Yahoo News Fatal Attraction star Joshua Jackson says his Dan 'has to deal with the repercussions of his actions'
"And the Emmy goes to…?" We'll know the answer to that on Sept. 18, but this week EW's The Awardist is kicking off its coverage of the 2023 Emmys with an exclusive look at five returning and new series that will debut over the next two months — shows and actors that hope to be nominees when those are announced on July 12.
Joshua Jackson would like to make one thing clear: Dan Gallagher is not the victim.
When Jackson agreed to join the Fatal Attraction TV series, he was most intrigued by all the ways the story would differ from the iconic 1987 film, which starred Michael Douglas as successful businessman Dan Gallagher, a.k.a. the man who finds himself in a deadly affair with Alex Forrest (Glenn Close).
"My only nervousness about it was that everybody has an opinion about what Fatal Attraction is," Jackson tells EW for our Awardist preview. But when he asked showrunner Alexandra Cunningham why she wanted to tell the story, her answer sold him on the idea. "I liked her desire to tell a story that uses the benefit of TV and the amount of time that you have to really get into the characters, and to use that space to go deeper into the psychology of Alex Forrest and who she is and why she is the way she is and what in particular it is about Dan that is the perfect toxic element in her life."
Michael Moriatis/Paramount+ Joshua Jackson in 'Fatal Attraction'
Lizzy Caplan will play Alex in the series, but for Jackson, the portrayal of Dan was something they talked about a lot — particularly how setting the same story in present-day changes things. "The movie really presents him as the victim of circumstance, even though he's the one that committed the act," Jackson says. "I thought it was interesting when you really start to examine the type of personality that would take this, from the outside, seemingly perfect life and put it in jeopardy to do something so selfish. Why does a man choose to do this? And then once he's committed the act, in particular, Dan's ego doesn't allow him to take accountability for the thing that he's just done. So he doubles down and creates even more havoc and then doubles down again, creates even more havoc. I thought that was an interesting take on the story of Fatal Attraction."
Monty Brinton/Paramount+ Lizzy Caplan and Joshua Jackson in 'Fatal Attraction'
Thanks to the show utilizing multiple timelines, Jackson says we'll also get to see the long-term effects of Dan's choices. "The huge difference on the Dan side of the story is we have the time to really delve into the damage that he's causing," he says. "Honestly, the movie is very sympathetic to him. At no point does he seemingly feel all that guilty about what he's done. So we get into what might have happened if we saw all of those characters say five, 10, 15 years after the event, and the damage has now had a chance to seep down into the cracks of his marriage and the rest of his life. He actually has to deal with the repercussions of his actions."
Michael Moriatis/Paramount+ Joshua Jackson and Amanda Peet in 'Fatal Attraction'
One of the people most affected by Dan's actions is, of course, his wife Beth (Amanda Peet), whose story will also be expanded in the series. "It's an extremely complicated position for a wife and a mother to be in, and I think this is another place where we're in a better cultural conversation now, where you can be a variety of things inside the same person instead of being one thing," Jackson says. "She makes the choice to be with her man, fix the problem, and that's something they don't really delve into in the movie because it's not how the traumatic narrative is set up."
Michael Moriatis/Paramount+ Joshua Jackson in 'Fatal Attraction'
Ultimately, Jackson points to Dan's ego and his obsession with his image as a central reason why he's unable to make better choices for himself and his family.
"If he could step down off his own pedestal, he could save himself so much pain, but because he's invested in the image of himself, of this successful man, loving father, doting husband, he can't grapple with the fact that he did something against that," Jackson says. "He really has no love for himself. He doesn't have the grace or sympathy for himself to accept that he is also a flawed person and has done something unequivocally bad that he would definitely need to make up for. But if he could admit the first bad thing, he could save himself from all the rest of these pains."
Monty Brinton/Paramount+ Joshua Jackson and Lizzy Caplan on 'Fatal Attraction'
Fatal Attraction premieres April 30 on Paramount+.
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