Netflix's 'East of Eden' Adaptation Is Even Better When It Goes Beyond the Book
Liam Gaughan is a film and TV writer at Collider. He has been writing film reviews and news coverage for ten years. Between relentlessly adding new titles to his watchlist and attending as many screenings as he can, Liam is always watching new movies and television shows.
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Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for East of Eden on Netflix.East of Eden is the greatest novel by John Steinbeck, whose work has frequently been adapted. Although Steinbeck’s novels have inspired great films like John Ford's Oscar-winning Grapes of Wrath and Gary Sinise’s Of Mice and Men, East of Eden has been a much harder story to crack because it is an epic, generational story that spans decades of time; the one cinematic adaptation from 1955 that was directed by Elia Kazan and starred James Dean is certainly a great film, but it is based only on the last few chapters of the novel. However, Kazan’s granddaughter Zoe Kazan follows the entire plot of the book in the seven-part Netflix adaptation that tells the entire story of sin and forgiveness. While seven episodes still isn’t enough time to capture everything that was in the book, as the Hamilton family plays a relatively small role, 2026’s East of Eden reinvents the character of Cathy Ames, who Steinbeck had originally described as a “psychic monster.”
Cathy is played in the series by Florence Pugh, and she is introduced as a victim, not as the "malformed soul” that Steinbeck had written her as being. A young Cathy (Vaughan Reilly) is harassed and stigmatized before killing her parents Bill (Simon Maiden) and Elizabeth (Leeanna Walsman), and she is savagely beaten by the pimp Mr. Edwards (Josh McConville) before she winds up on the door of the brothers Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles Trask (Mike Faist). East of Eden does not deny Cathy’s cruelty, as she takes advantage of the sex workers who work at Faye’s (Martha Plimpton) brothel, betrays Adam’s kindness, and abandons her sons Caleb (Joseph Zada) and Aron (Joe Anders). However, Cathy’s most despicable behavior is the result of situations in which she found extreme solutions to solve existential problems; instead of being an inherently loveless character, Cathy was never offered love without conditions.
‘East of Eden’ Offers a More Sympathetic Cathy
The exploration of Cathy’s childhood that is told through objective, third-person passages in the novel is more personal in the series because she is faced with resistance whenever trying to avoid being locked into a societal role. The most significant reinterpretation comes within Cathy’s relationship with the Latin teacher, Mr. James Grew (Nicolas Burton). The novel suggests that Cathy deliberately seduced Grew into an inappropriate relationship, leading to his suicide, whereas the series suggests that she was protecting herself from a predator who intended to proposition her. That Cathy receives no sympathy from her parents in the aftermath, as they see her as having no purpose other than future domesticity, trains her in a survival technique in which she cannot fully trust anyone who shows her empathy. This doesn’t excuse the extreme lengths that Cathy goes to when she burns down her home to kill her parents, but it does frame her as being more of a scared child than a great evil.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Netflix Character Would Be Your Best Friend? Dustin · Emily · Wednesday · Gi-hun
Some friends drag you out of the house. Some sit with you on the worst night of your life. Netflix has written both, plus the one who tells you the truth you have been avoiding all week. Answer eight quick questions about how you actually do friendship, and find out which of them was always going to end up in your corner.
🧢Dustin(Stranger Things)
🗼Emily(Emily in Paris)
🕷️Wednesday(Wednesday)
🟢Gi-hun(Squid Game)
01
How do you usually end up making a new friend? The origin story says a lot about the friendship that follows it.
02
What is a perfect Saturday with your best friend? Friendship is mostly built out of very ordinary hours.
03
You call them at two in the morning. What happens? This is the real test of a friendship, and everybody knows it.
04
What do you want from them when you are clearly wrong? The best friendships are the ones that survive being corrected.
05
What do your friends actually value about you? The friend you attract says something about the friend you are.
06
You have a falling out. How does it go? How a friendship repairs itself matters more than how it breaks.
07
What do you actually need a best friend for? Everybody is missing something. The right friend fills that gap.
08
Ten years from now, what keeps the two of you close? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who you get.
The Group Chat Has Spoken Your Best Friend Is…
Four Netflix characters, four completely different ways of showing up for somebody. This is the one who fits how you actually do friendship, and what having them in your life would be like.
Dustin Henderson
You do not do friendship at half volume, and neither does he. What you want is somebody who says yes to the plan before you have finished describing the plan.
