Rachel Weisz, Double Threat

By her own estimation, Rachel Weisz had to eat a lot — "a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot" — while shooting several eating scenes for the new Prime Video limited series Dead Ringers.

For a scene set in a greasy diner, she gnashed through fifteen cheeseburgers (one for each take). She ingested a massive amount of seafood for a fancy restaurant scene. And finally, she crawled across a kitchen-island counter while hoovering up the remnants of someone else's sexy dinner date — a spontaneous improvisation. "It just kind of happened," Weisz says. "It definitely didn't say in the script, 'She crawled like a dog over the counter.'"

The actress, who is also an executive producer on the six-episode series premiering April 21, plays identical twin sisters, both doctors: Beverly and Elliot Mantle. When devising a way to differentiate between the lookalike women, she landed on a distinguishing characteristic for Elliot — an insatiable appetite. Which is why, for the kitchen-counter scene in the pilot episode, Weisz proposed to director Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene) that Elliot go "full animal" in trying to figure out what unknown person had been in her home and what they had been eating.

"I was just like, 'Oh, someone's been there. What have they eaten?' Elliot's going to find out by eating their leftovers. 'Whose knickers are these? Oh, I'm going to smell them,'" Weisz says. "Maybe the smelling of the knickers led me to the dog part — like, Elliot is part dog in the best possible way. She's loyal. She lives on instinct. And she'll eat beyond when she's full."

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"We wanted it to be messy, wild and energetic," Durkin says. "Rachel embraced that so fully — she ate more cheeseburgers than I've ever seen anyone eat. There was no backing down or hiding bites. She found that hunger for everything, and a different energy for each of the twins."

Elliot's devouring of a cheeseburger in the opening scene of Dead Ringers serves multiple purposes. We see her opposite her twin Beverly (whom she calls her "younger sister"), and we start to sense the distinctions between them — differences in how they speak and how they dress, of course, but also which of them is the "funny one" (Elliot) and which one is more touchy (Beverly, whom we see recoiling when a random man sitting nearby suggests the sisters join him for a different kind of sandwich).

This scene establishes the fact that Beverly and Elliot are, on some level, opposites. Elliot is more earthy and extroverted; Beverly is more sensitive and inward, but they are united in their shared professional desire to open a birthing center and an embryology lab. This, they feel, will give them "total control" over the way the reproductive process is perceived and handled — which in turn could change the world. But bringing that dream to life proves to be more difficult than they think, especially when the fragile egg that is their codependent relationship starts showing some cracks.

You may have noticed that the erotic thriller — a key movie genre in the 1980s and '90s — is making a comeback on television. There's a difference this time, though, in that we're given more sympathetic insight into the female characters, instead of just being invited to objectify them. Showtime retooled 1980's American Gigolo as a (short-lived) series in 2022. Paramount+ has revived 1987's Fatal Attraction (premiering on April 30). And before you know it, we'll be seeing remakes of 1990's Presumed Innocent on Apple TV+, 1996's Fear on Peacock and 1992's Damage on Netflix.

But it's Prime Video's reimagining of the 1988 David Cronenberg film Dead Ringers — whose Mantle twins were originally male, played by Jeremy Irons — that is most likely to stir a reaction. With women's health and reproductive issues in the national conversation the time seems right to focus not just on sex, but on its messy reproductive ramifications.

A huge Cronenberg fan, Weisz saw Dead Ringers as a teenager and never forgot it. As gynecologists sharing a practice and an apartment, Cronenberg's Mantle twins were a strange, codependent, self-destructive duo who exerted power over women while at the same time being coldly alienated from them; they saw their female patients as objects, which allowed them to take advantage of these women at their most vulnerable. The lookalike brothers also enjoyed a game of seduce-and-swap, wherein they would lure patients into bed and then each brother would impersonate the other, so they had the feeling of sharing sexual partners.

"What interested me," Weisz says, "is that level of intimacy — the idea of sharing everything. It's a really intense story. These two incredibly high-functioning siblings are brilliant at their jobs, but massively dysfunctional in their private lives. That contrast between genius and dysfunction is psychologically very profound."

