Actress Michelle Dockery relished the challenge of new series Good Behavior
In stark contrast to previous role as Lady Mary in the period drama Downton Abbey, she has reinvented herself as a former con artist and meth addict with a penchant for dressing up
Before the cameras even rolled on the dark TNT crime drama Good Behavior, everyone, from director to cast, to crew to producers, knew exactly what each scene would look like.
So a scene where lead actor Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary in Downton Abbey) is sitting framed perfectly in the mirror of a grimy room; or another of her in a diner, lit like an Edward Hopper painting full of symmetry and sadness – all were meticulously pre-planned and then communicated visually to the entire team.
“The way Alex [cinematographer of the pilot episode, Alejandro Martinez] works is that he photographs the rehearsals and then he’ll put all of the photographs on a board so it’s like a storyboard as we go along so everyone knows what the next shot is, how they’re going to shoot various moments during the scene,” says Dockery down the line from Wilmington, North Carolina, where they are filming the final fill-in scenes of the 10-part series.
“It’s a great way of working, particularly on a show that shoots as fast as this. I mean Downton Abbey was pretty fast – we’d do about 10 pages a day. OnGood Behavior we can do sometimes as many as 11 or 12. It’s amazing because you can see everything before it even starts, before the camera starts rolling. It is unusual: I’ve not seen it before.”
Watching the series, it feels as if Breaking Bad had met Hustle on the way to the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo via anything by Raymond Chandler.