Merritt Wever Was Ready to Play Someone ‘A Little Rotten’ in ‘Primetime’

The actor talks about the "warped" world of Lance Oppenheim's take on To Catch a Predator, and how her manipulative TV-producer character left a bad taste in her mouth

Merritt Wever hasn’t had the flashiest career, but when she shows up onscreen, you know she’s going to deliver. From her early turn on the sitcom New Girl to her role as the wet-behind-the-ears nurse on the Showtime dramedy Nurse Jackie (which resulted in the first of her three primetime Emmys — and her memorably stunned speech) to her steely widow in the Western miniseries Godless to her dogged detective in the wrenching sexual assault drama Unbelievable, Wever has flexed her talents for both physical comedy and emotional depth. 

In her latest role, the To Catch a Predator dramatization Primetime, she gets to bring it all to the table. Lance Oppenheim’s directorial debut is based on a true story, but turns the behind-the-scenes theatrics of producing the infamous reality show into a stylized pressure-cooker that blends satire, horror, farce, and genuine pathos. 

Wever plays Andie Bender, a Dateline NBC producer who attempts to keep the show on its upward ratings trajectory while constantly fielding the neuroses of its host, Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson). The character is an amalgamation of producers who worked with Hansen during the tabloidy show’s heyday, a woman who is cutthroat and callous with her talent, her crew, and even the naive young actor they hire as pedophile bait (played by a captivating Skyler Gisondo). Hansen may be the star of the show, but Andie pulls the strings, wielding her authority with an ever-present smack of chewing gum. She is assuredness personified — which happens to be the opposite of how Wever feels about the performance. 

“More than anything else I’ve been involved in, I walked away from [Primetime] knowing I wasn’t going to know what we made, and even to a certain extent what version of the character was going to end up in the film, until I saw the cut,” Wever says. “More than ever before, I need other people to be the mirror for this film, given all of the ways in which the content of the film is so warped and manipulated.” 

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While Wever is hesitant to make strong statements about the themes of the project or how she shaped Andie, her co-workers are freer with their praise. “Merritt brings such singular coherence to her character yet from take to take she always conjures a mystery that you can never quite pin down but always draws you closer,” Pattinson says over email. “She’s so prepared and has so much character detail at her fingertips that you can really go anywhere in a scene with her and it’s always totally authentic.”

Wever has enjoyed seeing the finished product with audiences in recent weeks, first at the Venice Film Festival, then the Toronto International Film Festival, and then at an intimate screening in New York, where she senses viewers are speaking “the same cultural language” as the film. Beyond that, she’s reluctant to characterize how they’re reacting to her performance, or to break down her process. 

“There are some actors who are very good at thinking about the outside in, like [about] the gaze of the audience. But I’ve found that when I think about things that way, I get less and less in touch with my guts,” she says. “That’s not my job. That’s yours.” 

What was your relationship with To Catch a Predator before you signed on to the film? 
I had seen the show when it was on. I’m old enough that it’s part of my cultural landscape. I remember I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing filmed. I’m curious what people who are younger than me, who didn’t grow up with the show, think of its existence. It takes place at a time before we had constant internet access and cameras in our pockets 24/7. I just wonder if, for younger people, if this will seem run-of-the-mill or shocking. 

What made you say yes to this movie? 
I’d been playing a lot of good hearts and good people and I’d worn myself out on them. I needed those parts of my heart to come back. I found myself in a position where I had done a part that required that good muscle, the caring muscle, and I could feel by the end of the shoot that it was fatigued. I was scraping the bottom of the barrel and I was like, “Oh, you’ve got to put those roles down for a while.” That was the draw. I needed to regenerate. 

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Andie is an amalgamation of a bunch of different To Catch a Predator producers. What qualities of hers did you feel were essential to convey? 
It was a script that went through a lot of different iterations. But the thing that always stayed the same was that there was something a little rotten in her. [Andie] is given the choice to try to improve upon that rottenness or to double down. Lance and I talked about the parable of the two wolves a lot with her. 

