‘The Affair’ Season 3 Spoilers: Maura Tierney Says Helen Is Really Struggling After Noah’s ConvictionBY MINYVONNE BURKE @minyvonneb ON 11/14/16 AT 12:45 PM
Helen Solloway will have a hard time moving on following Noah Solloway’s conviction for the death of Scotty Lockhart. Actress Maura Tierney recently dished on Season 3 of Showtime’s “The Affair,” teasing that her character will be dealing with an immense amount of guilt in the new episodes.
“She’s drowning in guilt and desperation,” Tierney told the Daily News in an interview published Monday. “But she’s got this really calm veneer over the top of it. It’s tough to bring a character back from that bad choice. Who could live with that? That’s been the struggle.”
As fans may recall, Season 2 ended with Noah (Dominic West) pleading guilty to killing Scotty (Colin Donnell), even though he didn’t commit the crime. He took the fall to protect his ex-wife Helen, who was driving the vehicle that struck Scotty, and his current wife Alison (Ruth Wilson), who accidentally shoved Scotty into the road as the car was approaching.
“As the season progresses [Helen] gets more and more desperate,” Tierney said. “There’s some stuff that she does that’s a little unhinged. It’s just not as funny. It’s a little sadder. It’s definitely surprising.”
Season 3 will pick up three years after Noah confessed. He’s been released from prison, no longer with Alison and is living with his sister Nina (Jennifer Esposito).
“This season is all about Noah,” Tierney told the outlet. “He’s been released. As the season progresses, there are more and more flashbacks. His journey in prison gets revealed towards the end of the season.”
What's Next For Noah, Alison And Helen In 'The Affair' Season 3?
According to a synopsis, via TV Guide, of episode 1, Noah is still haunted by what happened and “struggling to navigate the challenges of his old life while trying to adapt to a new one.” The synopsis also teases that the disgraced author will meet a new love interest, Juliette Le Gall (Irene Jacob), and learns that someone is following him.
Variety previously reported that Irene’s storyline will be pivotal as she helps Noah deal with some of the things from his past. However, Irene is keeping a few dark secrets of her own.
“The Affair” Season 3 premieres Sunday, Nov. 20 at 10 p.m. EST on Showtime.
www.ibtimes.com/affair-season-3-spoilers-maura-tierney-says-helen-really-struggling-after-noahs-2445800'The Affair' season 3 air date, news & update: Maura Tierney says Helen will make bad decisionsJackie Villegas20 NOVEMBER, 2016
"The Affair" season 3 will debut this weekend and star Maura Tierney said that viewers should prepare for a darker and more dramatic new chapter for the Showtime drama.
The third season, which will pick up three years after the highly emotional plot twist in the season 2 finale, will see the characters' complicated relationships getting even more complex. The premiere episode will reportedly see Noah (Dominic West) getting out of jail and moving in with his sister, to be played by Jennifer Esposito.
"This season is all about Noah," Tierney, who plays Helen, Noah's ex-wife, recently told the New York Daily News. "As the season progresses, there are more and more flashbacks. His journey in prison gets revealed towards the end of the season," she added.
In "The Affair" season 3, viewers will reportedly find Noah depressed and broke, despite his novel having made him famous. To make ends meet, he teaches a college writing class, where he meets a new love interest, Irène Jacob (Juliette Le Gal). According to the New York Daily News, this new character will have her own mysterious back story.
"It's about our darker impulses as humans and what happens if we follow them," Tierney said about the upcoming season.
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In a chat with The Boston Globe, Tierney also spoke about her own character, hinting that Helen is bound to make a mess of things in season 3. "In her desire to have Noah back, she makes a lot of really poor choices," the actress said.
This is despite Helen having a new boyfriend, Vic (Omar Metwally), a doctor who lives in the basement of her brownstone apartment. According to Tierney, Helen will jeopardize this new relationship in her attempt to get info on Noah.
"She becomes really desperate and I think makes some very poor choices in regards to sex," she said. "We'll be seeing her use sex almost in a mercenary way, and that's very ugly," she continued.
"The Affair" season 3 premieres Sunday, Nov. 20, at 10 p.m. EST on Showtime.
christiantimes.com/article/the-affair-season-3-air-date-news-update-maura-tierney-says-helen-will-make-some-very-poor-choices/66501.htmNO WAY, NOAH
‘The Affair’ Returns With Sex, Violence, and Campus Protests: Season 3, Episode 1 RecapNoah Solloway, television’s hottest scoundrel, is fresh out of jail after fessing up to a crime he didn’t commit. And another big mystery forms the center of Season 3 of The Affair.
