Grace in the face of infidelityGERALDINE CREMIN 18/10/2014
SoHo’s provocative new show, The Affair, follows two couples whose relationships become entangled in an extramarital affair. Geraldine Cremin speaks with Maura Tierney about her character’s role in the mess.
How would you respond to the news that your partner of 17 years, your college sweetheart and best friend had risked it all for a summer affair?
''I think that's going to be the question for Helen,'' says Maura Tierney (ER), who plays Helen Solloway in SoHo's new drama, The Affair.
''What happens when you're faced with adversity and challenges in life that are deeply painful and difficult to negotiate, when you haven't had to do that ever before in your life?
''Can you handle that with grace, when the world sort of gets completely sidetracked?''
''The show is a discussion about what happens when two people find themselves deeply attracted to someone who isn't their partner,'' Tierney explains. ''I think the show poses questions and hopefully everyone will think of their own answers.''
The Affair explores the emotional and psychological impact of an extramarital affair between Noah Solloway (Helen's husband, played by Dominic West) and Alison Lockhart (Ruth Wilson).
Noah is an aspiring novelist and frazzled father to four children. The Solloways are spending summer at Helen's parent's estate in the Hamptons when Noah meets Alison, a local waitress who seems trapped in her emotionally volatile marriage to Cole Lockhart (Joshua Jackson).
The story of the affair is told retrospectively, taking turns looking through the perspectives of Noah and Alison. Tierney says the difference in the two versions of events is one of the most interesting parts of the show.
''I think aside from remembering things differently, people even experience things differently. Your memory is bound to be affected by your experience, you know? Two people can be in the same room, at the same event and have a completely different idea of what's happening in that moment.''
Although the series deals with an intensely delicate subject at its core, the show's writers haven't shied away from adding more intimate and dark themes in to the mix; we see tragedy and a woman swamped in grief and watch up close as an abusive relationship plays out.
As we learn more about the characters of the show, Helen seems the most likeable of the four leads. Tierney says that while she has little in common with Helen (''We're completely different. Helen is married with four kids and I'm single with no children'') there is a lot she appreciates in her character.
''Helen has a sense of humour. I like that. Because the show is sort of serious and Helen gets to be a little bit - a tiny bit - funny,'' Tierney says.
''She's very self-aware and has a lot of understanding of what's going on in the world around her, even though she's not aware of what her husband's doing.
''I think Helen is doing her best to manage everything in everybody's lives and take care of them and make sure everyone's alright and she is missing that it's sort of controlling to do that. I think that's relatable; you're doing your best but really you're sort of clamped down on everybody.''
Tierney is a familiar face from her 10-year stint as Abby Lockhart on ER. She says that The Affair has given her an opportunity to push her boundaries as an actor, partly because of the intimate nature of the show which required her to take on some steamy sex scenes.
''It's always sort of anxiety-inducing to have to pretend to have sex with someone in a room with 10 other people. But it's not something I get to do on network television so it was a boundary for me that I got to go past. It's not like it was a blast and I wasn't nervous about it, but it was new to me and I wanted to try to rise to that challenge and do something different.''
The Affair 8.30pm, Sunday, SoHo.
www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/tv-radio/10630409/Grace-in-the-face-of-infidelityThe Affair’s Season Finale: Behind the Swimming, Sexing, and Surprise EndingBY JULIE MILLER DECEMBER 21, 2014
Do not proceed if you have not seen tonight’s Season 1 finale of The Affair. Spoilers ahead!
Tonight, the first season of Showtime’s drama The Affair—a “he said, she said” study of the emotional and criminal complications of one extramarital relationship, between a struggling author (Dominic West) and a woman grappling with personal tragedy (Ruth Wilson)—drew to a climactic close, answering some questions, and somewhat maddeningly, leaving others on ice for the second season. In celebration of the season closer, we phoned the show’s co-creator Sarah Treem to pick her brain about Noah and Alison’s personal evolutions, the finale cliffhanger, the Fiona Apple theme song, and much more. Ahead, the most interesting revelations from our conversation.
Noah’s opening montage is about more than just swimming and sexing.
