Hi, everybody. Hello, Netflix Book Club!
I'm Uzo Aduba and welcome to
But have you read the book?
If you've spent the past month trying to untangle all of the mysteries
in Harlan Coben’s Stay Close,
then you are here in the right place.
We have today, joining us, the author himself
Mr. Harlan Coben and star of Stay Close Richard Armitage.
-Hello, Richard. -Hi.
-Hello, Harlan. -Nice to see you.
-How are you both? -Thrilled to be here.
Glad to have you.
If you haven't finished reading or watching, pause now.
Get a cup of coffee and join us when you're ready
because we're going to be talking big, big spoilers here.
So first, first question Harlan.
Stay Close, it's your sixth book that you've done with Netflix.
What's the experience been like watching your books be adapted
and especially now for a sixth time?
It's really fun.
I mean, I know I’m supposed to be
a little jaded about this, but there's always that moment,
you know, when you go on a set and you see all of these actors
that you love in this cast and crew putting it together 100, 200 people
and you sit there and I go, I had this silly idea
in my house alone in the corner of my room.
And now Richard and these other people are going to bring it to life
for 190 countries, over 200 million plus Netflix subscribers.
If you don't get jazzed about that, you're in the wrong business.
I still get like a kid when I when I
when I'm starting to make a new show, I love it.
This is Richard’s second time working with me, which is so nice,
but it's just really cool.
Well if I thought of 200 million subscribers,
I would not come out of my trailer.
I’d have to get that out of my head.
I don’t tell Richard that until the end.
That’s a lot of people!
And then, what does it feel like being in an adaptation of his
knowing that he has such a following?
The first time, it was really kind of unknown territory for me.
I read The Stranger, the first chapter.
I'm like, I really want to be involved in this.
Coming back the second time,
I knew what I was in for, which is just a great team
of brilliant creatives that move this story out of the page
and into screenplay and then, you know, into kind of executed reality.
I just I love what these guys did and how how kind of open
they are to every possibility.
Does that at all affect how you approach each book now moving forward?
It doesn't affect my writing at all.
A novel is a novel, a TV series is a TV series.
They shouldn't be the same.
And if you try to write a novel thinking, “Oh, this will make a great eight part
Netflix TV series,” you're dead.
The caveat to that, the thing I add to that is
I'm willing to make a ton of changes. I love making changes.
I don't think they should be the same.
I think the worst adaptations stay slavishly devoted to the text.
It's a visual medium.
You should respect that.
Do you find it useful to have
Harlan close?
Is getting more insight into the story as written,
helpful to you in terms of the performance
that you're going to bring to Ray?
Totally.
Because in a way, this is the Bible
and this is God.
And that’s a line!
You kind of have direct access.
So I can take, you know, every single scene in the script,
you can find the reference for it in the book
and then I can call or email Harlan and go
and then what happened?
It's like this,
I birthed Ray, if you will, his character, Ray Levine in Stay Close.
But now he's going to take them,
and the best actors do, you do this too, take him in a different direction
that I don’t really expect and is often better than what I expect.
So, it’s that collaboration I love.
Today, I have some quickfire questions
for the man, myth, legend.
Are you ready Harlan Coben?
-Yeah, let's go, shoot. -Alright.
Name all six Harlan Coben titles available on Netflix.
Oh, okay, let's see.
The Stranger
Safe
Stay Close
The Woods
Oh, don’t tell me!
The Innocent
and Gone for Good.
Did I get them?
Favorite set to visit?
The Innocent over in Barcelona
because I got to go to Barcelona.
Barcelona or Manchester?
That's right.
Which of your characters is most like you?
All of them.
You know, there’s piece of me that's Ray.
There’s a piece of me that’s Broome.
There’s a piece of me that’s Megan.
There’s a piece of me that’s Lorraine.
There’s a little bit of musical theater Barbie in you as well?
If you cooperate,
the pain will be kept at a minimum.
What is your favorite book quote?
My favorite quote
that I sort of live by is a Yiddish proverb
that I use in a lot of books is
“Man plans. God laughs.”
What keeps you up at night?
Not much. I sleep pretty well.
I think I get it all out and pass it all on to you.
How do you take your coffee?
Black.
Just the pure hit.
-The Italian way. -That’s it.
-This is the last one. -Alright.
In Stay Close, who do you think was perfectly cast
and why was it Ray?
A simple question.
Why mysteries?
You know, you can call it what you want.
Mystery, crime, fiction, suspense thrillers.
I don't look at it as a genre.
I look at it as a form like saying a haiku and within a haiku
within that form, I can do all the things I want to do.
So what is the story really about, the friendship between Ray and Fester.
The romance between Broome and Lorraine.
