"Normal People" stars Daisy Edgar Jones as Marianne and Paul Mescal as Connell.
Is it a love story or isn’t it?
This is the question many will ask as they take in the new series Normal People.
The story follows lovers Connell and Marianne as they navigate the ups and downs of their complicated relationship, which constantly shifts amid personal and societal pressures.
The pair weave in and out of each other's lives across developing an intense bond that brings to light the traumas and insecurities that make them both who they are.
The series is based on Sally Rooney’s best-selling novel of the same name, and stars Daisy Edgar Jones as Marianne and Paul Mescal as Connell.
The source material is often praised because of the introspective nature of the characters.
About this Rooney says, “definitely part of the challenge when I sat down to write the early drafts of what later would become the scripts for these episodes was that I realized I was writing about two characters, particularly, in the early phases of the drama, one of whom is characterized by not having any friends or anyone to talk to and the other one of whom is characterized by never really saying anything.”
She says that, “as a novelist you have a whole set of tools that you can use to express interiority, and as a screenwriter you have a different set of tools. And I just wasn’t used to using those. And so, yeah, that definitely was one of the big challenges for me in the beginning of this process.”
To deal with this, Rooney says that to cope with this she acknowledged, “that the script is only one small part of what will actually become the show. As a novelist all you see is what you put on the page, and language is the only tool that you have, whereas a screenwriter you accept that you are just one small part of all the layers that will build into presenting the story in a new way. [The director and the actors] are the next step in trying to flush out the interiority of these characters. The script is only one small sort of tile in that mosaic.”
Both lead actors worked to bring those interior emotions to life in a very specific manner, says Mescal. “You’ve got all of [these] interior thoughts there, and then you just try and bring it into the kind of physical space.”
It helped that the novel changed perspective often, shifting between the characters, explained Jones. “Sometimes you were coming to a scene knowing exactly what your internal dialogue is, but also having an understanding of what the other character is seeing you as. I think that the real theme of the book is kind of your vision of who you think you are as opposed to who you actually are. Balancing that was really interesting.”
Jones admits that she's a ‘massive romantic,’ citing Baz Luhrman’s film version of Romeo + Juliet as an influence “ I love love. I love meeting somebody that’s so unique to you. You can meet five, 10 different people, spend three years with them and not change and have one conversation with someone and be completely different just because of a kind of intangible kind of access that they give you into who you are.”
Mescal added, “I would say that I’m a romantic as well and terms of reference like I love films like Blue Valentine when you see the kind of presence of it and the absence of it. I think it kind of can incapacitate you in a real kind of cathartic way.”
Normal People director and executive producer Lenny Abrahamson commented that the narrative of the series is, in his opinion, a bit contradictory to current television shows. “We’re very interested in dysfunction and particularly around stories of younger people and love and sex. It’s just a really amazing thing to tell a story which is beautiful and kind of life affirming and affirming of the value of the persistence of formative first, life-changing relationships.”
He admits that the relationship between Marianne and Connell is extremely complex, with ‘moments of pain and distance.’ “But,” he explains, “[there’s] largely something incredibly positive and incredibly healthy about this relationship. They really, really love each other.”
‘Normal People’ is available for streaming on Hulu.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anneeaston/2020/04/29/normal-people-translates-the-inner-struggle-of-love-to-the-small-screen-says-author-of-the-bestselling-novel/
2020-04-29 14:09:53Z
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