Dead Ringers: Poppy Liu Explains the Surprising Secrets of the Prime Video Remake
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The post Dead Ringers: Poppy Liu Explains the Surprising Secrets of the Prime Video Remake appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Prime Video’s Dead Ringers.]
The Prime Video remake of Dead Ringers is centered on the story of gynecologist twins Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played by Rachel Weisz), whose deep bond frays as they work together to innovate the ways in which women give birth today. The Mantle twins live in a complicated world packed with complicated characters, though, including Greta (Poppy Liu, Hacks), the house manager who looks after their domestic needs. Greta has ulterior motives in working for the twins, however, revealed slowly over the course of the six-episode season.
Greta at first seems like she’s up to something extremely nefarious, given how (when the Mantles aren’t looking) she’s collecting seemingly endless biological samples from the twins, including hair and used tampons. “It’s interesting because a lot of the creepy stuff my character does, she does alone,” Liu tells Consequence. “I’m literally the only actor on set for a lot of those shots — when she’s in her kind of Silence of the Lambs-esque basement, it’s just me. The set design that they did for that basement was chilling. Because it feels like she’s a serial killer. It feels like it was going down a totally different route.”
Playing the role was something Liu savored, they say, because “it kind of felt like Greta was her own kind of side canvas, where everyone’s like, ‘We’re going to all put a little bit of our own input into this character.’ There was a lot of co-creation with hair, makeup, wardrobe — I think they really let all the different creative departments run with it.”
This included the creation of Greta’s apartment: “The set design of that basement and what you see on screen is just literally a fraction of it. There are drawers upon drawers all labeled with freaky little body parts, different fluids or things or compartments. It’s so extensive.”
Not to mention the costume design by Keri Langerman: “Keri is an Asian woman, and I remember during our first fitting, she too was like, ‘I find this character really interesting. And also as an Asian person, I also don’t want anyone to ever look at Greta and be like, oh, you’re an Asian maid person. We’re going to do that by making sure she’s the best-dressed person in every room that she’s in.’ And I think she accomplished that to a point where it’s almost confusing why Greta’s chopping apples wearing designer leather pants and an Ariana Grande ponytail, or in a full face of makeup serving tea.”
Dead Ringers (Prime Video)
In the season finale, Greta’s reasons for cataloging the twins get revealed: She’s an artist using the samples she’s gathered to create an installation piece about her own birth, which also led to the death of Greta’s mother. “It almost feels like it’s a trauma response,” Liu says. “Greta should have just gone to therapy and instead she was like, ‘Let me work in your home and collect your tampons and make my little art installation instead.’ I guess everyone copes with trauma differently.”
The twist was one that Liu enjoyed, because “in the end, you’re like, ‘Oh, you just have unsolved trauma and you’re processing it through your little artistic heart, aw.’ Whereas earlier on you’re like, ‘[Greta’s] a killer. She’s going to kill everybody.'”
Below, Liu explains in depth why they initially rejected the role, how race played a factor in that initial rejection, and what ultimately convinced them to take on the project. They also explore how actors like Lucy Liu — with whom Liu (no relation) bonded on the set of Law & Order: SVU — have made careers like theirs possible today.
To start, talk about how your character was initially presented to you.
It was very under wraps during the casting, it was under a pseudonym called Larry’s Diner — you met Larry in the first scene in that diner, it was kind of an inside joke that it was Larry’s Diner. So when I first got the appointment in my inbox, there wasn’t really any information about the show. I didn’t have any scripts to read — it was maybe a page and a half of scenes, but scenes without the context of the show, and now that you’ve seen how strange my character is, the scenes didn’t totally even make that much sense. It wasn’t even Greta being weird and freaky and arty. It was just her doing housekeeper stuff and cleaning or getting the twins to bed or whatever.
So when I first read it, I actually passed on it initially because there was a lot in the description about she’s secretly an artist and all that stuff, but she’s working as a housekeeper, which I kind of read at the time as a maid character — and that specifically she is Asian too. I was like, “Oh, I don’t know if I feel very called to play an Asian maid.”
I think I just kind of glanced through it and was like, “Meh.” But then Alice Birch and Sean Durkin hit me up and I was like, Well, dang, they rock.” But also they were like, “We actually want you to read some of the scripts and if you’re down, we’d love to do a Zoom call and talk to you about the character and the world.” I think they sent me the first three scripts of it and then we had a call.
I mean, it is like nothing I could have imagined. It’s unlike any script I’ve ever read before. It transcends genre. I was like, “Oh, this character is actually so freaky and strange and interesting and a weird Rubik’s cube to solve, and there’s layers upon layers. It’s stylistically so fascinating.”
In our call, we talked about the character a lot and what they envisioned, which I found it interesting once I found out what show it was and that it was a remake of the original Cronenberg. She’s one of the few characters that is a totally new character that they made up — it was interesting to think about where she fits into the world.
And yeah, I like that she’s very sneaky. I like that it’s never explicitly said, but it feels almost like she placed herself specifically in the world of the Mantle twins to do her little deeds and create her little art projects. In the final episode, when I have my big voiceover explaining my own origin story and the death of my mother during childbirth and the trauma that came with it… It makes sense, the obsession I have with these two people that are at the forefront of birthing and the projection of mother onto them, the mothering of them, the obsession with their mother, the obsession with just people giving birth.
