Like an unexpected dark horse that grows little by little, almost by surprise, Apple TV has become a platform with popular series (read the phenomenon Ted Lasso) but, above all, cult. This year, its products have achieved a total of 89 Emmy nominations, awarded by the United States Television Academy, no longer so far from other giants like Netflix (with 111) or HBO (with 122), to the delight of its executives. Even its mega boss, Tim Cook, dropped by the premiere of the football series in Los Angeles, and posed with its protagonists. For now, Lasso and his team will not be at this year’s Emmys, but they will be at the next ones, as will likely be the case with the actors of another of its season hits, Cape Fear, the remake of Cape Fear, now in series form.
A Javier Bardem with one eye of each color is the protagonist, a villain whose mere presence and fearsome smile torment and at the same time illuminate the screen every time he appears on stage. However, the Spanish actor is not present in this round of interviews organized by Apple TV in Los Angeles — attended by EL PAÍS invited by the tech company — where the series creator, Nick Antosca, and actresses Amy Adams — who plays Anna Bowden, his lawyer — and Juliette Lewis — the unsettling Crystal — do talk. What they do not discuss is whether the series will have a second season. “No comment,” laughs Antosca, also a writer and executive producer.
Talking about Bardem is easy for them. In the interviews and in the more informal chats afterward, it is normal for them to be asked about the actor, the central figure of the fiction. Especially for the Spanish-speaking press, it is the main topic, almost as if apologizing. “You can ask about him all you want,” Antosca will laugh later, at the end of the interview round. Before that, they all position themselves as fans of the Oscar winner, the true face of fear in that cape.
“He is fear itself,” agrees the creator in the interview. In the current story, Max Cady is Maximiliano Cady and, as explained at the start of the series, his origins are Spanish; it is a different starting point from his predecessors, Robert de Niro in 1991, and Robert Mitchum in 1962. “I was writing [the script] thinking of him. I wasn’t sure if we could get him, but we met while I was writing and talked about the character,” explains Antosca. “So we didn’t create that story that he was half Spanish and half American until he joined, but I had it in mind, I had a plan. And once he was on board, we shaped the character and part of that background together,” he explains. “About what it’s like to work with him: he’s a teddy bear,” he comments, to the laughter of his actresses, with Amy Adams affirming from behind. “He’s a great guy. You can tell from direct experience. But it was fantastic. And it’s very remarkable to see him go from the sweet dad he is to this volatile and terrifying predator.”
Adams confirms this. “Working with him is fantastic. He’s very fun, and also very committed to his work,” says the six-time Oscar nominee actress, who recalls how, to film the last scenes, they had “a very, very intense week, he had to scream all the time, and I remember he started losing his voice. He was so committed, so careful with the details, it was a pleasure to watch him.”
The shooting was not easy, with very intense days and complicated weather conditions, with heavy rains and lightning in the state of Georgia, as the actresses recall, who had to stop some scenes due to thunderstorms. “I have filmed in Georgia many times and I’m used to the madness that lightning is,” said the creator, “but yes, sometimes it was especially intense.”
Antosca wanted to keep certain elements of the original in a format that goes from a length of a couple of hours to almost 10, one per episode. “The two movies are very different because each absorbs the ideas and fears of its time, and it was very interesting, creatively, how it would be today, with the fears and cultural atmosphere, the moral confusion and paranoia of 2026,” he reflects. More tangibly, he also wanted to keep Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack, who also created the music for classics like Vertigo, Psycho, Citizen Kane, or Taxi Driver, and the original movies. “It was something Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg [executive producers of the series] said from the beginning: wherever we put it, we must use the music and make it a character of the series.”
There is something more from the movie starring De Niro and directed by Scorsese in 1991: Juliette Lewis, who played the daughter of the lawyer couple and now is a kind of counterpoint to Max Cady. In the interview, she recalls that she indeed does not keep the script from that shoot, but playing that role that earned her an Oscar nomination remains “one of the most important things” that has happened to her. “I was 18 when I did Cape Fear. It’s my creative birthplace, so to speak, and I credit Martin Scorsese, who validated my instincts,” recalls the actress and singer. “There were things I knew intuitively, although I didn’t quite know what they were. And he told me to keep going, which gave very beautiful moments in that movie. And here we are. When Nick invited me to be part of the project, it seemed like a perfect moment, closing the circle. It’s something full of meaning, and when I saw those Cape Fear letters, that typography, arriving on set, I was filled with nostalgia. Just like seeing the character names,” she admits.
Since then, Lewis has not stopped working, although also with one foot in her music career. But she continues making movies, series, as projects arise. Like everyone in this volatile industry. “When you’ve been working for 35 years, you get used to being unemployed, to having work again, to being without work. When I was younger, I got more nervous. But it’s part of the process,” she admits. Her co-star agrees with laughter: “Right now, I don’t have work,” Adams admits. “It’s a bit of a strange world in that sense,” Lewis says, “it has its ups and downs, but it’s nice to build relationships and work again with those people later.” And if it were with Javier Bardem, everyone would be delighted.
