For “Your Friends and Neighbors” creator Jonathan Tropper, the neo-noir TV series began, well, next door.
“I lived for 15 years in Westchester, adjacent to neighborhoods like the one in the show,” Tropper explained in an interview with TheWrap. “The notion just occurred to me that I was living in a very safe neighborhood. None of us really locked our doors, and it would be so easy to just walk into the houses of friends of mine.”
His new Apple TV+ original takes place in the fictional New York community of Westmont Village. It follows Andrew “Coop” Cooper (Jon Hamm), a self-made, recently divorced hedge fund manager who, after losing his high-paying job, starts robbing his neighbors’ homes to make quick cash. The series is inspired by Tropper’s time living as “a novelist among finance people” in an environment not at all unlike the one featured in “Your Friends and Neighbors.”
“It felt like very rich territory to mine,” Tropper explained. “My TV career took me in a different direction, but I always intended to get back to this. It just took about 12 years.” In the intervening years, Tropper made a name for himself in Hollywood as the creator and showrunner behind series like “Banshee” and “Warrior.” Then, when the COVID-19 pandemic ground the world to a halt in 2020, Tropper found himself returning to his decade-old idea.
All of a sudden, the show’s takedown of our collective “delusion of security” felt more relevant than ever. “When Coop gets dragged out of his hedge fund offices [in Episode 1], his boss yells after him, ‘It’s not yours if you can’t keep it!’” the showrunner explained. “I think a lot of us realized with the pandemic just how fragile the scaffolding of our lives is.”
“It just seemed like now was the time to try it,” Tropper said, and Hamm, whom Tropper had in mind for “Your Friends and Neighbors” from the very beginning, agreed. “I really liked the idea of setting up this world,” Hamm said. “I knew that [Jonathan] would be able to populate it not only with compelling characters, but also in telling the story, give it a deeper resonance thematically [in regards to] rampant consumerism and late-stage capitalism and all of the things that we’re wrestling with now as a culture — and I was proven correct.”
Hamm was immediately intrigued by Tropper’s pitch and the “wildly contemporary” protagonist at the center of it. The actor sees parallels between Coop in “Your Friends and Neighbors” and Monty Miller, the wealthy oil company CEO he played in Taylor Sheridan’s “Landman,” and both roles appealed to him for similar reasons. “It’s fun to play a character who is wildly contemporary — who is very much of the now,” Hamm explained. “Both of those characters have something to say about where we are and how we got here.”
In Coop, Hamm and Tropper saw a vessel to explore the emptiness of a life dedicated to material success. “This is a world where everybody has been so busy climbing the mountain for so many years, and they’ve reached the top. But it’s only now they realize it may have been the wrong mountain to climb,” Tropper explained. “A lot of the characters’ behavior is about trying to avoid looking at the void or trying to fill the void — and that’s when bad behavior sets in.”
Hamm’s Coop is not the only figure in “Your Friends and Neighbors” suffering from a crisis of identity. As the series winds its way through its story, viewers also see Coop’s ex-wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), who cheated on him with Nick Brandes (Mark Tallman), a retired NBA champion and close friend of Coop’s, lash out at her life in surprising, sometimes violent ways.
“I like that Mel isn’t a depressed divorcee who sits on the couch and drinks white wine,” Peet said of her “Your Friends and Neighbors” role. “She’s having sex with a really hot boyfriend, and she’s taking things into her own hands and acting out in ways that are sort of unusual for a middle-aged woman.” She and Hamm were tasked with navigating a difficult relationship onscreen, one that alternates between combative and supportive.
“He’s a mensch and a great actor, so it was a ball,” Peet revealed when asked about working with Hamm, adding with a laugh, “It was easy. He’s easy on the eyes and he’s easy — period.”
For both actors, it was important that viewers feel the complexity of their characters’ relationship, as well as the history of it. “We both knew that it was important to Jonathan that the heart of the show be Mel and Coop’s family, even though it’s not the A-story he’s telling. That was always in the back of my mind, and I’m assuming it was in Hamm’s, too,” Peet commented.
Coop and Mel share what Tropper called “a broken love.” In the disconnect between them, Peet was reminded of the “1950s novels about suburban ennui and what lies beneath the placid surface of suburbia.” “What is the lie?” Peet observed. “You can live next to or even sleep next to someone for 15 years and still, every now and then, wonder, ‘Wait. What if I don’t really know you?’”
It is this focus on relationships and identity that Hoon Lee, a frequent collaborator of Tropper’s following his roles in “Banshee” and “Warrior,” thinks makes the TV creator’s work so appealing to both watch and work on. “I think Jonathan’s writing is somewhat deceptive. It doesn’t announce itself all the time,” Lee, who stars in “Your Friends and Neighbors” as Barney Choi, Coop’s closest friend and personal accountant, explained. “At the heart of it, his core concerns are always family, love and romance. All of these things are resonant, classic themes, and they speak to what is important to him.”
“I don’t think you see his genre pieces and detect that they have a hollow core,” he added. “The dramatic center is always quite rich.”
Coop and Mel’s relationship is complicated in “Your Friends and Neighbors” Season 1 by not only their divorce and his illegal new hustle but also his secret, ongoing affair with Sam Levitt (Olivia Munn), another member of their social circle in the midst of a grueling divorce from her unfaithful, rich ex-husband. For Munn, “Your Friends and Neighbors” marked a full-circle moment, having auditioned but failed to land a role over 10 years ago in the Shawn Levy-directed 2014 film adaptation of Tropper’s novel “This is Where I Leave You.”
“I had a call with Jonathan about this show where he just talked to me about his personal life and how he had been in this world once that is very much like the one in [‘Your Friends and Neighbors’],” Munn recalled. “He was there for the big dot-com crash and watched a lot of people with enormous wealth lose it in an instant. He explained it all to me — this place inhabited by the wealthiest 1% of people — and I just thought it was the most fascinating, interesting world.”
In “Your Friends and Neighbors,” the gated world of Westmont Village is populated by people desperate, no matter their financial state, to either maintain their current social status or improve it. That includes Elena (Aimee Carrero), a Westmont Village housekeeper who becomes an unlikely partner for Coop. “How far are you willing to go for the things you want?” Carrero muses about her character. “In her case, pretty damn far.”
As she read Tropper’s scripts for “Your Friends and Neighbors” Season 1, it was the desperation of the show’s characters that stood out to Munn. “It’s like when you can feel everything slipping away, but yet you’re imprisoned by the world you live in,” Munn explained. “These one-percenters, they’re desperate to stay in the same social group. It doesn’t matter who’s divorced who, who’s sleeping with who, who betrayed who, they’ll still go to the same barbecue. … It matters more to them to keep up the facade than to actually live a happy life.”
That desire to resist change, no matter how unstoppable it may be, is at the heart of “Your Friends and Neighbors,” and it stems from that same false sense of security Tropper felt when he was living in Westchester all those years ago.
“We now live in a world where the permanence of everything is in question,” Tropper remarked to TheWrap. “What the show is exploring is one person grappling with this shocking impermanence in a life he thought was pretty permanent — his marriage, his family, his wealth, his status. It all just gets taken away from him, and he is left in the death throes of trying to hang on to it all.” It’s there that the bad behavior and the compelling drama begin.
“Your Friends and Neighbors” premieres Friday, April 11 on Apple TV+.
The post ‘Your Friends and Neighbors’ Cast and Creator Discuss the Apple Crime Drama’s ‘Wildly Contemporary’ Story appeared first on TheWrap.