At the Television Critics’ Association winter press tour, HBO paneled The Undoing with panelists Nicole Kidman, Noma Dumezweni and Hugh Grant, along with executive producer David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies) and Susanne Bier.
Susanne Bier will also direct all six episodes, and the series was created and adapted for TV by David E. Kelley and is based On Jean Hanff Korelitz’s Novel You Should Have Known.
The limited series will also be available on HBO NOW, HBO GO, HBO On Demand and partners’ streaming platforms.
Bier said The Undoing was shot like a six hour film and that it maintained the overview while being immersed in detail, and that it was a demanding shoot.
David E. Kelley explained the premise further: “The theme and the core of denial that these characters lived in drew me in. They all draw false narratives about who they were, who their partners were, who the people in their lives were…We live in a world where the facts are the facts but the story is better. In relationships, that can be true as well.”
Described as a series where there are seven suspects and people’s intentions are revealed and unravel in the process, Nicole Kidman said that the show is “so twisty, and nothing is what it seems.”
Her costar Hugh Grant said that in the series, it is “such a relief” to be cast in roles where he gets to be “consistently vile.”
Grant also noted: “We have to be careful in our answers because this is a whodunit… and all of us knew who did it so, as actors, we had to keep up a pretext and try not to show the things we knew.”
HBO shared notes about the production:
The limited series follows Grace and Jonathan Fraser (Kidman and Hugh Grant) who are living the only lives they ever wanted for themselves. Overnight a chasm opens in their lives: a violent death and a chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child (Noah Jupe) and her family.
The cast also includes Edgar Ramirez (American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace) as Detective Joe Mendoza; Ismael Cruz Cordova (Berlin Station) as Fernando Alves; Matilda De Angelis as Elena Alves; Lily Rabe (American Horror Story) as Sylvia Steinetz.
Noma Dumezweni was on panel with Kidman and Grant and is cast as Haley Fitzgerald.
Critics’ Choice Awards nominee Noah Jupe (Honey Boy) is cast as Henry Fraser, described as Jonathan and Grace’s “precocious and artistic 12-year-old son.”
Also in the cast are Sofie Gråbøl cast as Catherine Stamper; and Emmy winning actor Donald Sutherland cast as Franklin Reinhardt, Grace’s father, a retired financier.
The Undoing is slated for May 2020 on HBO.