HBO Max is bringing some of Hollywood’s biggest names to one of the most controversial true crime cases with The Staircase. Starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette as Michael Peterson and Kathleen Peterson, the eight-episode limited series debuts on the streamer this spring. Tuesday, HBO Max released fans’ first look at Firth as he takes on the role of the convicted killer and Collette as his wife, who died under suspicious circumstances on Dec. 9, 2001.
Firth told reporters during HBO Max’s TCA presentation that taking on the role of Peterson, whose charge was reduced in 2017 to manslaughter and has long maintained his innocence, “came out of nowhere” when it came to the roles to which he is normally attracted. “The true crime genre isn’t where I go for my entertainment particularly,” Firth admitted, revealing that it was the quality of the script that drew him to the series.
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The Staircase‘s case has been examined so many times in so many different ways, but Firth said this iteration, written and executive produced by showrunners Antonio Campos and Maggie Cohn, “deftly avoids taking a single position” on what happened, nimbly managing to “mess with your expectations” and “keep doubt alive.” Cohn agreed that a theme of the series is to “make people comfortable ultimately with the gray,” or the realization that we truly don’t know what happened that led to the death of Kathleen.
With so much of what we know about Peterson coming from the original documentary by the same name as the HBO Max project, Firth said it was a “unique experience” trying to embody his character without simply focusing on being a “mimic.” Likewise, Firth tried to not impose his own judgment one way or another on the case while filming, not out of a moral choice, but a “creative necessity” to stay “as open as possible” for the purpose of the series’ message.
In line with that methodology, Firth didn’t have contact with Peterson or his family ahead of portraying him. “I felt that the way that the script was structured – just the whole approach of it… was its own ecosystem, so to speak,” he explained, noting that he didn’t want any person connections he formed to “skew” his performance. Instead, he and the showrunners based The Staircase off of the original documentary it’s based on, as well as Diane Fanning’s Written In Blood, countless articles, trial documents and interviews with the people involved.
Also starring alongside Firth and Collette in The Staircase are Michael Stuhlbarg, Juliette Binoche, Dane DeHaan, Olivia DeJonge, Rosemarie DeWitt, Tim Guinee, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sophie Turner, Vincent Vermignon, Odessa Young and Parker Posey. The Staircase premieres on HBO Max in spring 2022.
