Actor Max Irons had no idea why friends looked shocked when he told them he was considering a role in “Flowers in the Attic: The Origin.”
“I then looked into it and the sort of morbid curiosity in me drew me in,” he says.
In the prequel, Irons’ character falls in love with Olivia Winsfield, a seemingly nice woman who ultimately locks her grandchildren in the attic.
Irons’ Malcolm Foxworth, though, is hardly without his own faults.
“Malcolm is a bit of a monster,” Irons says. “He’s a megalomaniac. He’s a narcissist. He’s a psychopath at moments. But it’s not my job to judge him.”
After filming scenes, Irons says he felt the need to apologize to his co-stars: “By the way, I don’t think any of those things I just said. I’m not a horrible psychopath pervert." But, he adds, "it is quite fun to play.”
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Jemima Rooper, who plays Olivia, hadn’t read the books or seen a film version of the story before shooting began. Then she took a deep dive into the books that inspired it.
In the initial stages of “The Origin,” Olivia doesn’t seem like she’s headed down a dark road. “Then, there’s a lot that happens to her,” Rooper says. “That keeps pushing her down this dark path.”
So why was Malcolm so unrelentingly bad? Irons says he had an absent father and a doting mother who suddenly abandoned him. “And this was a time when therapy wasn’t a thing…this young man was left with these confusing feelings and understandings of the world around him. While Malcolm is a monster, he’s dealing with the world on the world’s terms from his perspective.”
Evil? “To label a person ‘evil’ is a bit of a blunt term,” Irons says. “There are always reasons why a person has turned out the way they have.”
Olivia, meanwhile, is just misunderstood, Rooper says. “I completely sort of sympathize with her until maybe the last episode.”
Filmed in Romania during the pandemic, “Flowers in the Attic” required the cast to isolate, which didn’t encourage lots of bonding.
For Rooper, it was probably a good move because “I’m not sure I would’ve been able to keep up with my lines if I had been able to.”
In addition to starring in the limited series, she had just given birth and was also tending to her child during the filming.
“I had lots of help; our crew were amazing,” Rooper says. “We were trying to achieve a lot in a short space of time and, it was weird because it was probably the first job I’ve ever done where I haven’t socialized with the rest of the cast.”
Subject matter aside, Irons says, Rooper “was such a joy to be around. Had I had to shoulder a percentage of the weight that (she) had, I would’ve been a nightmare.”
Because previous “Flowers in the Attic” projects had huge followings, producers were aware of the stakes. “We didn’t want to disappoint,” says Executive Producer Paul Sciarrotta. “We also came into this knowing that not many readers were familiar with the prequel book called ‘Garden of Shadows.’ We had an opportunity to provide some new insight to the big fans of the story.”
To please those diehards, “The Origin” will have Easter eggs that should register.
More important, “we had to create a story that would make us understand her world and understand why she might take the actions that she took, which is locking children in the attic. And we went from there.”
“Flowers in the Attic: The Origin” airs on Lifetime.