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For \u201cTowards Zero,\u201d Yates and the writer Rachel Bennette chose the moment, tweaking their source material for today\u2019s audience, as shown by the <\/strong>steamy interaction on the staircase, which pushes the characters to violent extremes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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Set in 1936 among the British upper class, \u201cTowards Zero\u201d opens with a love triangle playing out around <\/strong>a much-publicized divorce. Nevile Strange (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a playboy tennis star, is ending his marriage to Audrey (Ella Lily Hyland), on whom he cheated with the younger <\/strong>and more assertive Kay (Mimi Keene), who would become his wife.<\/p>\nBut Nevile and Audrey just can\u2019t quit each other, and he convinces Kay that they should spend their honeymoon with Audrey at a picturesque coastal home where both divorc\u00e9s had spent time as children.<\/p>\n
This uneasy trio, as well as other summer visitors nursing their own resentments, are hosted by the formidable Lady Tressilian (Anjelica Huston), who is confined to her bedroom, traumatized after witnessing a family death. To play the acid-tongued matriarch, Huston said recently by phone, that she was inspired by the powerful women overseeing large households whom she had known during her own childhood in England and Ireland.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Lady Tressilian is also revising her will, and by the time the first body is discovered, toward the end of Episode 2, we know that most of the characters have a reason to want at least a couple of their fellow house guests dead. It\u2019s unusually late for a Christie murder, more than halfway through the narrative, but the TV adaptation also reflects the pacing of the novel.<\/p>\n
James Prichard, Christie\u2019s great-grandson and an executive producer on the show, said that, once she was an established author, Christie enjoyed writing out-of-series novels, such as \u201cTowards Zero,\u201d that didn\u2019t feature her most famous detectives. \u201cPoirot and Marple give her work a particular feel, and removing them removes a certain feeling of security in the reader, and allows a freedom of form that I think she found inspiring,\u201d Prichard said in an email.<\/p>\n
Yates, the director, said that while Christie was writing \u201cTowards Zero\u201d in the early 1940s, the author became interested in Freud and his ideas about psychoanalysis, and applied those theories to her characters.<\/p>\n
The title refers to the notion that \u201cevery murder has its moment of origin, its point zero,\u201d as the lawyer Frederick Treves (Clarke Peters) says on the show. Delaying the murder gave the author more time to explore what brought her characters to that crunch.<\/p>\n
Matthew Rhys, who plays the show\u2019s police detective, said he was drawn to the role\u2019s \u201cdepth and layering,\u201d as well as the story\u2019s psychological richness \u2014 which felt different from the Christie he\u2019d read before.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n