Jason Bateman and Jude Law Are Brothers at Odds in Gritty Thriller ‘Black Rabbit’

Vince Friedken is no Michael Bluth. In fact, Jason Bateman’s role in Netflix’s limited series Black Rabbit feels about as far from his type-A Arrested Development character as you can get. Like Arrested, this is a tale of sibling dysfunction. But this time, Bateman plays the brother wreaking aimless havoc, not the one trying to keep them all together. Vince struggles with gambling and drug addictions. He looks like he hasn’t had a haircut in years. He’s dangerously fun to be around. “We’ve collectively as an audience spent so much time with Jason over the 30, 40 years he’s been on TV,” says Zach Baylin, Black Rabbit’s co-showrunner. “That idea of him as this buttoned-up, very controlled personality was really exciting to play against.”

Bateman’s inspired casting—which results in one of the most fascinating performances of his career—slyly speaks to a core theme of Black Rabbit: Appearances can be deceiving. The eight-episode thriller (premiering September 18) is set in the fictional eponymous restaurant, which has become the talk of New York. It’s run by Jake (Jude Law), a savvy, aspirational operator trying to build himself a cultural empire. Then his brother, Vince, suddenly returns to town—on the run from something, without money or prospects or even a phone, in need of urgent help. Jake gets drawn back into a sticky family web, which slowly reveals the faulty foundation of his business.

The fast-rising Baylin (Oscar-nominated for writing King Richard) created Black Rabbit with Kate Susman, his wife and producing partner under their Youngblood Pictures banner. The pair now live in Los Angeles, but moved to New York with their kids for the duration of Black Rabbit’s production. The show’s setting, energy, and vibrant swirl of an ensemble—artists, musicians, chefs, and bookies colliding in a pressure cooker that turns more stressful by the hour—were inspired by the 18 years they spent living in the city.

“We wanted to shoot our version of New York, which was a little underbelly-ish—the downtown parts and the places that weren’t completely sanded off into some beautiful, glamorous vision of what someone who doesn’t live in New York might think of it as,” Susman says. “We’re getting at a tactile, textural ugliness—but also an intoxicating-ness…. The gossip that came out of Page Six about what happened last night at certain restaurants was pretty exhilarating to us as young 20-year-olds in New York.” The Black Rabbit itself was drawn from legends of the city’s dining scene like Dressler, which helped define a transforming Williamsburg and whose owner “had a very tragic and complicated life,” Baylin says. “Or like Waverly Inn, Minetta Tavern—these restaurants that built artistic-literary-music communities that were nexus melting points.”

Baylin got to know Jude Law after writing last year’s potent crime thriller The Order, which was directed by Justin Kurzel. Law starred in and produced the film. When Baylin and Susman pitched him Black Rabbit, Law understood the world instantly. Like the writers, he had spent a lot of time in New York in that earlier era. “What was exciting was being able to tap into that natural, raw energy…. Trying to plait our Black Rabbit history onto the real history of New York was a great opportunity to authenticate it,” Law says. “We wanted you to look at it and go, ‘Oh, was this real? Did I go there? Have I had a beer at that place? I think I did.’”

Initially, Baylin and Susman wanted Bateman to direct the series. His Emmy-winning work behind the camera on Ozark proved he knew his way around a family-centric thriller drenched in local atmosphere. But as soon as Law heard Bateman’s name, he knew he had found his onscreen brother in crime. “He brings a twist of humor and humanity to drama,” Law says. “A darkness—you smile while you’re crying or you laugh while you’re cringing. It’s a very hard, very graceful note to play to get right. And it just seemed like a very interesting contrast.”

When Bateman got wind of Black Rabbit, he wasn’t sure who was playing who. After reading the scripts for the first two episodes, he shared his feelings with Law: “I think people would expect me to play Jake—the normal guy—but I’ve really got a great idea for this other guy, Vince.”

Despite building a varied résumé after Arrested Development—shining in the likes of The Gift, Air, and of course Ozark—Bateman had never had the chance to so fully, physically disappear into a character. For Black Rabbit, he stopped cutting his hair, stopped shaving, started skipping meals to lose weight. “I’m pretty disciplined about not overreaching,” he says. “But I did find myself looking in the mirror in the makeup room before the start of the day, going, ‘Oh, that’s not who I thought I was inside my body.’” That’s not to say Bateman didn’t relate to Vince. “Vince is definitely the idiot side of Jason, or the reckless side of Jason. I’ve gone left instead of right at various times in my life, so I’m here as I present to you today. Had I gone right instead of left, maybe I look and act a little bit more like Vince.”

Law, meanwhile, was coming off of a string of character roles that rendered him unrecognizable in projects like The Order and Firebrand, in which he played King Henry VIII. (Last year, he told me that part was “physically further away from me than I’ve ever played before.” If you don’t believe him, just watch the movie.) “We were like, ‘Is he still going to be able to be this suave New York restaurateur?’” Baylin says with a laugh. “He showed up in New York looking like Jude Law, and we’re like, ‘Oh my God, this guy’s still the most beautiful person in the world.’”

Pedro Pascal

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