Brothers

[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the Black Rabbit finale.]

On paper, Jude Law and Jason Bateman share a surprising number of things in common. They’re both proud fathers to young adult children. They both have startlingly blue eyes. And despite growing up on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the ’70s and ’80s, they both started acting young and found success quickly in America: Bateman made a name for himself as a teen actor (and the DGA’s youngest-ever director) on The Hogan Family, while Law broke out as a heartthrob at the turn of the millennium in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

But while they presumably ran in the same Hollywood circles for years, Law and Bateman had never sat down to have an in-person conversation until they were just days away from playing badly behaved brothers in Netflix’s Black Rabbit, which they also executive produced.

Created by King Richard screenwriter Zach Baylin and his wife Kate Susman, the eight-part series stars Law as Jake Friedkin, the savvy owner of Black Rabbit, a fictional Brooklyn-based restaurant with an exclusive VIP lounge. Jake’s plans of parlaying the success of the clubby restaurant into running fancier establishments are upended by the unexpected reappearance of his chaotic older brother — and former business partner — Vince (Bateman), who had fled the state years earlier to avoid paying a hefty debt to  menacing mobster Joe Mancuso (Troy Kotsur).

While he initially returns to New York in need of urgent help from his seemingly well-to-do younger brother, Vince quickly learns that Jake has been hemorrhaging cash. “As we all know, it’s fucking hard to make money nowadays, and to maintain a lifestyle and that presentation of who you want to be,” Law tells The Hollywood Reporter in a joint interview with Bateman (who also directed the first two episodes). “I like the idea that, in the end, these two guys from Coney Island are still just ‘chancers’ — and one is maybe more honest than the other.”

Vince’s return quickly unravels Jake’s carefully curated life, thrusting both of them back into the dark underbelly of the Big Apple. Over eight episodes, the brothers find themselves at the mercy of Mancuso — a former family friend — and his vicious henchmen, and they are forced to confront the emotional scars of growing up with an alcoholic father, who had gambled away his own restaurant.

Despite vowing to do better, Vince reaches a point of no return in episode six. After Mancuso’s mercurial son, Junior (Forrest Weber), threatens to kill him and his loved ones, Vince reluctantly agrees to help Junior carry out an armed, masked robbery at Black Rabbit, where Jake is hosting a party with millions of dollars‘ worth of expensive jewelry.

That fateful robbery, first teased in a flash-forward during the premiere, is doomed from the start. Wes (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù), Jake’s long-time artist friend and one of Black Rabbit’s biggest investors, gets shot and later succumbs to his injuries in the hospital. And in a last-ditch attempt to stop Junior from shooting Jake, who recognized Vince even through his ski mask, Vince shoots Junior in the head and then flees the scene.

Knowing that his life will never be the same, Vince secretly gets his affairs in order. He makes sure his estranged daughter is taken care of. He comes clean to Jake about killing their father decades ago with a bowling ball to stop him from abusing their mother. (Jake reveals he knew all along, and loved Vince anyway.) In a bittersweet final twist, after confessing to the police over the phone about his involvement in the robbery, Vince jumps off the roof of Black Rabbit, leaving a shell-shocked Jake to grapple with feeling untethered to — and unburdened by — his brother for the very first time.

Just hours ahead of the show’s world premiere at TIFF, Law and Bateman opened up about the agony and ecstasy of their first collaboration, which the former describes as a twisty tale about “what we forgive in those who we are related to.”

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You both boarded Black Rabbit as stars and executive producers less than two years ago, but Jude was attached first after working with Zach Baylin on Justin Kurzel’s The Order. Jude, is it true that you called Jason up and asked him to play your onscreen brother-in-crime?

JUDE LAW (Laughs.) Not quite that directly. We knew he’d been approached and had seen the potential that we all saw. The initial conversations were, “Please come on and direct this,” because we knew that it had all these facets that he had proven to be so adept at juggling with Ozark in particular. I think we had a pilot-ish and an overview of where it was going, but we needed to be in the hands of someone who knew how to take this on.

As a producer at that early stage, you just want to encourage it to manifest, to grow. I’m not one of these [actor-producers] who’s like, “By the way, I’m playing that part,” because I think especially when you go to a director, you don’t want to go, “Picture this — and me.” I knew I wanted to be one of the brothers, but in truth, I just wanted to see the piece realized. So the first conversation was, “Do you want to direct it?” I take responsibility fully for being the one who went, “Hang on a minute. If he’s going to direct, then he’s got to be one of the brothers. It’s gotta be us.” And it worked!

JASON BATEMAN Then we had to decide who’s going to play who.

Jude, you’ve spoken about how you vividly remember being in the same New York restaurant scene in the late ’90s and early aughts that Zach and Kate used as inspiration to create the world of Black Rabbit, so it was probably more of a natural fit for you to play Jake. Jason, why did you want to play Vince?

BATEMAN It was through conversations with Jude, Zach and Kate, and fortunately, they were just as excited about the notion of me playing the brother that you don’t usually see me play.