The finale opened somewhat fabulously with a montage showing Noah, after he has left his wife and been dumped by Alison, swimming laps and bedding strangers while the Animals’ “It’s My Life” blares in the background. Treem delightfully refers to the sequence as “the swimming and f**king montage” and says that writers scripted it after “thinking about what happens to a man after he ends his marriage of 20 years [and is] blown off by his mistress. We thought he probably goes wild for a little bit and makes up for lost time. [. . .] I think the decision to intercut it with the swimming was to show that he has quite a lot of anxiety. He’s [working through some of it with] the swimming and f**king, but he is not actually at peace. It’s almost a stress response.”
Treem never planned to end the first season differently, even if the show had not been picked up for a second season.
Because there are still so many loose strands at the end of the finale, we wondered whether the writers had planned an alternate finale in the event that Showtime did not pick up the series for another season. “No!” Treem tells us. “We really didn’t. I was just kind of counting on us getting picked up. Maybe if Showtime knew that we weren’t getting picked up, maybe they would have told us to change something? But no, we were kind of gunning for a second season and shooting for the moon.”
Dominic West’s sexuality was so overpowering that the writers had to change his Noah character accordingly.
“I think it’s interesting how the actors brought different elements to the show and how we started to adapt those characteristics into their narrative,” Treem says about writing the first season. “Dominic is very sexy. He is very virile. You can’t really deny it. The Noah character was definitely written to be more of a wallflower than he is, and more nebbish-y. So as we kind of moved forward in the writing of the season and saw the dailies, I was like, ‘You can’t really make him into a nerd.’ So now let’s figure out, O.K., who is this guy? He’s married, he has four kids, he has a good marriage, but he seems like he has a tremendous amount of sexual energy, so what do we do with that?”
Similarly, the Alison character became a totally different person than what Treem originally envisioned.
“Ruth is really, really strong,” Treem explains. “And Alison was written to be quite weak, actually. In the beginning, she is just in grief and incredibly passive and disassociated from her own life. And Ruth is the opposite of that. She is incredibly active and very aggressive even sometimes. That was helpful because then we got to kind of watch this character claim her power. To me, what is most exciting about Alison’s journey is that scene with Cole where he says, ‘Come on, let’s make this work.’ And she says, ‘I don’t want to anymore. It’s not worth it to me.’ To me, that was an act of real strength. It was exciting to get her character to a point where it could dovetail with the essence of Ruth.”
What you are seeing in the first few minutes of Alison’s narrative is Alison Eat, Pray, Love–ing her life.
When we saw Alison practicing yoga, reconciling with her mother, and eating sushi at some remote retreat, part of us wanted Alison to stay there and really “do her” for the first time. When we brought this up, Treem explains, “That yoga/hemp-bar summer was just a moment in time . . . I think that very few people can run away to their lives.” If others felt like it was a crazy leap for Alison’s character, Treem explains the writers’ motivation: “I think it’s a little like the inverse of the opening montage with Noah,” she says. “It’s an extreme reaction to breaking up your life. I think the Eat Pray Love phenomenon is not unique. That’s why the book was so successful, because women, when they end their marriages or relationships, and feel like they are falling and have no control of their lives, they’re like, ‘O.K., I’m going to go zen out, find myself and some inner peace, repair my relationships.”
Everyone agrees that Maura Tierney is awesome.
The actress plays Noah’s jilted wife, Helen, and Treem confesses that she never expected Helen to be such a sympathetic character. “I think that might have been the biggest surprise of the season . . . how brilliant Maura is,” Treem says. “Everybody loves Maura Tierney as an idea and as an actress. But when we started to write her in this part and see how natural and likable she is and how complicated she made the character, even with nothing to do in the beginning, we were blown away.” Treem says that she “kind of begged her to do this show” and promised to make the character and series worth her while, even though the first few episodes were centered on Noah and Alison. “But once we saw what Maura could do, it was like writing for her became a great joy for the writers.”The writers purposefully made episodes 9 and 10 so eventful.
“[Episodes] 7 and 8 were purposefully written to kind of be sweet episodes,” Treem says. “Everybody behaves exactly how you expect them to and everybody’s saying they’re sorry all of the time. In my mind, as a writer, it’s kind of the calm before the storm. So when the scripts for 9 and 10 came out, [the actors] were kind of shocked. We had a lot of conversations [with] the actors about the script, the characters.”
The standoff between Cole (Joshua Jackson) and Noah went through many different drafts.
