After starring in the gender-flipped series adaptation of David Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers", Rachel Weisz is back to television with "Vladimir", an eight-episode limited series based on Julia May Jonas' debut novel of the same name.
Netflix has announced a March 5 streaming premiere date for the show, billed as a "twisted comedy-drama", which also features John Slattery and Leo Woodall.
According to the official logline, Vladimir follows "an unnamed, middle-aged protagonist (Weisz) who is a writer, professor, wife, and mom. As her life unravels, she becomes obsessed with a captivating new colleague, the eponymous Vladimir, at the small liberal arts college where she’s worked for decades. Full of sexy secrets, dark humour, and complex characters, Vladimir is about what happens when a woman is hell-bent on turning her fantasies into reality."
The woman's professor husband is played by Slattery, while Woodall essays Vladimir, a fellow writer and professor with whom she becomes fixated.
The show is going ot have Weisz breaking the fourth wall, in the same way that Phoebe Waller-Bridge did in her show "Fleabag" — a narrative choice that Jonas says makes sense for a cinematic adaptation. “We managed to make external a lot of those internalisations through the direct address and the fantasy and things like that,” the author says.
For Rachel, this choice helped accessibility. “You have direct access to what the character is thinking and then also what she wants you to think,” she told Netflix. “What she wants you to think is a little distant from the total truth. The narrative she tells isn’t always accurate, but that seems like a very human trait — to adjust the truth for one’s audience when things are [getting] out of control.”
Woodall feels that breaking the fourth wall makes it "immersive" and "fun."
“When Rachel’s character breaks the fourth wall, we, the audience, are in on the joke, which makes it immersive and fun. But also, there’s a world in which she is justifying some of the actions that she takes, like we all do — when you do or say something, and you immediately need to rationalise it. That makes her very relatable,” he added.