LAW Zach had seen you in [the 2009 film] State of Play. He loved you in that.

BATEMAN Right, that squirrelly dude. And I enjoy playing that part. I just don’t usually lean into that part, because I like being the audience. I like being the protagonist, the person that everything is funneled through to manage tone and all that kind of stuff. That’s the director side of me coming through.

LAW What he can’t say — and what we all know — is that he has innately, as an actor, this humor. There’s a wryness. There’s an intelligent, humorous kind of smirk to what he’s doing or the shit he’s involved in. And what he brings to Vince, which is so great, is you get why Jake forgives him. You get why the world forgives him and still wants him at the party, because you go, “OK, he burnt the place down. But he’s such good company.”

BATEMAN It was fun while we were in trouble!

LAW It was fun! And you can’t fake that. If anyone else would’ve played Vince, you’d have gone, “This guy is a fucking train wreck.”

BATEMAN “Why is he still doing that?”

LAW “Why is anyone putting up with it?”

BATEMAN “It’s unbelievable!”

LAW That elevates what is at the heart of the piece, which is what we forgive in those who we are related to. Jason said recently — and I just thought it was so spot-on — if we’d been buddies, you’d have been annoyed at our relationship: “One of you’s just got to go away and leave this [relationship].” Brothers are a very different thing. There’s this incredibly complicated backstory that bonds them, and you see them as children literally in our show, so that was key.

When you think back to your earliest conversations with Zach and Kate about Black Rabbit, how did those discussions inform the way you thought about playing your respective characters? How did you come to understand or justify the underlying reasons for their bad behavior?

LAW You get over-complicated if you try and justify the characters you’re playing. I’d say the same about me: I’m not trying to justify my behavior. I behave because of certain things that have affected me through my life, that have led me to this moment. That’s what you’ve got to understand, as an actor, and just go, “Who is this person? Why are they doing this? What are their patterns?”

I was keen that you had to want to stick with Jake as well. I wanted him to be trying to make himself better. You know that he’d misbehaved in the past. He’d probably slept around too much, he’d probably done too many drugs, but he was really trying to get his shit together. It seemed really exciting to me that here’s a guy who’s probably just turned 50 like me, and he’d probably think, “Okay, my past is behind me. I’ve got a good future. This [business] is going to be successful.” What he doesn’t count on is the whirlwind that arrives that reminds him of all that shit and brings it all back in.

So there were little things that were a little more present in early drafts — affairs, bad behavior, drug use — and I was just like, “Nah, I think that makes him a bit sleazy. It’s fine that that’s hinted at, but that’s not who he is now.” Another detail that I thought was key was bringing up his affair [with Estelle, Wes’ girlfriend, played by Cleopatra Coleman] into real time, so it wasn’t something that had already started [before the show]. You’re seeing him trip into it, and as you get to know him better, you understand that old habits die hard.

BATEMAN I’m a big fan of letting writers write, and as an actor, your job is to fit what is in existence before you start acting. That’s just the math of it all. So when I’m in a privileged position of being able to have a seat at the table in the creation of a character and the progression of how that character is written, I’m really just looking and watching out for things that run counter or are at odds with what I’m excited about playing.

So, in this case, it’s really important for Vince to be deeply flawed. Anytime something would be brought up that makes him too capable in a certain area, then that might make my plan for how to play him invalid. Zach and Kate never really put anything in front of me that made it impossible for me to do the version of Vince that I knew would be the best yin to Jake’s yang.

Vince and Jake are both addicts — the former is addicted to drugs and gambling, while the latter is addicted to his own brother. Jake has a habit of always giving Vince second chances, but seemingly reaches his breaking point in episode five. After they were both forced to strip while being held at gunpoint by Mancuso’s son Junior and associate Babbitt (Chris Coy), the brothers have a blowout fight on the side of a highway in their underwear, and Vince ultimately punches Jake in the face. How did you approach shooting that confrontation?

LAW We worked very hard at that. We loved the extremity that they were both pushed to by Junior and Babbitt, so we knew that [the fight] had to be extreme. We knew that there’s a wonderful kind of humorous desperation, in that these guys are literally left with nothing. I mean, it is funny, but it’s also sad. It’s like the difference between seeing someone falling over a banana skin from far away and close up. If you’re far away, it’s funny; if you’re close up, it’s fucking painful.

But the physical interaction, first of all, there was a practical approach, and we were meant to have a full-on, rolling around fight [on the concrete]. I’m glad we debated it, because I think that one piece of physical violence is so much more upsetting and shocking. That is a good demonstration of how we all worked — we would question things. Sometimes, there’s a suggestion of it on the page, and [we’re] like, “Yeah, but is that too much? How can we take that and distill it?”

BATEMAN Oftentimes, writers will write something that really makes things clear for the reader, but once you marry that with performance, you might need to say less. In this case, I started thinking about the practicalities of that [scene] — being in our underwear with no shoes on — and that it would be really difficult to believably scrap and fight the way they were talking about, because think about what that would do to your feet, your knees and your elbows. We can’t do that over and over again. So we started thinking about, “What is the goal there with that [fight]?” And what they were looking for was to marry the absurdity of this brother, scrappy fight and the very real, honest drama of what they were saying. So what is that proper cocktail mix?