“We had to write that scene and rewrite it and rewrite it because I think the fear was that the scene was going to play like a different show,” Treem says. “I had always wanted the finale to be Cole’s, because we had been painting him as so controlled for the whole season. He was really trying so desperately to keep his life together in the wake of a tragedy and not let his world fall apart. And a little bit like the Noah-f**king-and-swimming montage, it’s like what happens to Cole when everything gets pulled away from him? I wanted Cole to have his own freakout, but I thought that the freakout Cole has is probably with a gun.”
Joshua Jackson came up with a key concept for the standoff.
“We originally wanted the shootout to take place from both perspectives from outside,” Treem reveals. “It was Josh’s idea to move it inside for Alison’s perspective because it’s a much more controlled environment. He could play less grandiose and dramatic and could play it more small and meaningful, which turned out to be helpful. I think one good thing about making the two biggest episodes the last episodes is that the actors have a good sense of their own characters at that point and what their characters would do, so they can be really helpful.”
The second season will pick up pretty soon after the events of the first end.
There are two narratives in the series—Noah and Alison’s—and two timelines—the past, which ends in the finale with the Noah/Cole standoff, and the future, which ends with Noah being arrested in his swanky Manhattan apartment where he lives with Alison and his baby. Treem says that “the intent is to start [the second season] in the past and catch up to the present. And then the second season will be about getting them to that [future moment] you see them at. And then moving them forward.”
The writers have so many ideas for the second season that Treem briefly considered asking Showtime for more episodes.
“I sat down with the writers a couple of weeks ago and really started to hash [the second season] out more,” she tells us. “We sat around for a couple hours and looked at our notes and were like, ‘Wow, there is a whole season there.’ I was like, ‘We should go back and ask Showtime for more episodes!’ And everyone was like, ‘Wait. Hold on a second. We have been talking for two hours. Let’s see if these ideas actually hold.’ But there is a lot of story potential that we are all really excited about.”
The cast and crew celebrated the end of first-season filming by crashing Alan Cumming’s book party.
“Our premiere was on a boat in Manhattan and then the after-party was at the Spotted Pig [restaurant in Manhattan] on the third floor,” Treem recalls. “And there was a book party for Alan Cumming, but the whole cast arrived and kind of took it over and it became a big dance party, which was just fantastic. I think people were just thrilled that [filming] was finally done so we could just have fun after an emotionally exhausting experience.”
The haunting lyrics of Fiona Apple’s theme song could foreshadow Noah and Alison’s fates.
The Internet has dissected the enigmatic lyrics of The Affair’s eerie theme song in hopes that they might hold clues to the show’s ending or its central crime. But Treem tells us that Apple herself did not know the outcome of the series—she had only seen the pilot—when she revamped a previously unreleased track, “Container,” to fit the central motifs of the drama. If the lyrics, about an avalanche burying a man and a widowed bride, foreshadow the story, Treeme says, “It will be because we take it from her song, not because the song’s lyrics were written with that in mind.”
If you are looking for The Affair to ultimately reveal one truth about Noah and Alison’s relationship, and the events that led to Noah getting arrested, you should recalibrate your expectations now.
“I think if you’re looking for the objective truth [of the events], you’re missing the point a little bit,” Treem says. “Because I believe that truth is subjective, especially when people are recounting memories that happened years in the past. Nobody has a perfect memory and nobody experiences the universal truth. We are all filtering the truths through the prisms of our own perspectives and those perspectives are biased. In my mind, what you are seeing are the emotional truths of these people.”
Related: [The Secrets Behind The Affair’s Sneaky Costume-Design Changes](http://www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/2014/11/the-affair-showtime-costume-design?mbid=social_twitter]
credits:
twitter.com/MauraTierneyFanSarah Treem also teases season two (hint: get ready for new perspectives)Do not proceed if you have not seen tonight’s Season 1 finale of The Affair. Spoilers ahead!
Tonight, the first season of Showtime’s drama The Affair—a “he said, she said” study of the emotional and criminal complications of one extramarital relationship, between a struggling author (Dominic West) and a woman grappling with personal tragedy (Ruth Wilson)—drew to a climactic close, answering some questions, and somewhat maddeningly, leaving others on ice for the second season. In celebration of the season closer, we phoned the show’s co-creator Sarah Treem to pick her brain about Noah and Alison’s personal evolutions, the finale cliffhanger, the Fiona Apple theme song, and much more. Ahead, the most interesting revelations from our conversation.
