Father-son relationship drew Corey Stoll to 'Better Sister' role

UPI

5 days ago

1 of 4 | Corey Stoll's "The Better Sister" premieres Thursday. Photo courtesy of Prime Video
NEW YORK, May 28 (UPI) -- House of Cards and Many Saints of Newark actor Corey Stoll says he wanted to play successful New York lawyer Adam in The Better Sister because the character is a man with the veneer of a perfect life hiding a painful past.
"He's a complex guy," Stoll, 49, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. "He did not have the greatest childhood and has made something of himself, but has never really sort of let go of that chip on his shoulder."
Premiering on Prime Video Thursday, the adaptation of Alafair Burke's best-selling novel follows what happens when Adam's media executive wife Chloe (Jessica Biel) finds him beaten to death in their summer home.
Almost immediately, Adam's troubled teen son Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan) becomes the prime suspect, putting Adam's previous marriage to Nicky (Elizabeth Banks) -- Ethan's estranged, troubled mother and Chloe's sister -- into the harsh spotlight.
"It was really great having these two marriages to sort of work with, but it was the relationship with my son from the first marriage that really drew me to the material," Stoll said.
"It was the thing that I could identify with the most," he added. "There's something about father-son relationships that can be so fraught. It's so full of love, but so full of this sort of inability to cross that threshold and really express that love. There's just a lot of rich material in that."
While it may have been the family drama of the show that hooked Stoll, he also enjoyed the whodunnit aspect that surrounds his character's death.
"It's very obvious why it's a great project to do because it's just so twisty and turny and the show is always ahead of the audience," Stoll said.
"You constantly have to watch the next one, go to the next scene, go to the next episode, because you just have to find out how this is all going to pan out."
Because Adam is killed early in the story, most of what viewers learn about him comes from flashback scenes and the memories of his widow, ex-wife and son, not all of whom agree on their accounts of events.
Stoll recalled it was a constant group effort between the cast and crew to remind him of his time and space.
"I would read [the scripts] carefully and try to keep track, but, often, I'd be on set and be like: 'Oh, wait a second. What decade are we in? What do we know? What don't we know?'" Stoll said.
Of course, actors are used to shooting scenes out of order, but this job had more moving parts than most.
"This is taking place over the course of decades and, also, those plot points are so important because it's this murder mystery, so that was challenging," he said.
"But, luckily, the scripts were pretty airtight and you can really sort of hold on to, like: 'What is this scene? Let's just play this scene for what it is without having to sort of play the whole series.'"
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