How did you prepare for the role? 
I like to do a lot of research, although sometimes it can lead me a little too far off the beaten path. I did a lot of reading, like a 60 Minutes producer’s memoir. I spoke to two longtime television producers who are still working today. It was useful to hear what the job would have been like 20 years ago without access to the internet. The way that we have it now, everything is so online. But it was valuable to hear from them about how muddled the relationship between producer and host or on-air talent can get. You’re responsible for the logistics of getting the show made, and part of what you become responsible for is how to wrangle or handle or even manipulate the host themselves. Sometimes they need a friend, sometimes they need a push or a prod, sometimes they need a therapist, sometimes they need a pharmacist. 

This isn’t the first time you’ve played a type of crusader for justice; but your role in Primetime takes a wildly different approach to finding offenders than your work as a detective in Unbelievable. 
Yes! They’re complete opposites! My role in this is very different. There isn’t a Detective Duvall – I can’t believe I remember her [name] — in this story. She doesn’t exist. I think Skyler ends up being the person who feels the impact of what happens more than anybody else. Without his role and his performance and his existence in the film as its final victim, I don’t think I’d have been able to trust that the film was saying something that I would be able to get behind. [The film is] based on an article that I read before signing on that has a lot of compassion in it. And a lot of the time, people who have these kinds of inclinations towards children are people who were children who were abused themselves. And I hope there’s a place for the cycle of harm that exists. 

Do you have to make a concerted effort to keep the heaviness of the material out of your personal life? 
I don’t think I ever felt like that was an issue for me until recently. As you get older, everything seems to wear on you a little more than it used to. I don’t think it’s a matter of emotionally taking something home with you. In the past, I’ve noticed that whether I’m aware of it consciously or not, I’m always working on the part, or the part is always working on me. It’s like having the character on a spin bike in my brain. 

This was a part that I was attracted to because it wasn’t the compassionate person who cares about the right things and cares about people. There was a learning curve to playing that kind of a part. But I also noticed that I felt very ready to not be playing her anymore by the end of the shoot. Andie doesn’t live in a great place, and there’s no real moment of, for lack of a better word, catharsis. There’s never any real reckoning. There’s never any clearing out of all that nasty gunk. I’d come off of playing a similar character — I played Sydney Sweeney’s mom in Christy — and it’d been a one-two punch of playing people that tasted badly. I didn’t know how to spit it out. Moving forward, I [want] to pay attention to how to get those kinds of flavors out of my body. 

How do you prepare for a film performance where your scene partner for most of it is Robert Pattinson? 
Yeah, we’re so different. I can’t imagine being an audience member. I hope you can buy that these two characters live in the same world. He’s drawn to really interesting parts. Not all actors who have choice or control or power in their career are drawn to parts that are so extreme. He seems really drawn to people who speak in a specific way, have a voice, have an external encasing that’s very extreme. 

Right now, Lance is known best for his documentary work. He’s also said he was pretty loose about blocking and scenes on set, often filming with multiple cameras at the same time to mimic the chaos of To Catch a Predator’s production. How did that environment impact your performance? 
The truth is, the things that make Lance get free on set and the things that help me get free were, at times, diametrically opposed. But that ended up being the container of the job. The script changed so that by the time I got on set, I didn’t want to talk anymore. I just wanted to do. 

This project started for me with getting on a Zoom with Lance and the next step was getting on a Zoom with Lance and Rob. When I got on that second Zoom, it became clear that they were talking about a version of the script that I hadn’t read [laughs]. I say that with affection. But that was a very indicative precursor to this experience, feeling like I was catching up. And maybe that’s an example of carrying the character. Because Andie’s very much suddenly left out of the loop of the [show] she thought she was in charge of making. 

