Your First Look at Robin Wright and Olivia Cooke in <i>The Girlfriend</i>
Landing the man of your dreams is one thing, but impressing his mom? That’s a whole other challenge. Prime Video’s The Girlfriend takes that obstacle course to a dangerous extreme, turning the clash between a mother and her son’s new flame into a juicy, gripping psychological thriller. Adapted from Michelle Frances’s bestselling 2018 novel of the same name, the story follows Laura, a successful art gallerist and protective mother—played by star, director, and executive producer Robin Wright—and Cherry, an alluring real estate agent with a mysterious past, played by Olivia Cooke. The six-episode series, which premieres on September 10, will have you constantly second-guessing whose side you’re on.
Laura lives an exquisite life in London with her son, Daniel (Laurie Davidson), and husband, Howard (Waleed Zuaiter). The three have in an elegant home (plus a vacation property in Spain), and she boasts a fruitful career. But Cherry’s arrival, in her high heels and flashy dresses, sends Laura spinning. After an awkward first meeting over dinner, Laura believes Cherry, who hails from a working-class background, is hiding something. Is she with Daniel for the right reasons? Meanwhile Cherry has her own suspicions. Is Laura just out to get her? Amid their snooping and sabotage, things get taken too far.
Naomi Sheldon and Gabbie Asher adapted the book for TV. The cast also includes Tanya Moodie as Isabella, Shalom Brune-Franklin as Brigitte, Karen Henthorn as Tracey, Anna Chancellor as Lilith, Leo Suter as Nicholas, and Francesca Corney as Millie.
Frances remembers beginning to write the story around 2015. “I was toying with the idea of this thriller about these interlocking two women fighting over this guy, and it’s such a universal problem,” she tells ELLE. At the time, her children were young “and I became a real tiger mother,” and the story evolved from there.
Wright agrees on the universality. “I think you would ask any mother, and they probably had a little bit of that, where they’re like, is she good enough for him?” she says. The project came her way a few years ago during COVID, when Imaginarium Productions reached out for her to possibly direct. (Wright has previously directed episodes of House of Cards, Ozark, Tell Me Lies, as well as the film Land.) “I read the pilot, and I could see the show just from that one episode,” she remembers. Filming ultimately took place from the end of May to end of September last year.
The team had to move fast, though. With meetings quickly approaching to pitch the series to streamers, they were running out of time to find an actress for Laura’s role. “At the end of the day, I think [they] all were like, ‘Why don’t you just play Laura?’ And I was like, ‘Okay,’” Wright says. “But it worked out great in the end, and then we got Olivia, which was heaven.” Cooke was her top choice for Cherry after watching her in Thoroughbreds, Vanity Fair, and Slow Horses. “I liked the kind of toughness that she has embedded in her,” Wright adds.
Cooke, on the other hand, had no idea she was favored. “I thought that I was having to beg, borrow, and steal that part,” she jokes. The House of the Dragon star loves “an underdog story” and is a fan of Wright’s work, hence why she was drawn to The Girlfriend. “There was something that was so ballsy and confident about Cherry that I just really wanted to play,” she says. The character is “so daring and cutthroat and sort of Machiavellian, but also just with a heart of gold, in a way.”
Cherry clashes with Laura’s seemingly perfect life and tight-knit bond with Daniel. After suffering a personal tragedy in the past, Laura put all her energy into her son. “He was her buddy until Cherry moved in,” Wright adds. “It’s just almost like the rug got ripped up from under Laura, and she’s like, I don’t like her. I don’t trust her, and I need to get my son away from her.”
And while they’re on opposing sides, Cooke believes Laura and Cherry have some things in common. “I don’t think they’re that dissimilar, really. There are moments in the show where you’re like, oh God, these two people could really be friends. ... I think Cherry, at the start, looks up to Laura and thinks, ‘God, what an amazing, just incredibly accomplished woman who I would want to be.’”
And in the middle of them both is Daniel. “Through one lens, you see it as this beautiful thing,” Davidson says of the mother-son relationship. But it’s “hard for someone [else] coming into that. Laura occupies a lot of the same space that a girlfriend [or] a partner would occupy or should occupy. So when Cherry turns up, she’s like, ‘Where do I fit in?’ And that’s where some of the problems start.”
To exaggerate the drama, the series is told from Laura and Cherry’s two different points of view. “Halfway through the episodes, you’re going to get the other perspective of what actually happened,” Wright says. Often, you’ll see the same event portrayed differently depending on who’s telling the story. It’s not far from real life: Frequently, two people won’t remember an incident in the same way. But that meant the actors had to tweak their performances slightly based on how each of the two women would view a scene.
“In Laura’s perspective, it needs to look like Daniel is moving away from her completely and is going towards Cherry, and she’s trying to hold onto … her son. So in those moments, Daniel would seem like he was just kind of ignoring his mom and moving towards Cherry,” Davidson says. “And in Cherry’s perspective, we probably pushed the sense of him being a bit of a manchild, a bit of a mummy’s boy, because that’s what she sees. And my job was to try and make sure that these are part of the same person and that there’s continuity of character there, so they’re not just two completely different people.”
That added a “tricky” layer to Wright’s responsibilities, as both an actor and director on the series. “When you’re in the scene with Laurie or Olivia, I’m looking at that actor going, oh yes, they got that beat, they nailed it, but then you have to remember you have a line. … So, you’re looking out of two sides of your brain at the same time.”
Cooke, for one, was amazed to see Wright’s brain in action. “One of our first days was her filming this really emotional scene, and she’d be bringing this really gut-wrenching performance, and then she’d be like, ‘Okay, and cut. Okay, we’re going to go to a mid shot. What lens is that? Okay, yeah, let’s go with that.’”
The series also dives into more than just mother-girlfriend rivalry and family dynamics. It also explores wealth disparity, privilege, and the lack of social mobility, as Daniel grew up wealthy and Cherry did not. “When I was much younger, I remember just wanting to try and change where I came from socially,” Frances says of her experiences that inspired The Girlfriend. “Classism in our country is so embedded in our daily lives. It sort of feels innate at this point,” says Cooke, who hails from Manchester. And though the series is set in the U.K., there’s no doubt it’ll resonate across the pond and elsewhere, especially in an era of TV that is obsessed with analyzing the rich (think The White Lotus and Your Friends & Neighbors).
But even if the series doesn’t radicalize viewers against the 1 percent, Cooke hopes that, at the very least, audiences can “sink their teeth into this world for a little bit and have some reprieve.” After all, The Girlfriend boasts plot twists, steamy scenes, jet set-worthy filming locations, and bold wardrobe, on top of all the drama. As for Wright, “I’m hoping that they get hooked, and they’re like, I can’t wait to go to episode 2.” If the response is anything like it was for Frances’s book, that’s likely. The author remembers receiving personal messages from readers debating whether they’re “Team Laura” or “Team Cherry.” “That was really exciting,” she says. “And I’m sure it’ll be the same with the TV [version].”
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