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'Cruel Intentions' 25th Anniversary: Interviews With the Stars successful 1999! (Exclusive)
The covering whitethorn alteration but privileged teens plotting to ruin each other's lives for a lark has ne'er gone retired of style.
Hence the refashioning of the 1999 cult classical Cruel Intentions into a bid of the aforesaid name, present with a bigger formed of morally bankrupt characters navigating the precocious societal stakes of Greek beingness connected a posh assemblage campus.
But what other separates the film from the new show?
"Being successful a wholly antithetic setting, a antithetic clip period, a batch much applicable things that are happening present truly marque it current," Brooke Lena Johnson, who plays ambiguously principled pupil activistic Beatrice, told E! News' Francesca Amiker successful an exclusive interview. "We inactive person the ruthlessness and the taboo things, but you get to spot nary 1 is simply a bully feline oregon a atrocious guy."
Not to worry, there's inactive a stepbrother and stepsister—Caroline and Lucien (Sarah Catherine Hook and Zac Burgess)—playing psychosexual caput games with each other, arsenic Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe's Kathryn and Sebastian did successful the movie.
But the characters different "don't wholly enactment up the mode that you cognize it," Johnson explained. "These astonishing actors who are successful the amusement person done specified a bully occupation wholly spinning them successful a caller direction."
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That includes Sean Patrick Thomas, who played 1 of the pawns successful Gellar and Phillippe's risky crippled 25 years agone and adds a acquainted look to the caller series. But portion he's portraying a prof (as opposed to grown Ronald) astatine the fictional Washington, D.C., assemblage wherever the enactment takes place, helium showed up acceptable to play.
"The essence that helium brought to the amusement truly inspired a batch of us," Johnson said. He "brought that benignant of code [from the original], truthful we each navigated astir that." (As for the remainder of the Cruel Intentions O.G.s, she added, "I anticipation they bask this reimagining.")
Her Beatrice is besides a caller character, the histrion noted, and "she has a precise beardown imaginativeness of what it is that she wants. She's precise overmuch a fighter, truthful she'll basal up for immoderate she genuinely believes successful and she'll bash immoderate it takes to get there."
So it sounds arsenic if Beatrice—who abhors hazing and wants to instrumentality down the snooty sororities and fraternities astatine the halfway of this world—fits close in.
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"She's precise akin to immoderate of these different characters," Johnson continued. "And passim this full bid you spot this powerfulness struggle. It's a precise privileged, affluent mounting and you spot radical trying to marque the champion of their reputation."
And since everyone checks disconnected a fewer boxes from some the leader and villain categories, she added, you'll spot them each "take a darker roadworthy to get wherever they privation to go."
But ruthlessly amoral onscreen activities aside, the vibe among the actors connected the show's Toronto acceptable was axenic light.
"We had a large household consciousness to it," Johnson shared, and that successful crook created a hospitable situation for leaning into the characters' nastiness. "We could play astir with these much dangerous, dark, taboo sides of the amusement due to the fact that everyone was truthful playful and welcoming."
There was plentifulness of "fighting on camera," she added, but "there wasn't immoderate of that off. You tin bask the amusive and past [off-camera] everyone would conscionable laughter and beryllium like, 'But you're truthful great!'"
For anyone wanting much of what the classical story—which originated with the 1782 French caller Les Liaisons Dangereuses—had to offer, the intentions are inactive cruel and the liaisons dangerous. But the show "is a enactment of caller air," Johnson said. "You tin spot much successful item what [lengths] radical spell to get wherever they privation to be. "
And adjacent if you cognize the movie by heart, "anyone who's seen it earlier is going to beryllium truly surprised" by the series, she said. "You don't cognize what's going to hap next."
Cruel Intentions premieres Nov. 21 connected Amazon Prime Video.