TIM TEEMAN - 11.21.16 2:00 AM ET
If posh, liberal nerves are shot because of the election, then Showtime wants to shred them to their rawest, tingling ends. Yes, The Affair is back, that everyday story of happy, settled metropolitan folk who spend their days and nights engaged in friendly, intellectually zinging conversation, and hot romancing in fancy Manhattan brownstones.
Joking!
As any fan knows, The Affair is a tortuous parlor game, focusing on the fallout of an upper middle-class marriage which has progressed to affairs within affairs, abuse, murder, and a miscarriage of justice. The Affair is now so complicated that one comes to dread the beginning-of-episodes, “Previously on The Affair…” because how on earth do you compress the précis of the merry-go-round of dysfunction these people excel at in their perfectly appointed milieus of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Montauk.
Welcome then, dear brave fellow masochists, to Season 3. We left horny and mostly scoundrel-embodying author Noah Solloway (Dominic West) standing up in court and claiming responsibility for the death of Scotty Lockhart (Colin Donnell).
He didn’t do it. Noah was a passenger in a car driven by his ex-wife Helen (Maura Tierney), after Scotty was pushed into the trajectory of said car by Noah’s perhaps-not-now-present partner/former mistress Alison (Ruth Wilson). He was protecting both of them, in no small part because they are the mothers of his children.
Or at least he thought he was, because he’s actually not the father of Joanie, Alison’s daughter, whose father is her ex-husband Cole (Joshua Jackson). Before the car crash, we had seen both original, pre-affair couples—Noah and Helen, Cole and Alison—together again and pretty happy. Not for long.
The first surprise of Season 3: Fiona Apple has remastered the lyrics to that opening theme to make it even more staccato and creepy; the credits themselves are darker and still feature the sea, but it looks even blacker, and even more characters descend blurrily into its depths.
The cast list has expanded to include Noah and Helen’s children, and Irène Jacob, who plays a sultry academic, Juliette Le Gall.
And, for at least this first episode, just one perspective. Affair fans are used to seeing two perspectives, sometimes of the same events, in one episode. In this season opener, written by Sarah Treem, the show’s co-creator, it was just Noah’s point of view we saw and not much of the wonderful Tierney and Wilson, which, this viewer hoped, was a temporary blip.
It turned out his false courtroom confession had worked: He had been locked up for three years, and this first hour weaved between his time inside and his new life outside, working as a creative writing tutor at Princeton University to a bunch of namby-pamby, mollycoddled millennials.
Noah is his usual difficult-to-love self, but is so sexy that any heterosexual female who may object to him, or is hurt by him, ends up fancying him or having sex with him. The message of Noah Solloway: All is not lost for terrible partners and terrible dads, who happen to be charismatic stud-muffins.
Noah begins Season 3 with a heavy beard (he really should shave it off, his sister says rightly, he looks “insane”), at his dad’s funeral, his sister protecting him from her husband’s charges that he is a selfish asshole. The husband, scary as he may be, is right—we know that.
But the first brilliant piece of screenwriting saw Noah deliver his father’s eulogy—haltingly because the niceties of the traditional tribute caught in his throat. He didn’t know his father, he admits, and didn’t like him.
We see Helen at the funeral, hopeful of a future with Noah, which he does not want. His eldest son Martin (Jake Siciliano) wants nothing to do with him—so a nice bit of history repeating itself there. Noah calls Alison later to try and build a bridge (but we don’t see her), and we have no idea what has happened to his relationships with Alison and Helen. We as yet have no idea how they lived with him accepting guilt for something he didn’t do to protect them.
He is no longer the lauded famous author, but an ex-con tentatively rebuilding his life. We see he is also pill-poppingly shaken-up and vulnerable because of some terrible experience related to a prison guard.
This first episode, with blurry sightings of said person first outside and then—literally most shatteringly—in a liquor store, had elements of horror movie about it. Whatever happened between Noah and the guard is somehow caught up with the outdoors and the sound of a train. This season: sounds of train/forests/nighttime—all BAD.
