Lizzy Caplan’s Perfect Year
Up until now, Lizzy Caplan had avoided back-to-back projects. Not intentionally, but rather, that’s just the way things unfolded. So, of course, this year — the year she had her first child — would be the one where she bounded from a six-month shoot in New York, to immediately shoot another show in Los Angeles, to then embark on a full-on press tour.
“It’s been a crazy year, that i’m honestly mostly very grateful for,” Caplan says. “But in this moment I’m feeling a little crazy.”
On Zoom from her home in L.A., Caplan is preparing to wrap work on the television adaptation of “Fatal Attraction” before boarding a flight to New York to do press for “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” her new series. Adapted from New York Times writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s bestseller of the same name, the story follows Toby, a doctor in his 40s with two kids living in New York who is finding his footing through his divorce from Rachel when she suddenly goes missing. The story is narrated by Libby, Toby’s old friend who has moved to the suburbs with her family and, through supporting Toby on his saga, goes through her own life-questioning crisis. Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes are Toby and Rachel; Caplan, for her part, knew she was meant to play Libby.
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“I love this book. If you like the book I think it’s safe to say you’re going to like the show.
“It’s the truest adaptation of a book I’ve ever seen,” Caplan says.
She’d heard through her agents that the series adaptation was floating around, and once she learned a producer she’d worked with on “Masters of Sex” was involved, she approached her for the role of Libby.
“I find the idea of narrating a whole show very appealing, especially if it’s done in a way that works and I think that it actually works really beautifully [here],” Caplan says. “I like the idea of being part of something where you’re presented with a character who you have some ideas about and then hopefully by the end those ideas have been upended or deepened or altered in numerous ways. I didn’t really identify with the Rachel character ever — it was always Libby. We have a similar upbringing, there was enough to tap into.”
She also was interested in Libby’s status as a woman who left the city for the suburbs to raise children and is now feeling adrift.
“I was pregnant when I started speaking to them about it so it was sort of staring down the barrel of this next chapter of life and domesticity and it felt like the right time to do it,” she says. “On one hand, it made sense to me in a very instantaneous way, because it’s about this girl who has these friends and they met in Israel and theres this Jewish upbringing. It was like the East Coast version of my upbringing. I had these friends, I was definitely raised Jewish, I went to Israel, I did all these things. There was this instant familiarity with who this character is, combined with, honestly, feeling disconnected with the ennui of the suburbs and the kids and the long marriage and feeling really trapped and giving up a career to move to the suburbs and raise these children — that doesn’t mirror my life at all,” Caplan continues. “So it was this weird combination of something that felt more familiar than anything else I’ve ever read, and then this other side of it that I can identify with as a potential nightmare.”
Due to timing of her pregnancy and the pandemic, Caplan says she’d been holed up at home for plenty of time and hadn’t worked for a bit.
“For a lot of actresses, certainly for a lot of my actress friends, there’s this weird period when you’re about to have a baby and you don’t really know what your life as an actress will look like,” she says. “I didn’t know what to hope for, I wasn’t trying to fully identify what I was going for and was trying to keep it open and loose, but to be honest, this was the version of first year of motherhood that was beyond my wildest dreams. It was perfect, it was ideal.”
Coming back to L.A. and immediately getting out of the suburban-New-Yorker-mom character and into “Fatal Attraction” mode was just the culture shock she was looking for.
“For me personally, I’m happiest when I can be bouncing around and doing the most disparate types of roles, just changing it up. And there couldn’t be more of a whiplash change up from Libby to Alex in ‘Fatal Attraction,’” Caplan says. “Libby’s physicality, she’s somebody who’s sort of given up. She’s past the point of caring about her appearance and she’s fully enmeshed in this domesticated suburban life, and that felt very right for my headspace at the beginning of that. And it’s been really great to know that I have to turn that off and be the complete opposite right in the moment that I probably needed to feel more like my previous self.”
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