THE FALL at TCA: Live-Blog

THE FALL is returning to Netflix for a second season on January 16th, and Jamie Dornan (Paul), Gillian Anderson (Stella), and executive producer Allan Cubitt are coming to TCA to talk about what’s in store.

Follow along for the live-blog (but, since the entire season was made available to critics, if anything gets too spoilery about the new season, there may be some extra vagueness)…

9:46 AM: “I think you’ve really got to cling to what makes sense to you,” Dornan says of the humanity in Paul. “You have to find something likeable…there are qualities to him that make him somewhat normal, and I think we can understand being relatively good father and not a terrible husband for the most part.” He also notes he read books to get inside the mind of a serial killer.

9:48 AM: “He’s very much an ordinary man, and that’s disconcerting to people,” Cubitt says of making Paul more realistic versus more surreal, a la Hannibal, etc. “It’s a deliberate choice to make someone who is closer to the reality of the situation.”

9:50 AM: Were Dornan and Anderson on the phone with each other when they filmed the final scene of the first season? Nope. Dornan says Cubitt was playing Stella, and Anderson cracks that he does a great impersonation at her.

9:53 AM: Cubitt says he pitched THE FALL for a 12-episode first season to BBC. When they picked it up, they told him they could only make five episodes for season 1, but he didn’t have to end the tale there.

9:54 AM: Could the show continue, perhaps even without Dornan? Whether Paul makes it through the season, Cubitt says, “I’m very confident there will be a third season.” There’s official stuff to work through with BBC, but he’s hopeful it’ll happen.

9:56 AM: Does Cubitt have an end planned? “As a writer, reaching that point when you [eventually] come to the point when you’re going to end this thing, you have to do what you think is best…you can’t please everyone,” he says.

9:57 AM: Cubitt says he thinks we’re now geared to watching things in bigger clumps. “From that point of view, it’s a good model,” he says of having the show launch in America on Netflix.

Anderson says while people talk on social media about being so excited for the next episode of show, etc., but being able to binge a show means they don’t have to, so you don’t risk people forget to tune in, etc. And the way people have watched television has shifted throughout her run: “X-FILES was the beginning of appointment television, this is the end of appointment television.”

10:00 AM: Anderson loves working on this show, calling it her favorite thing to work on right now. “I felt strongly while doing the first season that Stella was one of my favorite characters I’ve ever played.”

10:01 AM: Do they binge-watch shows? Anderson says her daughter tried to get her to binge-watch BREAKING BAD, but they didn’t get very far. She did make it through SERIAL during the winter break. Dornan is a few episodes behind on SERIAL, but he did binge BREAKING BAD after the finale.

10:05 AM: “I was never in a room, situation, or audition where I was in the conversation to play someone like him,” Dornan says of playing Paul. He notes that while he takes complicated roles, he’s also a “complicated dude.”

10:06 AM: “I think it’s quite typical teenage behavior,” Cubitt says of Katie’s relationship with Paul. “To use a cliche, she’s playing with fire, and she doesn’t quite realize it.” Things come to a head with that storyline in season 2.

10:07 AM: Cubitt confirms he wrote a lot of the role of Stella with Anderson in mind. He notes it’s a dream come true to get your ideal actor to play a character.

What characteristics specifically did he write for Anderson? “I’m wondering the same thing as well,” Anderson laughed.

“She is incredible focused, understated, detailed…with an underpinning of emotion for the most part she chooses to keep in check,” Cubitt says. He points out when you first see Stella in season 1, she was wearing a facial mask and sweatpants.

10:11 AM: “The creation of a female character in order to investigate [the crime]…I had, broadly speaking, feminist intentions at the start of that,” Cubitt says of focusing the show on a female who was searching for a male killer. “These things work if you bring something fresh to them.”

10:14 AM: “We were approached and we had a deal that fell through for a remake of THE FALL,” Cubitt says. He says that since we share a language, we shouldn’t need to remake it for America.

10:15 AM: What’s the different between filming in America versus overseas? Anderson says it feels more personal there, and in America, it feels a little bit like “cattle ranching.”

10:16 AM: “You have to sort of rely on professionalism and see it for what it is,” Dornan says. “You’re still human beings, and it’s still odd positions to be putting people in, often literally with THE FALL. I personally do everything in my power to make the moments before or after the take very light…I don’t find it very personally comfortable to stay in the headspace of someone like [Paul] for too long. A lot of apologies. If I’m doing something especially heinous to an actress, I apologize and say, ‘I’m probably not going to derive a huge amount of pleasure from this.'”