Vogueishly, The Affair trod into the hot current topic of campus sexual assault and cosseted millennials. Noah verbally rounded on Audrey, one of his students in his creative writing class—rightly, her composition was navel-gazing dirge-drivel—who dashed out in tears.
Later, exhausted, he awoke after taking a nap in a church (as you do) to the dulcet tones of foxy Juliette. They chanced upon a campus demonstration about sexual assault, and Juliette mused about students wanting to feel “secure” now. In their day, the whole idea of going to university was being in an arena where you, and your ideas, were challenged.
Juliette is smitten by this screw-up, because why not, and invites him over for dinner where there are two male students and two female students (including Audrey). The female students are exercised about sexual assault and gender transgressions, the male students feel they can’t f**k a female counterpart without being accused of being potential rapists, depending on the young woman’s whims the morning after.
Noah’s own crimes of passion and real crimes are bought up by Audrey. In Descent, his potboiler distillation of what happened in Seasons 1 and 2 between him, Helen, and Alison, the moment he and Alison had rough sex against a tree is brought up. Audrey describes it as rape; Noah describes sex as blurred itself, “a war between intellect and instinct.”
“Merveilleux,” sighs Juliette, très French-ly, très predictably. She spends this first episode gazing at Noah in horny wonderment. Because she is French and so much more laconic and worldly than the fools of American academia around her, she just loves ze f**ked-up men like Noah who say ze bad things and outrage all ze social mores. Oohlala.
Audrey is bewitched too, because what point are your staunch feminist principles when confronted by the hot sex magnet that is Noah Solloway? That is until he wonders why she feels unsafe in his class, and says he only pushes her in class to take her out of her comfort zone; and she says, as a woman, she never feels safe, or in any comfort zone.
Well, OK. And well-distilled from headlines and all the right websites, Affair scribes. And thanks for listening to us watchers, who—as bewitched by West’s gorgeous butt as any reasonable human would be—have struggled to see Noah thus far as anything but an indulged, screwed-up abuser. But Audrey, just FYI: no one is in a safe space or in a comfort zone in The Affair, so welcome to the freakin’ party.
Lucky Juliette gets to bed the newly non-bearded Noah, and just as his muscular, zero-body fatted loins are getting into their rhythmic stride, there roars a train outside. Nightmare time. Evil guard time. Out into the night Noah sprints. Is this the evil guard he sees in the shadows? No, it isn’t.
But back at his digs, it all gets very Cronenberg. For some reason, his kitchen light is the only one in any suburb anywhere that is the flickering blue neon of a horror film mortuary. (We suggest a softer bulb. They’re a steal in Home Depot.) Ants are crawling everywhere. (Noah, babe, get some Raid.)
Horror appears imminent, because the bulb is also menacingly loud in its flickering. And indeed, our anti-hero is soon hitting the deck in his weird suburban mortuary kitchen, slashed in the neck by an unseen assailant, blood spurting from the wound as if Wes Craven himself had popped in to say a cheery hello.
The Affair, then, has a new mystery: Who tried, and maybe succeeded, to kill Noah? We have a missing three years, the usual cast list of suspects (minus Scotty), plus an evil guard for a storyline that looks set to be six parts Oz to four parts Shawshank. In short: another whodunnit, with loads of philosophical and sexual-political musing on the side to class it up. And, it would seem, the writers are going make Noah decent, just as they line up a gallery of suspects to kill him.
www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/20/the-affair-returns-with-sex-violence-and-campus-protests-season-3-episode-1-recap.htmlI Binged The Affair & All I Got Was A Lousy Attitude About MonogamyPhoto of Elizabeth Kiefer 21 NOV 2016 2:30 PM
ELIZABETH KIEFER
The women in my office employ a certain phrase when describing a thing that another one of us would enjoy. We say that the thing is "on brand" for a particular person — their personality and habits, their affinities for other series or films or fashion choices. The phrasing itself is very "on brand" for our publication. I suspect that if you're reading this, you already understand what I mean.
The Affair is an on-brand series for me. I was told this by multiple colleagues, from non-work friends out in the world (who used slightly different language but meant the same thing), and from my partner who, having not seen the show himself, mentioned that The Affair sounded like "something I would like." Okay then.
As it turns out: They were all right. I have spent the past week immersed in seasons 1 and 2, watching some episodes twice to make sure I understood the smallest plot twists and perspective shifts. I have marvelled at the brilliance of a show that takes "he said/she said" to a new level (a very sexy one at that), and emerged from hours of binge-watching in what I can only describe as a contemplative stupor.