A woman longing for her past, worried about getting married.
It's all of those things. But, when you're telling it
in a mystery form, you're remembering to tell the story.
There's a narrative drive, and if you think of all of your favorite books
that are more than 100 years old, almost all of them have a crime in them, right?
All of them have some sort of mystery angle.
It's only in the modern era where we sort of don't have that.
So what it what the form makes me do is not just
get lost in the genius of telling you the story about down and out Ray.
It's making him do things and keeping you engaged and telling a story.
Ray, what happened?
I can't remember.
Do you find that every character is
a detective in some way in your stories?
They’re detectives though, for their life.
I mean, most of these stories are about redemption. Right?
So Richard has to figure out what went wrong in his life. Ray, I'm sorry.
-17 years ago, something broke. -Still figuring it out.
In all characters something is broken.
And now they have a chance of trying to put it back together.
And so they're not detectives looking under a microscope or
or checking fingerprints.
But they all want the answers to what
what happened to them, what changed them, what caused their trauma.
And so they all are exploring. Otherwise, what else are they going to do?
I want my characters to be active, not passive.
Well, particularly from Ray's perspective,
he has not been able to move on from what happened 17 years ago.
He spent 17 years looking for this person that disappeared from his life,
and he hasn't been able to move on, and due to this lack of memory.
He is like a detective piecing together these fragments of memory
that he does remember, which was what the tattoos were all about.
It's a way of kind of marking himself to just try and trigger memory and
by chance in the story
as Meghan is triggered, so is Ray, and so much more starts to
to come back to him.
So by default, his antenna and his kind of nose
for the truth is out there sniffing around.
And I think every character is trying to kind of unearth what's buried beneath.
How did you find me?
Luck.
Coincidence.
Poison fate, I guess.
You just disappeared like
Like you and me, never even existed.
-I know you're upset. -Upset!
I'm sorry.
When you were reading Stay Close
did you know the whodunit of it all?
No, no, no, no.
Like literally to the very last page.
Yeah, it completely took me by surprise.
You keep us hanging on a thread until the very end.
Thank you!
And can you bring that to your performance as well?
Yeah. Well, and I try not to read too much of the things
that Ray shouldn't really know about.
You know, I always have this thing if it's none of your business
like things that are said about Ray in other scenes
that it's like it's none of his business.
So I try to stay out of that bit.
So it's always a surprise to me when I come to watch it.
I always find actors are different. You as an actress,
do you want to know how a story ends?
Before you start doing it?
Or do you want to know in order that your character is going to know?
Hmm. It’s a good question.
I think it depends on the project.
I think if it's a film and I think I do like to know...
Sometimes. Sometimes.
The answer is sometimes I like to know.
So some actors like to and some don't.
And I have to try to respect that, you know, from the actors that want to know
what's going to happen.
I said, well, you don't really need to know, do you?
Because in your narrative drive, you don't know.
So then do you do that as well as you're building the mysteries?
I knew the ending before it starts. I know.
I know who did it before...
When I start a book I know the beginning and I know the end.
I compare it to driving from where we are here in Brooklyn,
New York, across to LA.
I may go Route 80, but chances are I’ll go
via the Suez Canal or stop in Tokyo.
But I always end up in LA. I always know my ending.
Why is that part of your process?
I think it helps,
so if I can go on and off different roads and I can twist and turn you
as long as I know where I'm ultimately heading
I can lead you in false directions better.
Then the hints that are laid out there,
those hints are enough to make, say Ray,
think that Cassie's done it.
But then Cassie thinks that he's done it.
You know?
And technically, he done it.
It was like a trance.
Okay, y’all. So we are still in a pandemic,
so not everyone can join us in person,
but I really wanted to meet Nicola Shindler,
executive producer of Stay Close, so we are going to give her a ring.
-Hi, how are you? -Good. Thank you.
-Are you okay? -I am okay. I'm doing very well.
Thank you. I'm doing better now that I'm talking to you.
Thank you!
Can we talk about changes that were happening from book to screen?
What were your favorite changes?
I think some of the characters we've added are really fascinating.
So, Richard Armitage, whose character Ray,
in the book he was ex-army.
He was a photographer with the army.
But in the story, what we've done is, added his army sergeant.
Who’s a really interesting character who comes along and whose fiancee
has gone missing.
This is my army sergeant.
This just won't compute yet.
-Well, don't worry, it's only a phase. -It's kind of a red herring.
You don't know whether it's connected to the mystery.
It starts with the mystery.
And then it takes it moves the story a little bit wider.
And what Harland doesn't ever want is for you to just have a red herring
that goes off on a tangent that never comes back to the story.
So it's a really brilliant,
careful process inventing story which will help enhance the ending.
