To become Amanda Knox, Grace Van Patten had to inhabit her nuances and trauma very quickly

Los Angeles Times

11 hours ago

New York — The first time Grace Van Patten met Amanda Knox, it was a surreal experience. Not because she would be playing the much-talked-about Knox in the Hulu series 'The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,' but because they decided to go paddle boating in Echo Park Lake. The activity was Knox's idea, the actor says.
'I remember just trying to ask questions, but also trying to keep it cool because it was the first time we were meeting, and also [I was] so out of breath from pedaling because I didn't realize how hard it was going to be,' Van Patten remembers. 'I also was so out of body. I couldn't believe what was going on. I didn't feel present.'
A last-minute addition to the project after another performer dropped out, Van Patten had only about two months to prepare for the intense six-month shoot, in which she had to put herself in the skin of Knox, who was wrongfully convicted of the 2007 killing of her roommate Meredith Kercher during her year abroad in Perugia, Italy. Van Patten had to inhabit not only the trauma that Knox went through, in which her every move was scrutinized by worldwide media, but also the strange whimsy with which she approaches life.
The limited series, premiering Wednesday with two episodes, offers a take on the events narrated by Van Patten as Knox, tracking her youthful joy when she moves to Italy, the terror she felt while incarcerated, and the ultimate forgiveness she bestowed upon her prosecutor. The project is a major moment for Van Patten, a breakout of Hulu's soapy drama 'Tell Me Lies,' as well as one for Knox, who serves as an executive producer. The eight-episode saga created by K.J. Steinberg is an act of reclamation for Knox, and she believes Van Patten captured the nuances that so many people missed when she was a regular presence in the tabloids.
'She got my tics, she does my snort-laugh, all of the little things that make you a person like a fully dimensional person,' Knox says during an interview at the show's New York press day. 'Honoring that young person I was, the kid who had never had anything bad happen to them until a horrific thing happened.'
It's a performance that makes Knox feel grateful. The day before we speak, Knox explains to me that she told Van Patten, 'I cannot believe how lucky I am that you were playing me.'
For Van Patten, now 28, getting the role was also something of a stroke of fate. She had honed in on Knox as someone she wanted to portray nearly 10 years ago. When the Netflix documentary about Knox, simply titled 'Amanda Knox,' came out in 2016, Van Patten had watched it and thought, if they ever made a dramatized account of the story she would love to play her.
'I was so young then too,' she says, perched wearing a denim dress in the downtown Manhattan hotel room. 'It was probably just like, 'Oh this is such an interesting person and that's what I would love to do as an actor.' '
If you look at her resumé, Van Patten's acting career began all the way back when she was a child in two episodes of 'The Sopranos,' directed by her father Tim Van Patten, but it was around the time she watched the Knox film that she began to pursue it seriously.
Though she recently decamped to Los Angeles, she grew up in New York. After graduating from the prestigious Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School — otherwise known as the 'Fame' school — she deferred USC for a year. In that time, she started auditioning and by 2017, she was starring opposite Adam Sandler in Noah Baumbach's 'The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected).' She never started college.
Through her father — whose credits besides 'The Sopranos' include 'Boardwalk Empire,' 'Game of Thrones' and, recently, 'Masters of the Air' — she saw sides of the industry that were not so 'glamorous.' So she took a beat to commit herself to the idea of acting as a job. (Her other love was sports: If she had gone to college she would have wanted to play basketball in some way.)
'I think it just took me a while to have faith in myself and I probably needed some external validation,' she says.
Her full circle moment with Knox's story came when she got a meeting with Steinberg and executive producer Warren Littlefield to take over for Margaret Qualley. Within a week she had the role and from there had about two months to line up an Italian teacher and do as much research as she possibly could.
'It was nice to kind of have a fire under me,' she says.
The show's executive producer Monica Lewinsky understood the challenges of casting someone to play a highly scrutinized real-life subject like Knox. She herself was portrayed in FX's 'Impeachment: American Crime Story' by Beanie Feldstein in 2021.
'I have been through this process as a subject, and I think in talking to Amanda about almost the most important thing that I felt, and that I felt Beanie Feldstein had captured so well, is the emotional truth, my emotional truth as a human being,' she says. 'Where verisimilitude can be really important — and we strived for verisimilitude in this project — I think that someone who looks like you, who can evoke you, if they can't bring out the soul of you, it almost doesn't matter in my opinion.'
Van Patten, she says, was up to the task. 'She just captured my heart in every scene,' Lewinsky adds.
Knox, meanwhile, started to have faith in Van Patten because of the kinds of questions she asked.
Knox recalls, 'She would say things like, 'OK, there are a lot of people who say like you're quirky or whatever, they judge you for that kind of thing, and I just want to get that right, what do they mean by that?' ' (Knox's answer: 'Like the musical theater kids at school.') Van Patten also wanted to know the nonverbal ways that Knox and her husband Christopher Robinson communicate with each other. (Touching hands.)
'I didn't want to attempt to do some impersonation or impression,' Van Patten says. 'I was so much more interested in capturing essence and portraying her emotions authentically.'
In person you can tell they are not one-to-one. Van Patten's voice has a huskiness to it that Knox's lacks. And while Knox has the carefully chosen words of a practiced public speaker, Van Patten has a chillness that pervades.
Knox didn't coach Van Patten through every second of the grueling interrogation scene depicted in the second episode, which condenses 53 hours of ruthless questioning into one harrowing scene. 'She had such really good instincts,' Knox says. 'Even the way that scene is crafted you realize everyone in the room is kind of being gaslit by each other, everyone's sort of crafting this false narrative around Amanda and she's trying to figure it out as it's going. It's such a nuanced scene and she carried it.'
During filming, which took place in Rome and Budapest, Van Patten says she didn't do much other than work and sleep, though Lewinsky says she brought genuine warmth and cheeriness to the set.
'I was very much trying to be in her brain as much as possible and trying to see these situations through her eyes as best as I could and then getting home and making sure that I'm settling back into me and staying calm and winding down so that I could just be present and open,' she says.
The fact that her real-life sister, Anna Van Patten, played her on-screen sister also helped ground her, along with visits from their family.
Van Patten didn't have much time to recenter herself after shooting on 'The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox' wrapped. About three weeks later, she had to start shooting Season 3 of 'Tell Me Lies,' where she plays college student Lucy Albright who is in and out of a toxic relationship with the hunky and volatile Stephen DeMarco (played by Jackson White, who is Van Patten's actual boyfriend).
She was thankful it was a part she knew well. In her brief downtime she did as little as possible. 'I was horizontal for three weeks, it felt like,' she says. 'But that's kind of life when I'm not working.'
Now she is prepping to see how her version of Amanda will be received. 'There will be a lot of strong preconceived opinions going into this, so I'm really curious and hoping that people can be open to reconsidering their thoughts on it through watching it,' Van Patten says.
Knox already considers the series a 'dream scenario.'
'The burden is taken off me to be and explain Amanda Knox to the world and the fact that Grace would be willing to take that on — she knew my story and she knew the kind of baggage and challenge that it would be to represent me and to carry that torch alongside me,' Knox says.
Van Patten had waited a decade to do so.