The Showtime series — a relationship drama told from a tennis match of perspectives, first his, then hers, back and forth until someone hits the net — feeds the part of my brain that loves dark and cerebral plots that every so often perform the TV equivalent of a pop quiz, just to make sure you've been paying attention. Noah Solloway (Dominic West) and Allison Lockhart (Ruth Wilson) are captivatingly twisted characters whom you hate and relate to in the same thought; their cuckolded spouses, Cole (Joshua Jackson) and Helen (Maura Tierney) have their own demons to fight, and watching all these egos, desires, manipulations, and self-deceptions battle it out is nothing short of fascinating.
WHAT DOES IT SAY ABOUT ME THAT I TAKE SUCH GREAT SATISFACTION IN WATCHING IT ALL FALL APART?
But I must admit there's some schadenfreude involved with loving this series. You have to enjoy watching "perfect" lives implode on themselves, like a renovated three-story Brooklyn brownstone that begins to collapse, floor-by-floor, on all the inhabitants within. You have to take pleasure in watching people who have it all f**k it all up, as well as be comfortable with a nefarious omniscience: You know much more than they do about what's really going on, through the flash-forwards and the entry granted to different characters' consciousnesses. It's a dark rabbit hole to fall into, and, at least from my own experience, it has the power to land a viewer in a grim headspace. And — to top it off — all that is kind of the point of watching.
In the end — which is to say, the beginning of season 3, which premieres on November 20 — I wound up despising everyone involved, really hating them for so severely messing up what should have been an idyllic life. At the story unfolds, it's hard to find the key players anything short of despicable. And yet, I also pitied them. Maybe because they remind me a little of myself.
So what does it say about me that I take such great satisfaction in watching it all fall apart, and find my own reflection in a series about the way people fail and f**k each other? What is going on in my brain that this is "on brand" for my viewing pleasure?
Because it is, and while of course I'm far from the only person who loves The Affair, I am someone who has to kick it around in my own mind late at night, when lately I'm wondering if monogamy is really a sustainable promise to make to someone you love. Part of the magnetism of the show — on top of the riveting twists and turns, the stellar performances, and the gorgeous cinematography — is that it's an opportunity to think about what might happen if you scrapped everything you've built and started over again, just because it seems like less work than labouring at something imperfect.
So before you dive in, as a new viewer or an old one returning: Have you ever thought about blowing your life up? Disappearing and starting over? Cutting your losses and leaving town? All the time? If the answer is yes, then you should probably watch The Affair. Then again, depending on where your head is at these days, maybe you shouldn't. In real life, unlike on television, there are consequences to our rash decisions.
The Affair returns to Sky Atlantic on Monday November 21.
www.refinery29.uk/2016/11/130628/the-affair-review-season-1-2-binge-watchingTierney embraces the chance to make a mess on ‘The Affair’Maura Tierney as Helen on “The Affair.’’
By Christopher Wallenberg GLOBE CORRESPONDENT NOVEMBER 18, 2016
NEW YORK — In nine memorable seasons on “ER,” life was never easy for Maura Tierney’s soulful yet sad Abby Lockhart. As one of the show’s central heroines, the nurse-turned-physician battled alcoholism and depression and grappled with a mother with bipolar disorder.
Now, as Helen Solloway on the Showtime series “The Affair,” which returns for its third season Sunday night at 10, Tierney is once again playing melancholy, with a feisty side of smart-ass. At first, she appeared to be the picture-perfect vision of a bourgeois Brooklyn wife whose life got upended when her husband, Noah, left her and her four children for another woman. Helen came across as a wronged, almost martyred wife. But in season two, in a series structured on the differing perspectives of the main characters, she was given her own point-of-view, and it often wasn’t pretty.
“What we saw is this woman realizing how culpable she was in contributing to the dissolution of her marriage,” Tierney says. “So it was fun to play this ‘perfect wife’ as she unraveled in front of people and got dismantled a little bit.”
The real kicker happened at the end of the season, when it was revealed an intoxicated Helen was driving the car that killed bad-seed Scotty in a hit-and-run. She then let Noah take the fall for her. Tierney’s riveting performance garnered her a Golden Globe award and an Emmy nomination this year.