- Dustin is the friend the entire show runs on: loyal past the point of sense, enthusiastic about everything, and incapable of leaving anybody behind.
- You have the same instinct. Your friendships are loud, specific and slightly ridiculous, and they last for decades because of it.
- He is also the one person who would take your strangest interest completely seriously, which is far rarer than it sounds.
- You would have a group chat. It would never once be quiet.
Emily Cooper
You are the friend who makes things happen, and so is she. Together you would be mildly exhausting to everyone around you and completely delighted with yourselves.
- Emily treats an ordinary Tuesday as something that could be turned into an occasion, which is either the best or the worst quality in a friend depending on your energy levels.
- You share her refusal to sit still. Neither of you has ever accepted a night in when something was happening somewhere else.
- She is far more loyal than people give her credit for. She defends her friends loudly, publicly, and occasionally before checking the facts.
- She would post the photo without asking. You would forgive her, because it is a very good photo.
Wednesday Addams
You have no patience for pleasant lies, and she has no ability to tell them. What looks like coldness from the outside is the most reliable friendship on this list.
- Wednesday never says a kind thing she does not mean, which makes the rare ones count for an enormous amount.
- You would rather be told the truth than be made comfortable. She is constitutionally incapable of offering you anything else.
- Underneath all of it she is ferociously protective. She simply refuses to make a performance out of caring.
- Do not expect a birthday message. Do expect her to ruin anyone who wrongs you.
Seong Gi-hun
You look after whoever is having the worst day. So does he. It is the least strategic way to move through the world and the best possible quality in a friend.
- Gi-hun is not the strongest player in Squid Game, or the cleverest. He is the one who keeps choosing to protect somebody else, over and over, at genuine cost to himself.
- You have the same instinct. You notice who is struggling and you stay with them, long after anybody would blame you for leaving.
- He is a flawed friend, and that is part of why it lands. He lets people down, then comes back and tries again, which is more than most manage.
- He would give you his last chance and never once mention that he had done it.
The flashbacks to the younger versions of the characters are important because Kazan shows the similarities and differences between Cathy’s childhood and how the Trask boys were raised. Although a younger Adam (Asher Whitehead) and Charles (Gus Turner) were both subjected to emotional abuse by their father Cyrus (Tracy Letts), who preaches chivalry but lies about his war record, they still developed unconditional love for one another that taught them the power of empathy. This makes the dynamic between the three of them more complicated, as Adam is more earnest in his appreciation of human goodness, whereas Charles has become more cynical as a result of being denied love by Cyrus.
Charles’ animosity towards Cathy isn’t just because he disapproves of her past as a sex worker, but because he is concerned that she will take advantage of his brother’s sympathies and corrupt him. The eventual sexual liaison between Charles and Cathy isn’t romantic, but rather the result of two deeply traumatized people who both feel as if they are not worthy of Adam. This becomes tragic in a deeper way because Adam steps into a depression when the two people who he loved the most become absent in his life when he has to raise Cathy’s children, despite suspecting that Charles is the father of his sons.
‘East of Eden’ Becomes a Deeper Tragedy
Cathy is still a provocateur and deceiver who causes harm to those who see her as nothing but a victim, but that doesn’t mean that she is incapable of feelings. One of the best alterations to the source material is the expanded role of Faye, with Plimpton giving a deeply sensitive and maternal performance. Cathy slowly and painfully poisons Faye so that she can become the madame of the brothel, but she carries the weight of her sins as we see her slowly age, becoming consumed by paranoia and guilt.
While Faye showed Cathy genuine love, Cathy's desire for autonomy and independence — something that Faye was not offering as she continuously pushed Cathy to quit seeing clients — outweighs any affection she might have for her adoptive mother. But Cathy’s tragic backstory does not mean that her coping methods are justified, a fact that is underlined by the heartbreaking performance by Hoon Lee as the Trask family servant, Lee. Lee also dealt with significant mistreatment throughout his life due to racism, but he does not take his rage out on others, and instead helps instruct Adam’s children on how to be better men.
East of Eden is a literary masterpiece that deserves to be taught and read for generations to come, but it was also a novel written in 1952 that was grounded in the gender roles and opinions about promiscuity that were coherent for that era. Kazan doesn’t reject Steinbeck’s story as much as she expands it, as she chooses to tell East of Eden through Cathy’s perspective, turning Cal into a character who is (for better or worse) shaped equally by both of his parents. This doesn’t just make East of Eden a feminist retelling, but a more interesting one.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.