Louis Partridge and Emma Appleton wanted to “find the soul” of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen as they transformed into the infamous couple for FX’s Pistol. Prior to the May 31 premiere of the six-episode limited series about the Sex Pistols and the rock ‘n roll revolution streaming now on Hulu, the Enola Holmes and The Witcher stars opened up to PopCulture.com about taking on such an iconic pair.
“You hear that word [iconic] … flung about quite a lot, but they were a true iconic duo,” Partridge told PopCulture, admitting that it seems like a “bigger undertaking” looking back than when he and Appleton were doing their research on the Sex Pistols bassist and his girlfriend. “You were really just trying to find the soul within these people,” he continued. “So it didn’t seem like we were taking on this monster that was these characters.”
Videos by PopCulture.com
Appleton agreed they tried to “shut out the classic Sid and Nancy kind of idea” that they initially had and look at them as “human beings.” Becoming such a controversial figure in the punk scene, Appleton read And I Don’t Want to Live This Life: A Mother’s Story of Her Daughter’s Murder, written by Spungen’s mother, to help with “humanizing a character that we haven’t seen on screen before.”
“We’ve seen versions of Nancy,” she explained. “We’ve heard a lot of stories about Nancy, and I wanted to take the emotional kind of vulnerable aspects as well and weave that into the Nancy that Craig [Pearce] had written in the script. So it was just more about just really fleshing her out and seeing all sides of a human being, rather than just the kind of the mythology of what we’ve heard and seen.”
Partridge wanted to do the same with Sid, telling PopCulture he found it “really fulfilling” to be giving the punk figure “a bit of humanity” outside of his public persona. “You listen to an interview with him and you’re like, ‘He’s a thoughtful guy.’ Well — in some interviews. I’ll preface that because there are some [interviews] where he’s far from thoughtful. But yeah, there’s stuff going on behind the guy with his shirt off.” Appleton noted that even after filming Pistol, there’s “so much” you can never know about these incredibly famous figures. “I think it’s easy for us to think that we know everything when we didn’t know them,” she said. “We still don’t know them.” FX’s Pistol premieres Tuesday, May 31, exclusively on Hulu.
