Lizzy Caplan Jokes About Working With Her 'Fatal Attraction' Co-Star Joshua Jackson
We all know that some remakes should never see the life of day (hello, 2011’s Charlie’s Angels and 2006’s The Pink Panther), and others deserve a reinterpretation through a modern-day lens. Fortunately for co-stars Lizzy Caplan and Joshua Jackson, their latest drama, Fatal Attraction, falls into the latter camp.
The actors star in a reimagining of the 1987 film of the same name, which originally starred Glenn Close and Michael Douglas, showing now on Paramount+. Caplan stars as Alex Forrest, the scorned mistress to Jackson’s married character Dan Gallagher, and explores themes of infidelity and monogamy in 2023, as well as sensitive and polemic subjects such as personality disorders and coercive control.
Ahead of the psychological thriller’s release, Caplan joked of working with Jackson during a recent game of ELLE UK’s Ask Me Anything: ‘It was absolute torture working with Joshua Jackson – he should be arrested.’
Speaking about her character, she noted: ‘It was important to show Alex as a nuanced character, because why else revisit it? Glenn Close did an incredible job in the film and she did all of this behind-the-scenes work that didn’t really make it onto the screen, and we had this opportunity, now that we have eight full hours to explore Alex’s psyche to really get into it, so I guess there wouldn’t have been much point of remaking it otherwise.’
‘Even if you feel a shred of compassion for Alex, that is what I’d be most proud of,’ she added.
Caplan has starred in numerous projects since her first role in Freaks and Geeks in the late Nineties. In recent years she’s led TV series such as Masters of Sex and Fleishman Is In Trouble, and starred in films like Now You See Me 2 and Cloverfield. However, arguably her most recognisable role for most millennials with a memory of flip phones and Nickelodeon, is as the moody goth Janis Ian in 2004’s Mean Girls.
‘If I could play any character in Mean Girls that wasn’t Janis [Ian], I would play the girl who talks about her wide-set vagina,’ she told us, noting that she ‘stole’ some of her character’s wardrobe from set, including a pair of painted trousers.
While Mean Girls has become synonymous with Y2K fashion, serving us everything from low-rise jeans to choker necklaces, Caplan’s favourite trend from the Noughties was ‘boys’ boxer shorts as shorts’.
‘I think the Mean Girls quote people say to me the most – I feel like everyone knows every line to that movie – [is] “your mum’s chest hair?”’ she recalled.
Caplan married British actor Tom Riley in 2017 and has developed a love of certain British delicacies, including brown crab on toast and black pudding’. ‘I love some of the reality TV from the UK,’ she revealed, adding: ‘Obviously I started off with Bake Off – baby games – I have since graduated to Gogglebox and First Dates. I’m a huge fan of First Dates.’
From the best acting advice she’s received to which of her characters she’d like to be friends with, you can watch the rest of Lizzy Caplan’s Ask Me Anything video at the top of this article.
Episodes of Fatal Attraction are now available to watch now on Paramount+.
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