When Weisz started thinking about new projects to develop as a producer, Cronenberg's old film remained lodged in her brain. What if that story were set in modern times? What possibilities might open up if she portrayed the Mantle twins herself? What if the tone of the story were radically different, with more humor and a rebellious spirit?

Weisz first met with Sue Naegle, then Annapurna's chief content officer, over tea at New York's Greenwich Hotel, where she suggested doing Dead Ringers as a limited series. Before Naegle's teacup was empty, she was in. "It was the chance to do something devilish and sexy with Rachel Weisz," she says. "I mean, please, sign me up!"

Weisz then called up playwright and screenwriter Alice Birch (Normal People, Succession), to recruit her as showrunner. "It felt like an enormous challenge," Birch says. "It's a huge reimagining. Also, how do we retain what is magic about the film?"

Everything would change once the two doctors became women examining other women, Birch realized. But she didn't want to lose the Mantle twins' strange detachment from their patients, or make them — even sensitive Beverly — caring, gentle or maternal just because of the gender swap.

"Rachel and I felt that they are not always the most empathetic, moral characters, although they are having a lot of fun," Birch says. She brought up two ideas — how OB/GYNs conducting cesarean sections can sometimes feel like they're playing God (deciding when life arrives), and how unhealthy some codependent relationships can be (citing the infamous 2012 case of Tetra Pak billionaire Hans Rausing, who kept his wife's decomposing body in their home instead of burying her).

Weisz says, "I was like, 'God and the Tetra Pak heirs? This woman has a great imagination.'" Birch later came to New York and the pair spent a few days together sitting with their laptops on their knees, brainstorming. They decided to name Beverly's love interest after Geneviève Bujold, the actress who played a similar role in the original film. "That's one of the sneaky little moments in our show," says Britne Oldford (The Umbrella Academy), who plays Geneviève. "My version is a bit softer."

Weisz and Birch ate at a Brooklyn diner, spoke with a number of twins and hung out in the doctors' lounges at two Manhattan hospitals to get the feel of staff banter. Weisz was also given permission to witness two births — which, although she had given birth twice herself, was eye-opening. "When you're giving birth, you can't observe it," she says. "And it was extraordinarily beautiful and primal. I don't think I've ever had an adrenaline rush like that before."

Outside of the gender swap, the biggest change Dead Ringers makes is emphasizing body reality over body horror — depicting body parts and bodily functions in ways not often seen onscreen. There's menstrual blood, miscarriage tissue and a montage of crowning babies. "Didn't Judd Apatow get there first?" Weisz wonders. "Didn't Knocked Up have a massive closeup of a crowning baby?" (It does.)

"It's destigmatizing birth," says Poppy Liu (Hacks), who plays Greta, an employee of the Mantle twins. "A lot of the time, the only kind of birth we see onscreen is written through a male lens. It's a one-note thing — like, the water breaks, the rush to the hospital, the screaming, the baby comes."

"In the Hollywood versions of quick-and-easy birth, the baby comes out looking like a fresh, clean four-month-old," says Michael Chernus (Severance), who plays a Mantle colleague named Tom. "In this show, it's intense, dangerous, bloody and deeply human."

"The only predictable thing about birth is how unpredictable it is," says Jennifer Ehle (1923), who plays a birthing-center investor named Rebecca. "I find it reassuring to have so much of the reality that I've experienced, and that half of the population on Earth experiences, reflected to me through a story on television."

The reality of childbirth is often different from the myths portrayed onscreen, such as the prevalence of water breaking (when only 15 percent of women experience that before labor begins) or birthing on backs (versus side positions or squats).

"Dead Ringers is one of those projects that give you what I call good stomachache problems, good butterflies," Amazon Studios Chief Jennifer Salke says. "Even after giving birth to three children, I did think the idea of exposing all the technical aspects of childbirth in such a visual way could be polarizing. But one of the points of the show is to fly in the face of that squeamishness. We are all born somehow. That's how people arrive in the world. It shouldn't be something that's hidden away."

To read the rest of the story, pick up a copy of emmy magazine HERE.

This article originally appeared in its entirety in emmy magazine, Issue No. 03.