to be as real as possible. When I tell people I\u2019m a bad liar, they\u2019re like, \u2018Oh, but you act for a living.\u2019 And then I\u2019m like, \u2018I work really hard to tell the truth when I\u2019m acting.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n More than most films, according to Wever, Primetime\u2019s shape changed radically throughout production and editing. An initial cut of the film ran over three hours; a second one came in around 72 minutes. The final version lies at 110 minutes. \u201cMore than anything else I\u2019ve been a part of, I was not positive what we were making when we made it,\u201d Wever says. \u201cI left the experience knowing that I wasn\u2019t going to know what film they chose to make until I saw it, and who the character was too.\u201d She asks what I made of the film and her character, because knowing how people respond to Andie helps her understand who exactly she played. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to tell me,\u201d adds Wever. \u201cI\u2019m also just trying not to talk.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019d seen Wever with Oppenheim in a Q&A after a Primetime screening before our interview, where the two collegially discussed the \u201clearning curve,\u201d as Wever calls it, of making a film together. \u201cI find that the more chaotic the situation is, the more I can discover little fragments of reality,\u201d Oppenheim told me. She was used to treating the text of a script as scripture; he thought of it as more of a guiding document. \u201cThere were times Merritt struggled with that, and she made that very clear to me. But I liked that. I love Merritt, and I want to work with her on everything else I do.\u201d Among the difficulties: three grueling weeks of night shoots to capture the film\u2019s final sequence where Hansen and his crew coordinate with police to nab a target they want to get on-camera. \u201cLance and I get on really well, but we\u2019re very direct with each other about what was hard\u201d in the process of filming, Wever says. \u201cAnd I am very glad he\u2019s happy with my performance because that means a lot to me. But it\u2019s my nature to go, \u2018Oh, oh, oh, but that\u2019s not \u2026 oh \u2026\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \n In Primetime. Wever\u2019s characteristic, impulsive honesty and circumspection is something she\u2019s wrestled with throughout her time in Hollywood. One of her most enduring moments as a public figure came not through a performance but when she won her first of three Emmy Awards for her role in Nurse Jackie<\/a> in 2013. She delivered an 11-word off-the-cuff thank-you that ended with her announcing, \u201cI gotta go, bye.\u201d As we chat over coffee, she follows that same need to be real to a fault. She often mirrors back questions to me as if we are in a normal conversation and she\u2019s not the one being interviewed: So where did you grow up? When have you regretted telling or not telling the truth in a piece of your own writing? At one point I ask why she hasn\u2019t performed onstage for more than a decade \u2014 not for lack of trying, as it turns out; she auditioned for a play recently and didn\u2019t book it. What she\u2019d really like, she tells me, is to return to an intimate Off Broadway venue, like the Soho Rep, where she played Sonya in Annie Baker\u2019s translation of Uncle Vanya in 2012. She then interjects, adopting a goofy voice, \u201cI can hear my reps going, \u2018Don\u2019t say that! Say that you want to do Broadway!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n After coffee we walk toward the nearby store Books Are Magic. On a set, Wever has trouble absorbing narrative fiction while trying to immerse herself in a character, but \u201cI am woefully unemployed at the moment, so I\u2019m going back to reading.\u201d She recommends Harriet Clark\u2019s The Hill, a novel about a woman visiting her radical mother in jail \u2014 up her alley, she says, because \u201cwe share some things\u201d; Wever grew up in the Penn South co-ops in Chelsea with a caseworker single mother who held Communist Party meetings in their apartment. We also discuss Cynthia Ozick, Annie Ernaux, Sarah Polley\u2019s memoir, and Lena Dunham\u2019s Famesick. Wever herself was in Dunham\u2019s 2010 film, Tiny Furniture, and read an excerpt of her memoir aloud<\/a> for The New Yorker. The book is \u201ca painful read,\u201d she says, though valuable she adds, pointedly, for a journalist like me to understand \u201cwhat it\u2019s like for the people who are actually making TV, the toll it takes on your body.\u201d Soon we\u2019ve gone over our interview time, but Wever has gotten caught up in thinking about whether critics and artists can ever understand each other and has decided she really needs my take on this too. I do my best to reply honestly \u2014 that they only sort of can, because they speak in different ways toward different people \u2014 and she seems satisfied. We shake hands before splitting off in different directions. \u201cMy favorite part of this has been talking to you like a normal person,\u201d she says, then catches sight of my phone again, \u201ceven though that was still going.\u201d<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Primetime is in theaters September 25. 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\n Photo: A24\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/717f937023772a8785bfb114b329568bf4-Primetime-1.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: A24\n <\/p>\n