In the Prime Video series Scarpetta, events play out in two different time periods. In the past, Dr. Kay Scarpetta (Rosy McEwen) begins her career, interacting with Detective Pete Marino (Jake Cannavale) and FBI Agent Benton Wesley (Hunter Parrish). Years later, Scarpetta (Nicole Kidman) revisits old crimes with Marino (Bobby Cannavale) and Wesley (Simon Baker) with some unofficial help from her niece Lucy (Ariana DeBose).
Awards Buzz spoke with members of the cast about the chance to play different versions of the same characters. Parrish and Baker shared how, despite coming from very faraway places, they found inspiration to jointly craft an impeccable Southern accent:
“We had this wonderful dialect coach, Tom Jones (not the Welsh singer), and his father was from Virginia, and I was talking around the idea, this was pretty early on, about the warmth of a Southern accent. We were talking about tonality and I was listening to, actually, he’s from Arkansas, Bill Clinton. Yeah, he has a particular way of speaking, but it’s also the sound that he makes that is very comforting, but you know he’s fiercely intelligent and that he could slice you apart verbally at any point. There’s a folksiness to it that is comforting.”
Jake Cannavale shared how it felt to play the younger version of his father’s character:
“It was definitely an advantage. I feel I’m getting away with something, to be honest, every time me and him work on this character. One of the things that definitely helped is that me and my dad created this character together just with scripts and highlighters on the couch. It’s nice that once I turned my brain off from trying to match his mannerisms or his speech patterns or his little quirks, once I let that go, I found that because I’m his son, I fell into doing those things a little bit naturally.”
DeBose shared whether she sees her character as a departure from the roles she typically plays:
“I think Lucy Farinelli-Watson has some crossover between my personal lived experiences. She was raised between the Commonwealth of Virginia and, what you don’t really know from the books, in Florida. I was raised in North Carolina. There’s a very interesting nuance about being raised in Southern states. Also the nuance of Lucy is she’s being raised by white women, not to put too fine a point on it. She’s a beautiful Brown child and she was raised surrounded by Italian-origin white women, and I was raised by my very glorious white family. I think there’s real nuance that comes with that. I was not raised quite as affluent as I think Lucy was, but it’s the closest thing that I’ve ever taken on that is near to my own personal circumstances. So I’m very careful about separation of church and state as to how much I give Lucy.”
Author and executive producer Patricia Cornwell described the most challenging part of adapting her book series for the small screen:
“For me, it was them finding somebody who could actually pull this off, because nobody ever has. It’s been options going all the way back to 1989 and every effort conceivable to bring Scarpetta to screen, and then until Liz Sarnoff came along, she figured out a way to do it that’s absolutely brilliant and I will forever be indebted to her, because I really had come to a point where I just didn’t think anybody got it enough to be able to do it. So it’s been a remarkable experience.”
All eight episodes of Scarpetta are now streaming on Prime Video.
