Netflix’s latest original series, “Unbelievable” debuted Friday, immediately making a poignant statement about the reality of sexual violence. The show, which stars Toni Collette, Merritt Wever and Kaitlyn Dever is based on the true story of a teenage sexual assault victim and the investigations that followed her accusation. The creator, writer and director of the series, Susannah Grant, stopped by the Boston Harbor Hotel a day before the show’s release on the last leg of her press tour.
Grant said she felt inspired to create “Unbelievable” after she read the article the show is based on, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” which was published as a joint effort between the Marshall Project and ProPublica in 2015. The story earned reporters Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.
“It was, at least for me, a new perspective on the issue of sexual assault, specifically at the investigative process, both from the point of view of the victim of sexual assault and from the point of view of a couple of really great investigators and what it takes to do that job as well as they did,” Grant said. “It seemed like a new and specific look at the issue.”
Dever, fresh off of a leading role in Olivia Wilde’s critically acclaimed comedy, “Booksmart,” plays Marie Adler, a teenage girl whose past is filled with almost incomprehensible hardship, and subsequently becomes a victim of sexual assault in her own apartment. Adler, under the pressure of interrogation, serves as an example of how trauma can affect sexual assault victims and the way they tell their stories.
“I think the thing that I love most about [Dever’s] character is that she can really embody the full impact of this whole trauma this young woman is going through and still never lose that little feeling of hope that it’s all going to turn out better,” Grant said. “In every scene she is simultaneously drowning and staying afloat and I think that’s such a remarkable feat.”
Grant said that she had no idea her leading lady would be starring in “Booksmart” until she saw the movie over the summer, learning that Dever auditioned for the Netflix mini series right after wrapping up “Booksmart.”
“I knew nothing about “Booksmart,” Grant said. “So it’s not just that she has range over the course of a year, she has that range within a day. [Dever] left “Booksmart” and came and did a beautiful audition for us, fully embodying this girl and it was all in the same day. She’s really staggering.”
While the majority of Dever’s character’s story takes place in Washington state in 2008, Collette and Wever play detectives in Colorado three years later investigating sexual assault cases that are strikingly similar to Marie Adler’s. While the male detectives who first handled Marie’s investigation are depicted with a lack of empathy and seem unqualified, Collette and Wever’s characters operate with determination and authority. Grant attributes their handling of the case to their experience rather than their gender.
“The detectives that [Collete and Wever’s] characters are based on had both had a lot of experience with sexual assault and they understood how trauma affects the memory of an assault victim and what it does to the way they can tell a narrative,” Grant said. “The guys in Washington were both very new to sexual assault.”
Grant said that the show runners were very intentional about respecting all who were involved in the true story behind the show, even the investigators who “made horrible mistakes that were cataclysmic for Marie.”
The names of all the survivors were changed for Miller and Armstrong’s Pulitzer Prize winning article, however the show took it one step further. For “Unbelievable,” Grant made the executive decision to change the names of everyone involved.
“I didn’t think we had any business affecting their personal journey with this,” Grant said. “I thought the story was every bit as relevant and important and credible by changing their names.”
Grant said that she hopes the show will jumpstart a conversation about sexual assault, citing upward increases in calls to the national sexual assault hotline, describing the crime as “invisible,” with the “shame associated with it.”
“The idea that when these cultural documentaries or narratives, when something new lands about it, it does bring people out and encourage them to seek the help that is out there,” Grant said. “And the more people that do that, the less invisible this crime will become.”