Within the last performance piece, where I’m like, “It’s the moment of birth,” it became clear that when trauma happens, that moment in time becomes crystallized and you become obsessed with it and you also can’t escape it. Whatever was just one event becomes an elongated thing. And for Greta, it feels really clear that she’s fixated and stuck on the moment of birth, because that’s when her own mother died.
The voiceover initially at the end said something like, “I look everywhere for the doctor that delivered me. And sometimes when I’m walking on the streets, I think I see him.” And I asked Alice if we could just change the him to her, to leave it open-ended for the possibility that I was like, “Maybe it’s the Mantle twins that delivered Greta, and she’s fixated on this for this reason.”
She was like, “Love it, we’ll change that.” I think it was more for my own mind — it helps the story for the character to feel full circle. I don’t know if anyone else will even feel that or think that when they see it.
Dead Ringers (Prime Video)
So the casting breakdown specified that the character was Asian. Did you ever get an answer or an explanation, or was it ever discussed why it was important for that character to be Asian?
I have my own thoughts and feelings about it. I think me, Alice, and Sean did talk about this during our first Zoom call. And I don’t remember at this point how much of this was what we discussed in the call, or how much if it was just like, “This is what makes sense for me as the actor playing her now.” But it really feels like… I don’t know if it’s so much Asian as it is that she is an immigrant person of color.
When you see Greta’s own home, which is in Jackson Heights in Queens, it’s a very immigrant neighborhood and stuff, and you see the class differentiation of the world of the Mantle twins, which is pretty much the rest of the show, which is beyond upper class. It’s a la-la land tier of just people that are so disconnected from reality that they are just delusional with power. You just are in literally a different cloud.
But I think that was really important for her character that she’s cosplaying in the world of the Mantle twins, to insert herself into their lives. And I also think her being a person of color in a service industry role, it just is invisible labor historically. But I think the character uses that to her advantage and as her superpower, that this is the only way that she can get this close to the Mantle twins without anything being detected. They don’t suspect. They barely notice her, even though she’s running their lives and doing all this stuff.
I think I find Greta to be a very smart person, and I think she very deliberately used that historically invisibilized work as her superpower, to be able to get access. There are these glimpses of people that are of a different class level that infiltrate, for a moment, the Mantle twins’ world. It’s interesting that Greta is a witness to everything. She even puts together the pieces [about Agnes] because she cleans up the mess of the apartment after that huge party happens and then she sees the police, the sectioned-off area, and puts two and two and two together. She sees so much behind the scenes of what’s going on.
And I feel like as a device in the show, to have this character who’s kind of witnessing the world, it’s just interesting. It’s such a held-together-on-a-tight-rope, about-to-fall-apart-at-any-moment glass castle that they live in.
Dead Ringers (Prime Video)
You mention that you originally passed because the character could be boiled down to “Asian maid” — how often do you find yourself facing that sort of situation?
Honestly, not that often. I think it’s a sign of the times. When I first started working with my team, too, I made a whole goals list, a statement for my career and bullet points of the kinds of jobs I’m interested in, or the kinds of things I don’t want to be doing, or just intentions I wanted to set for how I want to move through the world as an artist. And I feel really supported by my team on that, and I feel really supported in saying no to things that I don’t feel really called to do.
And that was a big consideration — where I was like, “I don’t want to feel pigeonholed in a way because of race.” I think race in particular felt like a big one where I was like, “I want to feel expansive in my own identity.” I do want to tell Asian stories, though — I think we are really seeing this golden age of Asian cinema and TV like we’ve never seen before.
My manager works very closely with Lucy Liu, who I got to work with because Lucy directed an episode of Law & Order: SVU that I was on in 2019. Nicest, best person ever, first of all. Sweetheart. Sometimes you meet your heroes and it’s scary because you’re like, “What if they suck and then I’m sad?” But then you meet people like Lucy and you’re like, “You’re the nicest, best person.”
It was just a one-day shoot because I was just a guest star, but she would only speak Mandarin to me on set because she was like, “I never going to speak Mandarin. This is so fun and great.” And everyone’s like, we have the same last name too. So everyone was like, “Are you cousins? Do you know each other?” And I was like, “We’re cousins because all Chinese people are cousins.” It was just really sweet.
But I remember my manager, Peg, saying that she’s been working with Lucy for decades, and that in the beginning of her career, she couldn’t get a single casting call that wasn’t asking her to speak in an accent or wasn’t her playing a secretary or a maid or whatever. And things are really different now, and we stand on their shoulders. I have been able to have such a diverse array of characters I’ve gotten to play already — this just wouldn’t have been the case even 10 years ago.
To answer your question, I think the experience I’ve had is really specific to this moment in time, and the work of all of our predecessors combing through an inbox filled with one-dimensional stereotypical roles, and having to choose between having a career or playing characters that were like, “This just feels kind of terrible.” So I feel grateful.
Dead Ringers is streaming now on Prime Video.
Dead Ringers: Poppy Liu Explains the Surprising Secrets of the Prime Video Remake
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