Close Wants Female-POV “Fatal Attraction” Remake
Out collecting plaudits for her work in “The Wife,” actress Glenn Close has revealed that plans are afoot for a remake of the iconic 1987 psycho-sexual thriller “Fatal Attraction” but told from a different perspective – that of her ‘antagonist’ role Alex Forrest.
The original starred Michael Douglas as Dan Gallagher, a married man who has an affair with Close’s Alex. When he breaks it off, she becomes unstable and stalks him and his family – boiling the family’s pet rabbit and ultimately turning out to be incredibly dangerous. The film sparked a whole sub-genre of movies centered on obsessive, homicidal scorned women as villains including “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle,” “Single White Female” and “Basic Instinct”.
Close’s character is portrayed as a one-note villain, but the actress says with the world now taking a more understanding view of mental illness, more open to discussions of sexual abuse, and more ready to see people face consequences for willful misbehaviour – now is the right time to look back at her character in another light.
In fact, she’s looked into the possibility of doing it and tells
Deadline:
“Fatal Attraction was a movie that touched a very, very raw nerve between the sexes. We’ve gone back to Paramount to find out because they own the title. I think they’ve had some things in the works, but I do think it would be interesting to take the exact story basically and do it from her point of view. I think she’d become a tragic figure, rather than perceived as an evil figure.
She (Alex Forrest) was incested at an early age by her father, which would make it difficult to have a full relationship, especially if you were a child and turned into a sex object. This explained why she would spy on him, and giving the rabbit to the little girl when she runs to the bushes and throws up. What did it trigger, what did it force her to do?
It’s easy to make fun of and make unbalanced people the bad guy – that perpetuates the stigma. If it’s not a Nazi or the Taliban, it’s a mentally ill person… But I do think it would be interesting. It would be very upsetting to do it from her point of view.”
Close famously did a ton of research for her role, consulting two psychiatrists about her character’s behavior and possibilities of mental illness.