Noah’s opening montage is about more than just swimming and sexing.
The finale opened somewhat fabulously with a montage showing Noah, after he has left his wife and been dumped by Alison, swimming laps and bedding strangers while the Animals’ “It’s My Life” blares in the background. Treem delightfully refers to the sequence as “the swimming and f**king montage” and says that writers scripted it after “thinking about what happens to a man after he ends his marriage of 20 years [and is] blown off by his mistress. We thought he probably goes wild for a little bit and makes up for lost time. [. . .] I think the decision to intercut it with the swimming was to show that he has quite a lot of anxiety. He’s [working through some of it with] the swimming and f**king, but he is not actually at peace. It’s almost a stress response.”
Treem never planned to end the first season differently, even if the show had not been picked up for a second season.
Because there are still so many loose strands at the end of the finale, we wondered whether the writers had planned an alternate finale in the event that Showtime did not pick up the series for another season. “No!” Treem tells us. “We really didn’t. I was just kind of counting on us getting picked up. Maybe if Showtime knew that we weren’t getting picked up, maybe they would have told us to change something? But no, we were kind of gunning for a second season and shooting for the moon.”
Dominic West’s sexuality was so overpowering that the writers had to change his Noah character accordingly.
“I think it’s interesting how the actors brought different elements to the show and how we started to adapt those characteristics into their narrative,” Treem says about writing the first season. “Dominic is very sexy. He is very virile. You can’t really deny it. The Noah character was definitely written to be more of a wallflower than he is, and more nebbish-y. So as we kind of moved forward in the writing of the season and saw the dailies, I was like, ‘You can’t really make him into a nerd.’ So now let’s figure out, O.K., who is this guy? He’s married, he has four kids, he has a good marriage, but he seems like he has a tremendous amount of sexual energy, so what do we do with that?”
Similarly, the Alison character became a totally different person than what Treem originally envisioned.
“Ruth is really, really strong,” Treem explains. “And Alison was written to be quite weak, actually. In the beginning, she is just in grief and incredibly passive and disassociated from her own life. And Ruth is the opposite of that. She is incredibly active and very aggressive even sometimes. That was helpful because then we got to kind of watch this character claim her power. To me, what is most exciting about Alison’s journey is that scene with Cole where he says, ‘Come on, let’s make this work.’ And she says, ‘I don’t want to anymore. It’s not worth it to me.’ To me, that was an act of real strength. It was exciting to get her character to a point where it could dovetail with the essence of Ruth.”
What you are seeing in the first few minutes of Alison’s narrative is Alison Eat, Pray, Love–ing her life.
When we saw Alison practicing yoga, reconciling with her mother, and eating sushi at some remote retreat, part of us wanted Alison to stay there and really “do her” for the first time. When we brought this up, Treem explains, “That yoga/hemp-bar summer was just a moment in time . . . I think that very few people can run away to their lives.” If others felt like it was a crazy leap for Alison’s character, Treem explains the writers’ motivation: “I think it’s a little like the inverse of the opening montage with Noah,” she says. “It’s an extreme reaction to breaking up your life. I think the Eat Pray Love phenomenon is not unique. That’s why the book was so successful, because women, when they end their marriages or relationships, and feel like they are falling and have no control of their lives, they’re like, ‘O.K., I’m going to go zen out, find myself and some inner peace, repair my relationships.”
Everyone agrees that Maura Tierney is awesome.
The actress plays Noah’s jilted wife, Helen, and Treem confesses that she never expected Helen to be such a sympathetic character. “I think that might have been the biggest surprise of the season . . . how brilliant Maura is,” Treem says. “Everybody loves Maura Tierney as an idea and as an actress. But when we started to write her in this part and see how natural and likable she is and how complicated she made the character, even with nothing to do in the beginning, we were blown away.” Treem says that she “kind of begged her to do this show” and promised to make the character and series worth her while, even though the first few episodes were centered on Noah and Alison. “But once we saw what Maura could do, it was like writing for her became a great joy for the writers.”
The writers purposefully made episodes 9 and 10 so eventful.
