Nicole Kidman as Kay Scarpetta in the season one finale of the TV adaptation 'Scarpetta.' Connie Chornuk / Prime © Amazon Content Services LLC Logo text [This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the season one finale of Scarpetta.]
In 1990, Patricia Cornwell published her debut novel, Postmortem, about a forensic pathologist named Kay Scarpetta — inspired by real-life former chief medical examiner Marcella Farinelli Fierro — who investigates suspicious deaths in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Drawing from her experiences working as a crime reporter and then in the Virginia medical examiner’s office, Cornwell blazed a new trail in the traditionally male crime thriller genre. Since then, with her laser focus on cutting-edge forensic science, Cornwell has published 28 more Scarpetta novels and sold more than 120 million copies.
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Over the years, multiple attempts to bring Scarpetta to the screen have failed. Demi Moore was attached to play the character in the ’90s after Columbia Pictures optioned the rights to the fourth novel Cruel and Unusual, while Angelina Jolie was supposed to headline a series of films starting in 2009. But in early 2021, Jamie Lee Curtis reached out to Cornwell, whom she had known socially, to inquire about what had happened to Scarpetta. Once she discovered that the author had regained control over her life’s work, Curtis reached out to her new producing partner Jason Blum about optioning the books for TV, officially acquiring the rights in June.
The following year, Curtis ran into Nicole Kidman for the first time at the 2022 Academy Awards, where Curtis was paying tribute to Betty White and Kidman was nominated for playing Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos. Curtis later learned from Kidman’s producing partner, Per Saari, that she had always wanted to play Scarpetta, because her sister Antonia and late mother Janelle were avid fans of Cornwell’s novels. But there was initially a slight misunderstanding between the Oscar- and Emmy-winning actresses.
“I was not intending on being in the show,” Curtis confesses to The Hollywood Reporter. “When Nicole agreed to do the show, because I was a producer, I think there was an assumption like, ‘And you’re in the show, right?’ At that moment, it was, as I like to say, ‘Yes, queen! Yes, of course, I’m in the show!’”
Once she finished chatting with Kidman, Curtis, in a fit of panic, immediately called Cornwell and showrunner Liz Sarnoff, who agreed that Curtis could play Kay’s flighty sister, Dorothy. With Kidman and Curtis attached to star and executive produce, Amazon’s Prime Video officially ordered two eight-episode seasons of Scarpetta in September 2024.
Ambitiously told across two timelines, the TV adaptation follows Kay as she returns to the Commonwealth of Virginia to reassume the role of Chief Medical Examiner. The debut season, drawing from Cornwell’s Postmortem and Autopsy, pits Kay against a new serial killer targeting women. As she hunts for the copycat killer, Kay grapples with the long-buried guilt of a lie told during her first major investigation decades earlier. (Rosy McEwen portrays the younger Kay in the late ’90s.)
Kay’s inner turmoil is “what makes her such a great character to play, because she’s so measured [and] controlled. She wants to be right, and she’s been wrong. She’s made mistakes, and she’s had to keep a lie — and that is a terrible inner conflict for a person like Kay,” Kidman tells THR. “What’s been so ingenious about how Liz Sarnoff created this show is the weaving of the two timelines and the coming back to a job. As she said the other night when we were talking about it, when you come back to a job, you want to see what’s changed — and really, has anything changed? That’s also a fascinating part of the basis of this show.”
Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis in Scarpetta. Connie Chornuk/Prime From the moment Kidman was cast, some diehard fans have continuously expressed their disappointment about the actress not matching the exact way Kay was described in Cornwell’s novels. But Sarnoff, who has a personal connection with the source material, insists that Kidman captured the essence of the protagonist. (It also helps that Cornwell herself approved of the casting; the two even share a scene together, as Cornwell swears Kidman in as the new medical chief in the pilot.)
“We knew she could do it because she’s a shapeshifter, and the eyes and the emotion she brings to everything is real,” Sarnoff says of Kidman. “I knew that would be incredibly valuable, because we were going to tell a more emotional story in the present and the more procedural police story in the past. The present is really about the family and the relationships and how they’ve survived or haven’t. Once people see it, they’ll see how she embodies it and understand why she’s perfect for it, because she’s a very cerebral person — and so is Scarpetta.”
Once they agreed to play sisters, Kidman and Curtis decided to call on some of the former’s previous co-stars to build out the dysfunctional family at the heart of this series. After playing husband and wife in an episode of the Apple TV anthology Roar, Kidman enlisted Simon Baker, whom she has known for over 30 years, to play Kay’s FBI profiler spouse, Benton Wesley. “It’s a great delight to have a rapport with someone over so much time, and that just walks onto the set with you, whether you like it or not,” Baker says. “We have a history together, so there’s an ease, a comfort, a trust and a respect creatively.”
Kidman had previously worked with Ariana DeBose on Ryan Murphy’s The Prom, and Curtis had defended DeBose amid the backlash to her infamous rap at the 2023 BAFTA Awards (where she famously declared that “Angela Bassett did the thing”). On the set of Freakier Friday, Curtis personally texted DeBose to offer her the role of Dorothy’s tech whiz daughter Lucy, who is grieving the loss of her wife Janet by keeping her alive as an AI bot.
A little before that, Curtis also sent a cold text to Kidman’s former Nine Perfect Strangers co-star Bobby Cannavale. “I’d never met her, and she said, ‘Hello, sir. Would it interest you in playing my husband?’ That’s all it said. I said, ‘Yeah, tell me more,’” says Cannavale, who stars as detective Pete Marino. “This is a woman with much experience in this business. She knows how to pitch.”
Baker and Cannavale are no strangers to playing law enforcement — the former famously spent seven seasons playing a savant consultant for the CBI on CBS’ The Mentalist — but both actors were drawn less to the familiar procedural elements of the murder investigations and more to the use of dual timelines to explore the emotional toll of doing that kind of work for a lifetime.
“You still have that familiar genre element that is pulsing away the whole time, and fans of that genre are appeased, but you get to explore the ramifications,” says Baker, whose own mother is an obsessive fan of the Scarpetta novels. “In Kay’s case, she works to find out how someone was killed. I’m an FBI profiler, and I work to find out why someone kills. The two of us bring that into a relationship where they’re trying to exist as a husband and a wife, and what Liz does very successfully is to explore the recesses and issues of that over time.”
Kidman adds, “What I love about this is you’re dealing with a crime genre, but you’ve put in this very complicated family, and these dynamics that start off where we’re all living in a house together. I’ve come back, we’ve all come back, we’re put into this place to try and help protect [and] love [Lucy], and we’re both married to men. And by the end, everybody’s lives have been fractured and shattered.”
Detective Pete Marino (Bobby Cannavale) with Lucy Watson (Ariana DeBose). Prime Video Scarpetta ended up turning into a true family affair for Cannavale, whose younger self is played by his own 30-year-old son, Jacob Lumet. “I would guess that it had occurred to them that my son, who was a working actor, might be an option, but I definitely said something like, ‘Wait a minute, could Jake come in and read for this?’ He did and met with everybody. I think Jake’s got chops, and he’s earned his way here,” Cannavale says, insisting that he did not have final say on casting his double. “We worked a lot closer then on Nurse Jackie [where we played father and son] than we are on this, but I’m thrilled as much as a proud parent can be.”
Despite having a rare-for-TV rehearsal period with Sarnoff and producing director David Gordon Green before the start of production, the older actors never actually rehearsed any scenes with their younger counterparts. Instead, the actors sharing roles spoke at length with each other to create a common language for their character.
“Jake, without even trying, has my mannerisms,” remarks Cannavale. (He can also see the uncanny resemblance.) “I told him, ‘Don’t worry about that. That’s the easy part. Let’s just talk about where that character is when he’s that age, and I’ll worry about how much he’s grown, but let’s see how much he’s grown to that point. If you were 30 years old and you were a detective with already a spotty record for various questionable, over-the-line [behaviours], where do you think you’re going? What are your ambitions? And what does Kay do to him?’”
Through the use of flashbacks, Sarnoff says she wanted to show the moment that “broke” each of the characters and set them on a path that they have followed into middle age. In a dramatic departure from the novels, Kay and Dorothy’s father died in an armed robbery, rather than succumbing to leukemia. “I love that Scarpetta internalizes [while] Dorothy externalizes grief and death. We shared the same awful truth that our father was murdered and yet the way we navigate [is vastly different]. There is a ‘Life’s fucking short, let’s fucking go’ mentality to Dorothy,” Curtis says.
“It’s also very poignant, of course, in that beautiful speech that Liz wrote later on when [Dorothy] is ashamed that she thought Janet was just this boring person. That’s [another] person who’s also died, and she’s feeling very ashamed that she ever thought that because that person’s not here anymore,” Curtis adds. “There’s some beautiful internal work being done with Dorothy, but her external life pleases me a great deal.” [Writer’s note: On the day of this interview, in a nod to her colorful character, she intentionally chose to wear a leopard print dress and black stilettos.]
A flashback in episode four juxtaposes Marino’s penchant for violence at work with the way he used to beat up his childhood bullies to a bloody pulp. “His decision to not just fight back against these bullies, but to always fight back is foundational for him, and the idea that people don’t think he’s smart is in his bedrock. Those two things could be the primary elements of his downfall,” Cannavale says. “He is always going to avenge the insult that he’s absorbed, and that motivates him throughout his life. I think that’s why he’s gotten into so much trouble. It’s why he’s retired. That’s why his marriage is probably in trouble. He’s just a volatile person; he could just as well arrest the suspect as he could kill him.”
Benton, meanwhile, may have the darkest backstory. When he first read the pilot, Baker was concerned the character was not “meaty” enough for him to sink his teeth into. “My character’s a real slow burn,” he says. “Pretty much all the other characters in my time period are very outwardly expressive, and [Benton’s] a quiet character in the room, but there’s a lot of noise going on inside him that we start to see later and later.”
A scene at the start of episode six reveals that Benton’s depraved therapist mother once pathologized Benton as a sociopath and gave him a book called Why They Kill: Characteristics of Sexual Homicide. Whenever he needs to self-soothe, he returns to his creepy childhood lair in his basement and holds onto a photo of a murdered woman’s body from that book almost like a security blanket.
“The ’90s Benton [played by Hunter Parish] is essentially the same character. I’m the result of 30 more years of holding the struggle inside,” Baker explains. “I think very young [child] Benton has a predilection to watching things suffer, harming things. His mother pathologizing him as somewhat of a sociopath and planting that seed in his head is the bigger issue with Benton. I don’t think he’s ever been able to shrug the fact that he’s afraid that he is a sociopath.”
Past Benton (Hunter Parrish) with Abby Turnbull (Sosie Bacon) and Bill Boltz (Mike Vogel) in the finale. Connie Chornuk / Prime Benton’s dark turn in that episode was so surprising that some of his co-workers even started to pull him aside with questions of their own. “I’d never done this before, but at the end of the sixth episode, when that script was released, everyone on set was like, ‘Oh my God, are you the killer?’” Baker says with a wry smile. “And I was like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ And they’re like, ‘Well, aren’t you going to have a conversation with them and ask?’ I was like, ‘No, I’m just going to see what happens.’ So when the last two scripts dropped, I only read my [scenes], because I wasn’t interested in knowing. I didn’t want it to influence me in any way.”
The final episodes reveal that Kay and Benton’s romance began as an affair, with him leaving his wife and two children for her in the late ’90s. “They’re close, but they keep secrets — but they’re attracted to each other,” Kidman says of that dynamic nearly 30 years later. “It is a rollercoaster of a relationship, but there’s a lot of chemistry between them.”
Baker does not believe that Benton regrets abandoning his young family for Kay, but the cracks in the foundation of their marriage reveal themselves as they both get back to work in Virginia. Because Benton is a profiler by trade, Kay often feels less like a partner and more like a subject under observation, leaving her to wonder how much he truly knows about her past secrets. When Kay lashes out in an argument and tells Benton “there’s something deeply psychologically wrong with you,” those words “cut to the core of who he is, and that crushes him in a way,” Baker says. But when he tries to open up to his wife about his darkest impulses in the finale, Benton is brushed off.
“I don’t think he’s necessarily going into that [finale] asking for a divorce, but he’s basically saying, ‘I need to find the truth, and I need to share it with her.’ She has an idea of what she wants the truth to be, and it ain’t the same thing,” explains Baker. “I think him then asking for a divorce is basically [because he’s] like, ‘I’m not getting anywhere here. I’ve got to pull the pin.’ I did approach it like this was a coming-out scene to his wife about the essence of, really, who he is — and it doesn’t land.”
A lot of the friction between Kay and Benton stems from the secret that has long bonded her with Pete. Back in 1998, Kay correctly identified the serial killer as Roy McCorckle, a 9-1-1 dispatcher who chose all of his future female victims by their voices. When Kay went to visit Roy’s home, he tried to strangle her to death, but she killed him in self-defense. However, in a misguided attempt to cover up Kay’s involvement, Pete shot Roy’s body. Kay was then forced not only to conduct an autopsy on the same man she killed, but also to lie about her findings.
“One of the great parts of the book series is the whole Marino/Kay dance. They’ve been colleagues for a long time. Clearly they love each other, but they’ve never crossed that line with each other,” Curtis says. Once Dorothy and Pete got together at Lucy and Janet’s wedding, “Dorothy clearly was territorial, but there’s always this energy going back and forth — and I really find that fascinating. When you marry someone who you know was very involved with somebody else — your sister — and then they marry you, there’s got to be that underlying question of loyalty and love. That question, I think, is played out beautifully in Liz’s writing.”
Cannavale hesitates to say that Marino is caught in a love triangle between the Scarpetta sisters, because he thinks “there isn’t anything romantic” about the way that his relationship with Kay “runs” and “rules” his life. “I think he loves Dorothy in the only way he’s capable of loving in a traditional sense that is good enough for her, and he knows that. Love, for him, is being stuck in this terrible situation he’s in with this [other] woman,” Cannavale says.
“He has a moment there in the car [in the finale] when he says to Kay, ‘We could just drive away,’ and he could go another inch there and he doesn’t. I think that’s where he’s forever stuck in that in-between with Kay,” he continues. “Being with Dot, being around Lucy and Benton — that all keeps him close to Kay and that feeling. It’s weird that the reason that he manages to stay even closer to Kay is because he marries her sister, but that’s why it makes for a good, interesting, hopefully emotionally complex characterization and story.”
Kay Scarpetta (Nicole Kidman) in the finale. Connie Chornuk / Prime © Amazon Content Services LLC By the end of the season, Kay has been abandoned by all of the most important people in her life. Benton has left her to seek solace in the arms of his FBI cyber-investigator partner Sierra (Anna Diop). Pete opts to move out of Kay and Benton’s house and into a hotel with Dorothy. Even Lucy — whom Kay raised as her own daughter after Dorothy abandoned her periodically — turns her back on her aunt after Kay disapproves of the way Lucy has been grieving.
To make matters worse, Kay must fend for her life when August Ryan (David Hornsby), the officer viewers met in the pilot, breaks into her house and reveals himself as the copycat serial killer. Mirroring the way she used to break bones at work to relieve stress, Kay beats Ryan to death with a baseball bat, only stopping when a shadowy figure opens the front door to her house. “She’s completely become wild,” Kidman says of Kay’s ending. “She’s become a killer herself. She has found in her[self] what she actually investigates, so that’s pretty heavy.”
Curtis had already wrapped filming and was not on set the day Kidman shot that big, bloody cliffhanger ending, but the former vividly remembers her reaction to watching the raw, unedited footage of that final scene. “When I saw the look on Scarpetta’s face after that moment of rage and violence and the loss of all control,” Curtis recalls, “and the panic and the fear —”
“And the loss of everything in my life,” Kidman interjects.
“Going from the first time we see her to that last episode — in eight episodes of television — was thrilling to watch!” Curtis continues, complimenting the “spectacular” way that Kidman played Kay’s unraveling in the final minutes of the season. “It’s just fantastic work. As a producer, I was particularly excited because, again, it’s on her, with all due respect. So if you don’t buy that ride, you don’t buy the show, and I bought that ride because [Kidman] committed so completely to losing it all in that.”
Sarnoff recently revealed to THR that the second season, which will adapt Cornwell’s Cruel and Unusual and The Body Farm, will pick up shortly after the events of season one, at least in the present-day timeline, with the identity of the person who opened that front door to be revealed imminently. While Kidman and Curtis were mum about their hopes and plans for season two, their co-stars — who are not producers — were a little more forthcoming.
Baker, who had still not watched the final two episodes before all eight released last week, quips that he must not be the killer because he is heading back to Nashville to begin production on season two. “I’ve read the first two episodes for next season, and there’s a lot of trying to reconnect again,” he reveals. “Between Kay and I, there’s a fair bit of fallout about that divorce conversation, which I think is the last time we’re together in that [finale].”
Speaking in early March before the premiere, Cannavale admitted he had yet to drill down into season two, let alone read any of the seven scripts that Sarnoff says her writers room has already penned, but he hopes “to see more of Pete and Benton” next season.
“I do wonder, with what Benton is going through now in particular — Pete seems to ask a lot about what’s going on with Kay, and I don’t think that’s purely for his own [selfish] reasons. I think he and Benton are good friends, so I’d like to see that relationship deepen a little bit more,” Cannavale adds. “I just hope that Marino and Kay get closer to whatever their catharsis is going to be for each other emotionally without actually getting there.”
***
The full first season of Scarpetta is now streaming on Prime Video. Read THR’s full post-mortem interview with showrunner Liz Sarnoff here.
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