Chris Hansen has called the film “predatory” to his work and life. Was that something you considered during filming? 
It’s curious. I wonder if he’s seen it yet. 

In recent interviews, he said he hadn’t. [Editor’s note: Hansen announced days after this interview that he’s seen the film and plans to give his full reaction on his YouTube.] 
Given Lance’s background as a documentary filmmaker and the material he’s drawn to — the interplay between supposed fact and supposed fiction — I wonder if [Hansen’s comments] are going to be something that ends up feeding the conversation opposed to diminishing it. But I can’t imagine what it would feel like to have somebody make a dramatized version of a chapter of my life. I don’t think I have to live in fear of that happening. But I don’t think that I would like it. 

Do you see To Catch a Predator’s focus on spectacle and punishment pop up in today’s world? 
Yes. This is an answer, but it’s very tangential. I wish that we were better at having conversations around the idea of crime and punishment, for lack of a better term. I wish that we were able to have nuanced conversations. We have such polarity there. Someone has done something wrong and they get raked over the coals. I’m not thinking about what this film deals with, but mainstream headline culture. In the long run, it would help legitimate movements make more progress if we were able to talk about them in a more nuanced way. I think sometimes we just jump on the bandwagon to denounce something because we are so scared of being denounced ourselves. I wish that we were able to have more honest conversations about the content of these things. But that’s not the way the internet works.

I’m reminded of Rob’s line about how in the olden days there used to be whipping posts, and in the world of the film, To Catch a Predator acts as their cultural successor. 
Right! We certainly have them online. You can scroll through whipping posts any hour of the day. 

One of Andie’s most powerful lines happens at the end of the film and encapsulates the corrosive nature of the Predator machine. A tragedy has occurred on camera. And while everyone is looking on in horror, she says, “I think I can make this work.” 
What’s interesting is that I never thought those lines would pack a punch. But then when I saw it with an audience, twice, both times there’s an audible response. In my plotting, I was like, “Everybody knows Andie’s made her choice.” And then I realized, oh, there’s one last beat for her character in the film, and it’s the one I hadn’t anticipated. 

Why do you think that line gets such a visceral reaction? 
I don’t know that Lance or Jones expected or suspected that to be a final beat either. But I had hoped that Andie might be the character that people thought, “All right, if there’s going to be one sane person who sees clearly in this threesome, it’s going to be her.” There’s a sense of disappointment or strickenness that’s coming through. Even after we’ve seen where she’s choosing to land, it’s still an acidic shock to the system. 

The film is a snapshot in time, especially when it comes to the technologies of the early aughts. Is there an obsolete or older piece of tech you still have nostalgic feelings toward? 
I still carry a day planner! I don’t put my business in my phone. If I have an appointment, I write it down in a little book I carry with me. I still also write longhand. If I’m writing, I don’t want to type. The connection between my brain and whatever’s coming out on the page is a little more pure and clear and potent if I’m doing it with my hands. 

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I also have to read books on paper, which isn’t great for the environment when it comes to scripts. But I feel like if I read something on a screen, it’s like eating a meal that somebody else has already chewed by 30 percent. After I’ve read a book, I like to have it in my home. I like to be reminded of it and of the experience. I remember my mom saying to me once: “Books are like friends; you don’t just throw them away.” 

It wouldn’t feel right for me to talk about internet nostalgia without talking about your 2013 Emmy acceptance speech for supporting actress in a comedy for Nurse Jackie. I’ve always wanted to know — what was going through your head when you walked up there? 
What was going through my head was exactly what came out of my mouth. There was no filter. There was no translation. I feel lucky — I think it was the first category of the night. It was so unexpected. But if I had seen person after person get up there before me and had even heard what a speech was supposed to sound like, I may have been able to finagle and come up with something. Because that wasn’t an option, what I was feeling and what came out of my mouth were directly connected and in sync. That was not planned. And I feel very grateful that a moment of me being as honest as possible was received with affection. That’s a gift.