We rang up the Hyde Park native, 51, at her home in the West Village to talk about what’s in store for season three, her character’s mounting recklessness, and growing up in a political family (her father is the late Joseph Tierney, a former Boston City Council president).
Q. Season three picks up three years later. Noah has just been released from prison. What is Helen’s psychological state right now?A. Helen is kind of desperately, neurotically, and pathetically trying to get him back. [Laughs] She has this crazy guilt-fueled notion that if she can put her family back together how it was before and have her husband back, everything will be better again. It’s very misguided. But I understand it.
Q. Her two oldest kids seem to hate Noah for what they think he did. Is that adding to her guilt?A. She’s just desperately looking for some sort of absolution or forgiveness — which she can’t have. The only way you can have that is by copping to it. So all of this chaos has been created by this moment of really bad choice and cowardice, and it’s very hard to fix that.
Q. Is she still in love with Noah?A. I think she thinks she is in love with him. She is in a deep sense of denial that if she can only have him back, she’ll be OK. I think it’s a selfish, delusional, cloying desire. A lot of the show has always been about kind of the darker impulses in human nature, and this season sort of doubles down on that. In her desire to have Noah back, she makes a lot of really poor choices.
Q. But she also has a hot new boyfriend, Vic [Omar Metwally], a physician who’s living in the basement apartment of her brownstone.A. And she recklessly disregards the sanctity of that relationship in many ways in order to try to get some information about Noah. She becomes really desperate and I think makes some very poor choices in regards to sex. We’ll be seeing her use sex almost in a mercenary way, and that’s very ugly.
Q. What do you like about playing Helen?‘A lot of the show has always been about kind of the darker impulses in human nature, and this season sort of doubles down on that.’
Quote IconA. I really like how self-aware she can be. I mean, she’s a little bit more in delusional denial this season. But by and large, it’s this woman who really knows what she’s doing. And because the character is somewhat self-aware, she can have a really wry sense of humor. She’s aware when she’s being a bitch. She’s able to see what’s funny and make fun of herself.
Q. Were you intrigued by how the series explores multiple perspectives of the same events from different characters’ points-of-view?A. Yes, of course. The one thing I do really pay attention to now is how radically different people remember a conversation that even just happened five minutes ago. The possibilities of interpretation are so vast. And I do notice that 100 percent more now. Like this conversation between you and I will be remembered differently.
Q. What was it like winning the Golden Globe?A. Are you kidding? [Laughs] It was fun! I was really nervous, so I wish I had kept it together a little bit more. Because you get up there and that clock starts blinking and you have 30 seconds, and I just flipped out and I forgot to thank a lot of people. I wish I had had a little more composure. But I was really surprised that I won.
Q. Does acting fit your personality?A. I say I’m not a control freak and I don’t like to be in charge. But on the other hand, I really don’t like anyone telling me what to do. I have some authority issues. [Laughs] And I think that this kind of lifestyle can lead to a sort of independence that’s important to me. With acting, there’s a certain amount of independence you have within the framework of the storytelling. When it’s done well, it’s a collaborative medium.
Q. What frustrates you most about being an actor? Is dealing with rejection the hardest part?A. Rejection happens, and you have to have a thick skin about it, which is hard. You can’t be overly sensitive about people not picking you. Also, in order to do a good job, you really have to let go of being self-conscious, and that’s a struggle . . . especially if you’re aging. Being in this business is so much about your face and your body, but you really have to just not care about what you look like when you’re acting. You just have to throw your vanity out the window.
Q. Did growing up around politics, which can be very performative, inform your choice to become an actor?A. I’m sure my desire to perform came in part from being around politics as a kid. My dad had a big personality, and a lot of the people involved in Boston politics have big personalities, so there were all kinds of wacky people around. It was really fun, in a way that’s very similar to acting. You work with lots of different people. And a lot of it is dependent on, does the audience like you? [Laughs] There’s absolutely an aspect of “show” to politics. Not that there should be. But there is.
THE AFFAIR
Starring: Dominic West, Ruth Wilson, Maura Tierney, Joshua Jackson
On: Showtime, Sunday at 10 p.m.
Interview was edited and condensed. Christopher Wallenberg can be reached at chriswallenberg
@gmail.com.
www.bostonglobe.com/arts/television/2016/11/17/tierney-embraces-chance-make-mess-the-affair/p7cJj2cJUqs3CecWpxB5UP/story.html