Talk to me a little bit about a character like Kayleigh.
Her becoming a character that now connects to Carlton.
So in the book, Kayleigh was just Megan's daughter,
and she didn't have a real dramatic role.
But what we realized is we needed to bring Megan's story close
to Carlton's story before the end, so we wanted to invent a story for her.
And Harland had the idea really early on to bring Kayleigh and Carlton
together in Vipers, which is the name of our nightclub,
so that we would know that
we don't know how and we don't know why until really close to the end,
but we know that she's somehow involved in his disappearance.
Hey!
Come back here with my keys!
Come back here!
And then what about blurring Megan's past and present a bit?
Yeah, so in the book,
she has a lot of internal thoughts where she's remembering her past.
She's remembering being a dancer in the club.
And what we were aware of was that we can't have those memories just vocalized.
We had to dramatize them.
So we put in a whole level of 17 years ago
where we see Megan as Cassie and see who she was.
We wanted to show her both strong and empowered in that nightclub
and also the things that went drastically wrong and why she had to leave.
Cush Jumbo, the actress, was so up for playing both Cassie and Megan,
and she's done it so well.
And you know, it's not just her clothes and her hair that's different
she has a different energy about her, and she embraced that fantastically.
So, I'm going to read a little bit.
-This is pretty special for me. -I love this!
You're one of my favorite actors.
Oh my Gosh!
Getting to hear you read my stuff is going to be fun.
While I sit right here!
-Yes. -Not to put pressure on you!
La, la, la, la, la.
Let me get a little ready.
Again, spoilers.
If we're still daring to chart these waters without having
read the book or seen the show, I recommend you pause here.
And by that, I mean, the first line will spoil.
Lorraine said, “Drop the gun.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I'm here to help you, Lorraine.”
“Please, Broome.”
She pushed the gun hard
against his head.
“It's been a long night.”
“Drop the gun.”
Broom did as she asked.
“Now, call your dispatcher.”
“Tell them you don't need backup.”
“That it's all clear.”
Still stunned, Broome did as she asked.
Then he pointed to the body on the floor.
“Who is that?”
“Someone Del Flynn hired.”
“What did he want?”
“He wanted information about the”
“whereabouts of Carlton Flynn.”
“He was the type who could dish it out,”
“but couldn't take it.”
“So many men are like that.”
Broome looked at her,
she met his eyes and nodded
as if encouraging him to see
what was now so obvious.
”Oh Jesus, no!”
“It was you?”
“You killed all of them?”
“I wanted to make sure they could never”
“lay at the finger on a woman, ever again.”
I really felt for James Nesbitt
in that scene,
when he finds out, when he learned the truth about Lorraine.
I kind of want you to have all the feels.
I want you to laugh. I want you to be smiling.
I want to break your heart. I want you to be scared.
And I want you to be surprised, I’m greedy that way.
We sympathize, but certainly empathize with the experience or the reason anyway.
You also touched on something which is about the humanity
in each character, because even when we do discover who that serial killer is,
they still have a humanity in them that kind of guided them to this
terrible or, you know, victorious place wherever they end up.
And trying to either empathize or understand a serial killer is quite
a challenging thing to do, isn't it?
Absolutely.
There is explanation given to why Lorraine has been doing
the things that she has been doing.
He had taken my child's life.
I had taken his.
I used to think of myself as an avenging angel.
I always add one more twist that's not in the book.
So for those who have read the book
and are going to smugly watch the show thinking,
I know everything that happened,
there's one more twist in the last five minutes
that is not at all in the book.
Let's talk a little bit more about that piece at the end of episode
eight and the difference between the book and the episode.
Yeah, in the book, it was all Lorraine and I wanted to do something different
for the people who haven't read the book.
But also, it made more sense for the show because here at the end,
when Megan learns the truth, she's the only one who knows
all the pieces. What her husband did, and what her child did.
And when she has to realize that at the very,
very end, the horror that she is
a mother now, when everything seemed to be great, has to keep this secret.
And the way that Daniel O'Hara filmed that with the kind of shot
coming out from her back as she's realizing the truth.
Maybe because it wasn't in my book,
that part kind of gives me a little bit of goosebumps.
Also, makes that ending a little darker for Megan and
she's watching her family dancing on the dance floor at the wedding,
and only she knows the truth that they're responsible for a death.
And I just thought that would be a really cool way of ending it.
The book is called Stay Close by Harlan Coben.
It is incredible.
It is a worthwhile read.
Harlan, thank you so much for writing this.
Richard, thank you so much for a brilliant performance
and your work, always.
Stay Close.
-Thanks you guys. -Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Really, really, really, great.
Thank you. Thank you.
That was great.
Ohhh.