Two trials play out in the new Apple TV+ adaptation of lawyer-novelist Scott Turow’s 1988 bestselling legal thriller, Presumed Innocent: the criminal case against a Chicago prosecutor charged with murdering a colleague, and the nightmare at home that the murder trial visits on the family of the accused.
Those parallel ordeals stood out for actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who stars in the eight-episode limited series that premieres on Wednesday and runs through July 24. At Sunday’s premiere of Presumed Innocent at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, Gyllenhaal spoke in a panel discussion with showrunner and writer David E. Kelley and two directors, Anne Sewitsky and Gregg Yaitanes, about “the trial of the family and the actual trial” and “the juxtaposition between the two.”
“As brilliant as the writing and the acting is in the courtroom scenes, I really think it becomes like its own courtroom, too, in the house,” Gyllenhall said to a packed theater that saw the first two episodes.
Gyllenhaal plays Rusty Sabich, who becomes the prime suspect in the barbaric murder of fellow prosecutor Carolyn Polhemus, with whom he was having an intense affair. Sabich, who is married and has children, proclaims his innocence in the killing but has no alibi for the damage inflicted on his family.
It is film star Gyllenhaal’s first streaming project, and he spent 6 1/2 months in the role. He’s also one of the show’s executive producers, along with Kelley and J.J. Abrams.
As the investigation progresses and the depth of Sabich’s obsession with his murdered paramour becomes clear, the once-respected prosecutor finds colleagues turning against him along with the machinery of the judicial system to which he’s given his working life. At home, he faces his devastated wife, Barbara, played by Ruth Negga, and two teenage children, Jaden and Kyle, played by Chase Infiniti and Kingston Rumi Southwick.
“I remember speaking to David very, very early on and saying that the family was the thing that was the most interesting to me,” Gyllenhaal said.
Eight episodes gave the makers of Presumed Innocent more time than the 1990 film version to explore the trial’s impact on the fallen prosecutor’s home life. But the first two episodes don’t stint on the legal and political intrigue that helped to make the book a bestseller, adapted into a 1990 movie with Harrison Ford leading an all-star cast.
Peter Saarsgard — Gyllenhaal’s brother-in-law in real life — plays Tommy Molto, the prosecutor leading the case against his former office rival Sabich, whom he has replaced as the office’s top deputy. Molto’s boss, newly elected Chicago State’s Attorney Nico Della Guardia, is played by O-T Fagbenle, and the scheming tandem of Molto and Della Guardia go at their former colleague-turned-quarry with a zeal that is almost unseemly.
Sabich and Molto clash almost from the beginning, and Gyllenhaal said it was a “joy” to work with Saarsgard, who he called “the acting guru of our family.”
“I think people were excited to see what was going to happen on set between us in the scenes,” Gyllenhaal said, “and that just gave us more fuel,”
Sabich, meanwhile, is defended in court by his former boss, Raymond Horgan, who Della Guardia ousted in the election. Bill Camp plays Horgan as a harried, aging courtroom warrior and defeated politician who takes Sabich on as a client despite his fury at realizing that Sabich betrayed him and possibly cost him the election by slow-walking the high-profile investigation into Polhemus’ death.
In the first two episodes, the audience sees Polhemus, played by Renate Reinsve, in flashbacks that reveal the intensity of her affair with Sabich and disclose her own ethically questionable conduct in an earlier murder case with unsettling parallels to her own grisly slaying.
Turow, a co-executive producer of the show who was in the audience on Sunday, stood up at Kelley’s request to receive a round of applause. Asked by moderator Jessica Shaw about the challenges of modernizing the story for a new era of evidence collection and everyday camera surveillance, Kelley said, “I really found that the architecture of the book was so solid that we didn’t have to make a lot of whole changes to make it right today.”
“It’s a testament to Scott’s writing,” Kelley added. “He knows the law, and he knows characters.”
Turow’s book is equal parts whodunit, courtroom drama, and unsparing moral character study. He also co-wrote the 1990 screenplay with director Alan J. Pakula. In Turow’s telling, the criminal justice system is as imperfect as the people who work in it — the cops, lawyers, investigators, and judges entrusted with searching for the truth and administering the law even when those aims come into conflict.
Kelley is no stranger to dramatizing legal conflict, having created The Practice, Boston Legal, and Ally McBeal.
“The thing I think that David does so beautifully is, I think these morally ambiguous characters, he writes them with such richness,” Gyllenhaal said.
Turow, who spoke with Deadline as he filed into the theater, said he didn’t have a theory as to why Presumed Innocent was making a screen comeback 34 years later.
“I really can’t tell you why,” he said. “It may actually have been the Perry Mason series on HBO. But Dustin Thomason from Bad Robot, David — who I’ve known for years — called me within three weeks of each other and said, ‘It’s time to re-do Presumed Innocent.’ So, again, I don’t know whether it’s something in the water, or what it was.”
Whatever the reason, Turow said, “They did an amazing job.”
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