Playing a made-up producer opposite Robert Pattinson's Chris Hansen, Wever tells Deadline her character had every chance to be the film's conscience and blew it.
Merritt Wever remembers watching To Catch a Predator when it actually aired. That's the odd starting point of her new interview with Deadline about Primetime, Lance Oppenheim's dramatisation of Chris Hansen's reality-show sting operation, which opened in the US on Friday after premiering at Venice.
Robert Pattinson plays Hansen. Skyler Gisondo plays the show's underage-looking catfish, referred to as "Decoy Dan." Wever plays Andie Bender, the producer running the machine behind Hansen. Andie is entirely invented. Wever is clear about that.
"She really is a from-scratch character," she told Deadline, distinguishing her role from Pattinson's dramatisation of a real man and Gisondo's part, which she calls more of an amalgamation. "I wouldn't even call her a composite."
What Andie does carry, per Wever, is a kind of moral rot she's constantly negotiating with. Wever says she and Oppenheim kept returning to the old fable of two wolves inside a person, one light, one dark, and the elder's line about which one wins: whichever you feed. The film sets Andie up early as the character who might resist the machine. She doesn't.
"That's what I hoped would come through, and I didn't know if it would or not," Wever said. "She's the character that you think is going to make a different choice. And she's the one that does not."
For a show that ran for years on the strength of adult men showing up at a decoy house expecting to meet a minor, and that ended in the kind of controversy Deadline calls inevitable, that arc lands with some weight. Primetime isn't interested only in Hansen's ego. It's interested in everyone who let the ego run.
Wever's prep involved memoirs, documentaries and, more usefully by her own account, conversations with two veteran television producers about a version of the job that predates smartphones. She wanted to understand what it actually meant to manage a host two decades ago, before every crisis could be handled over text. "You are responsible for not just finagling a production, but finagling a human being," she said, calling that the hardest part of the job and, for the film's purposes, the most interesting.
She hadn't met Pattinson before signing on. Their first contact was a Zoom with Oppenheim, then a three-way call, then the shoot itself. Pattinson was coming off a packed schedule, Wever says, and the two of them simply got moving.
Oppenheim's film joins a crowded Venice slate this year that circled the media from different angles, including Alex Gibney's Elon Musk project and Danny Boyle's film on the founding of The Sun. Primetime is the one built around a show many Americans grew up half-watching and half-arguing about. Whether that history travels to audiences who never saw the original broadcasts is, by Wever's own admission, still an open question. No India release date has been announced.
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