Wilderness creators call out society for being 'uncomfortable with women being angry'

Watch: Wilderness creative team discuss the show's depiction of female rage:

Wilderness is an unapologetic portrayal of female rage and it tries to rectify decades of society being "really uncomfortable" with women expressing their anger, the show's creator Marnie Dickens and director So Yong Kim tell Yahoo UK.

The Prime Video series stars Jenna Coleman as Liv, a Welsh woman who up sticks and moves to New York for husband Will (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) only to later learn he is cheating on her, and has done so for some time despite him claiming it was a "one-time" mistake.

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Understandably angry, Liv concocts an elaborate plan to kill Will and get away with it during their road trip across the US, and viewers follow along with her as she prepares to make it a reality.

"I was thinking about women's rage this morning and was hoping it would come up," Dickens says when asked why Hollywood is so afraid to depict female rage, particularly from a woman's perspective.

"I think it's not Hollywood I think it's society, and Hollywood has sort of amplified it. We're really uncomfortable with women being angry and expressing it."

"Since you're a kid you're told as a girl to be quiet and be good, and you see boys' behaviour treated in a completely different way, so it felt like a very deliberate thing that we were tackling... addressing female rage."

Kim commented on how there is "a sense of shame with hysteria, especially with women" within society and has become codified, so they wanted to challenge this notion.

The series isn't afraid to show Liv at her worst, it gives her the space to be messy and let out her anger at Will when his wrongs come to light. Even as she comes up with ways in which to kill him the audience always remains by her side.

Kim adds: "I think, from the beginning, Marnie and I were on the same page about how we wanted to approach this journey for Liv.

"In many ways we are walking this fine line between right and wrong and we didn't want to [think] 'oh we're on the right side or the wrong side.' We wanted to be with her constantly, and take [her] point of view of this experiential take on each of the scenes."

The adaptation process

Dickens, who also writes the series, first came across B.E. Jones' book when executive producer Elizabeth Kilgarriff gave her a copy, "pointed [her] to a dark room" and told her she couldn't leave until she had finished the book.

"I really did read it in one go, not least because I had been forbidden from leaving," Dickens joked.

"I was drawn in by the very twisty-turny plottings of it, but actually the thing that excited me — apart from the amazing show-stopping locations that Bev had chosen — was it tells a relationship drama, but gets it instantly out of the domestic sphere.

"So you're just turbocharging something, and it gets natural stakes, so those are the things that initially brought me in, and I had to have a female protagonist."

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Coleman was the "top of the list" for Dickens and Kim when they first began working on the project, and Dickens said it was about "going on a wing and a prayer and hoping that she responded to the scripts, which fortunately she did."

They felt it was important to have an open discussion with Coleman about the show's themes and her character, so they knew they were "aligned on what you want to be portraying".

"She goes on a huge journey," Dickens says. "She does some really questionable things across the whole series, things that are really hard to come back from.

"It's not that you need to be cheering her on every second, but as long as you are understanding why she's doing what she's doing then I think we've overcome the challenge of the adaptation."

Another aspect of the book that they incorporated was Liv's Welsh heritage, and particularly the character's accent which Coleman uses in the series.

"It felt like it did add an extra dimension of otherness to this young woman over in New York, and within her and Will's relationship," Dickens said.

"But at the same time, when you're lucky enough [and] Jenna Coleman says 'yes', you say, 'OK, well it's up to you [if you want to use the accent].'

"Bev's been really fantastic as a collaborator so it could have changed if we wanted it to change, but Jenna is such a truthful performer, I'd say, that she wanted to honour the original intention."

Challenging The Other Woman stereotype

As well as allowing Liv to express her rage, another stereotype that Dickens and Kim were "really keen" to challenge was the idea of the 'Other Woman' as Liv meets the person Will is cheating on her with. The two women are at odds at first, but this changes the more they get to know each other.

Of doing this, Dickens says: "That was one of the first things I said to Liz when we were talking about whether it was the right project for us, was that we are just fed the whole time 'women beware women'.

"These gender notions of 'the other woman', and all of it, you just don't have the equivalent, there is no 'the other man', it's very rare to have that sort of debate.

The creator stipulates that the show still has "fun" with the narrative, adding: "At the beginning, we are going down more fun, cliché route of 'oh she's getting obsessed with this other woman' and it's got little hints of those brilliantly fun '90s [films] like Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction.

"We do lean into the stereotype, and then what we tried to do, I hope, is explode that because the truth is once you get to know each other you're realising you're just messy individuals, and in this case both ill-used by this man

"There is always, I think, much more common ground between women than we realise but we have been, sorry to say it, by the patriarchy pitted against each other, so this felt like a really important corrective to that narrative."

Both Kim and Dickens hope viewers come to the Prime Video series with an open mind and "watch Liv with a lot of empathy and connection", Kim says, because as Dickens adds: "I don't think we're ever that far away from these big decisions that she makes.

"I think the primitive, rageful side to women which we've always been told not to express is there, and the more we're told not to express it the more it kind of tinder boxes out. I personally end the series with her and on her side, so I hope viewers do too."

Wilderness launches globally on Prime Video on Friday, 15 September.

Watch the trailer for Wilderness: