Joshua Jackson has come a long way since The Mighty Ducks and Dawson’s Creek. The former Pacey now finds himself in a predicament as he has a torrid affair as Dan Gallagher with Lizzy Caplan’s Alex Forrest in the new Paramount Plus adaptation of Fatal Attraction. Entertainment Weekly got to sit down with Jackson as he talked about how the show differs from the movie and how they had discussed the nature of Dan and Alex’s tryst and why he isn’t just the victim in this interpretation.
Jackson tells Entertainment Weekly, “My only nervousness about it was that everybody has an opinion about what Fatal Attraction is.” Jackson explains how the showrunner, Alexandra Cunningham sold him on the show, “I liked her desire to tell a story that uses the benefit of TV and the amount of time that you have to really get into the characters, and to use that space to go deeper into the psychology of Alex Forrest and who she is and why she is the way she is and what in particular it is about Dan that is the perfect toxic element in her life.”
The setting of the show, being in a modern-day social climate, changes the narrative for the cast and writers. Particularly for the light that Dan is shown in. Jackson continued, “The movie really presents him as the victim of circumstance, even though he’s the one that committed the act. I thought it was interesting when you really start to examine the type of personality that would take this, from the outside, seemingly perfect life and put it in jeopardy to do something so selfish. Why does a man choose to do this? And then once he’s committed the act, in particular, Dan’s ego doesn’t allow him to take accountability for the thing that he’s just done. So he doubles down and creates even more havoc and then doubles down again, creates even more havoc. I thought that was an interesting take on the story of Fatal Attraction.”
One significantly notable change is the series will be showcasing multiple timelines, and Jackson says that it allowed them to explore how his choices affected people in the long term. “The huge difference on the Dan side of the story is we have the time to really delve into the damage that he’s causing. Honestly, the movie is very sympathetic to him. At no point does he seemingly feel all that guilty about what he’s done. So we get into what might have happened if we saw all of those characters say five, 10, 15 years after the event, and the damage has now had a chance to seep down into the cracks of his marriage and the rest of his life. He actually has to deal with the repercussions of his actions.”
Fatal Attraction debuts on Paramount+ on April 30.