“[Episodes] 7 and 8 were purposefully written to kind of be sweet episodes,” Treem says. “Everybody behaves exactly how you expect them to and everybody’s saying they’re sorry all of the time. In my mind, as a writer, it’s kind of the calm before the storm. So when the scripts for 9 and 10 came out, [the actors] were kind of shocked. We had a lot of conversations [with] the actors about the script, the characters.”
The standoff between Cole (Joshua Jackson) and Noah went through many different drafts.
“We had to write that scene and rewrite it and rewrite it because I think the fear was that the scene was going to play like a different show,” Treem says. “I had always wanted the finale to be Cole’s, because we had been painting him as so controlled for the whole season. He was really trying so desperately to keep his life together in the wake of a tragedy and not let his world fall apart. And a little bit like the Noah-f**king-and-swimming montage, it’s like what happens to Cole when everything gets pulled away from him? I wanted Cole to have his own freakout, but I thought that the freakout Cole has is probably with a gun.”
Joshua Jackson came up with a key concept for the standoff.
“We originally wanted the shootout to take place from both perspectives from outside,” Treem reveals. “It was Josh’s idea to move it inside for Alison’s perspective because it’s a much more controlled environment. He could play less grandiose and dramatic and could play it more small and meaningful, which turned out to be helpful. I think one good thing about making the two biggest episodes the last episodes is that the actors have a good sense of their own characters at that point and what their characters would do, so they can be really helpful.”
The second season will pick up pretty soon after the events of the first end.
There are two narratives in the series—Noah and Alison’s—and two timelines—the past, which ends in the finale with the Noah/Cole standoff, and the future, which ends with Noah being arrested in his swanky Manhattan apartment where he lives with Alison and his baby. Treem says that “the intent is to start [the second season] in the past and catch up to the present. And then the second season will be about getting them to that [future moment] you see them at. And then moving them forward.”
The writers have so many ideas for the second season that Treem briefly considered asking Showtime for more episodes.
“I sat down with the writers a couple of weeks ago and really started to hash [the second season] out more,” she tells us. “We sat around for a couple hours and looked at our notes and were like, ‘Wow, there is a whole season there.’ I was like, ‘We should go back and ask Showtime for more episodes!’ And everyone was like, ‘Wait. Hold on a second. We have been talking for two hours. Let’s see if these ideas actually hold.’ But there is a lot of story potential that we are all really excited about.”
The cast and crew celebrated the end of first-season filming by crashing Alan Cumming’s book party.
“Our premiere was on a boat in Manhattan and then the after-party was at the Spotted Pig [restaurant in Manhattan] on the third floor,” Treem recalls. “And there was a book party for Alan Cumming, but the whole cast arrived and kind of took it over and it became a big dance party, which was just fantastic. I think people were just thrilled that [filming] was finally done so we could just have fun after an emotionally exhausting experience.”
The haunting lyrics of Fiona Apple’s theme song could foreshadow Noah and Alison’s fates.
The Internet has dissected the enigmatic lyrics of The Affair’s eerie theme song in hopes that they might hold clues to the show’s ending or its central crime. But Treem tells us that Apple herself did not know the outcome of the series—she had only seen the pilot—when she revamped a previously unreleased track, “Container,” to fit the central motifs of the drama. If the lyrics, about an avalanche burying a man and a widowed bride, foreshadow the story, Treeme says, “It will be because we take it from her song, not because the song’s lyrics were written with that in mind.”
If you are looking for The Affair to ultimately reveal one truth about Noah and Alison’s relationship, and the events that led to Noah getting arrested, you should recalibrate your expectations now.
“I think if you’re looking for the objective truth [of the events], you’re missing the point a little bit,” Treem says. “Because I believe that truth is subjective, especially when people are recounting memories that happened years in the past. Nobody has a perfect memory and nobody experiences the universal truth. We are all filtering the truths through the prisms of our own perspectives and those perspectives are biased. In my mind, what you are seeing are the emotional truths of these people.”
Related: [The Secrets Behind The Affair’s Sneaky Costume-Design Changes](http://www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/2014/11/the-affair-showtime-costume-design?mbid=social_twitter]
www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/affair-creator-finales-big-reveal-759796credits - twitter"the affair"
Sarah Treem - twitter@sarahtreem
By the end of this season, I was convinced that Maura is actually a national treasure