LAW It’s funny that they’re in their underwear, but it would’ve been funnier if they were rolling around. Actually, at that point, it ain’t funny — it’s really sad. Also, they just faced death. That’s not funny. I mean, they were this close to taking a bullet. So, to see them fighting around and scrapping like you would do naturally, there may be the odd person that would go, “Oh, that’s funny.” It wasn’t meant to be. So, like I said, the idea of just a single punch to the face of your own brother is an awful thing to both instigate and to receive.

BATEMAN And to have it all be set against the absurdity of them just being in their boxers. They’re having one of the more important conversations they have in the show with no winking, complete seriousness. [They’re talking about how] they’re never going to see each other again — and cut to, they’re in their underwear walking away. (Laughter.) So that was a really exciting thing to try to find the right tone for while we were shooting it.

The moment that really took my breath away, as a viewer, is at the end of episode six when Jake realizes that Vince is the one holding him at gunpoint during the robbery at Black Rabbit. Vince was wearing a ski mask, but Jake would recognize those eyes anywhere. Jason, how did you understand Vince’s decision to rob his brother’s — and his own former — restaurant? Jude, can you give voice to Jake’s inner dialogue once he comes to that heart-wrenching realization?

BATEMAN Vince is obviously very prone to petulance, so a lot of the reason behind that decision at that moment sits with him being petulant. He’s also desperate. He’s sitting in the car with Junior. He thinks he’s on his way to get killed by Junior, but Junior says, “No, I want you for a job,” so he’s not really in a position to say no. And he’s pretty pissed off, still, from the scene we were just talking about where Jake is saying, “I never want to see you again.”

So there’s a feeling of vindictiveness and petulance that’s in there, but there’s also a practicality to it, too. He’s leaving, and he’s going to need some startup money to get his life going, and [he thinks] maybe this is a good thing. And ultimately, we see that he wasn’t really that sure about screwing over his brother, by virtue of what he ends up doing there at the end [by shooting Junior].

LAW I love the complexity of every decision made in this. I think bad writing sometimes highlights itself when you watch drama where every decision is full of conviction. I don’t know about anyone else in life, but I’m constantly contradicting myself, and that’s what makes life so complicated. And you’re trying to keep up with someone else, whether it’s a sibling or partner, going, “Wait, why did you just do that? But you said —”

I don’t know that I can answer what he feels when he realizes it’s his brother who is behind the balaclava and the one holding the gun that’s in his face. I can surmise it. There’s the obvious pit in your stomach sickness. I think he knows at that moment that it’s over — but not to the extent that it gets to.

I’ll put it like this: The reason [the restaurant’s] called Black Rabbit in my mind is … it was a kind of escape for these boys. First of all, it was a band. “We’re going to get out of here. We’re going to make money. We’re going to get laid. We’re going to get high. We’re going to be cool.” And then the band became a bar, the band became a brand. Holding onto that, monetizing it, making it sexy, and making yourself relevant — all of that was this entity that, yeah, [Vince] had realized, but that [Jake] would make real. I think, suddenly, [Jake realizes] that’s all fucking over. I think it’s like, “There’s no way, with these guns going off, that we’re ever coming back from that. Vince, you took the big needle and you stuck it in the balloon, and the balloon has finally popped.”

BATEMAN It’s a massive disappointment. But then 30 seconds later, he saves your life.

LAW That’s right! (Laughs.)

BATEMAN So you don’t really have time to sit in the devastating disappointment of this ultimate, fucking thing.

LAW I remember Justin [Kurzel, who directed episodes seven and eight] said, “So how are you going to play the aftermath?” I said, “I know. I’m just going to be in … (stands up unexpectedly and mimics a deer in headlights) total shock.”

BATEMAN Which was awesome. But then you let it boil over, and you’re screaming [at me] on the phone. You have those moments there with your head against the brick, just kneeling on the ground. It’s just gorgeous — and all of that without me. I wasn’t there. I was back in L.A., probably. He was working all this stuff out with Justin, and it’s so well-calibrated. And then the scene with your ex-wife.

LAW Yeah, that was crazy. [I was] hyperventilating! (Laughs.) And she’s going, “… I think you’re having a panic attack.”

BATEMAN Yeah. But the way in which all of that editorially was constructed too — I was just so happy with it all.

There’s an explosive, unpredictable quality to nearly all of Jake and Vince’s one-on-one scenes. As siblings, they are the only people who can really call each other out on their shortcomings, but they also revert back to a kind of childish dynamic whenever they’re together, where they’re constantly yelling at each other.

LAW The script had a lot of that [brotherly dynamic] already there. There were all these great head-to-head scenarios where they were suddenly having to either confront each other, and a lot of the dialogue was there. Because, really, that childish interaction is based in love, right? You love this person very much, even if you’re the kind of brothers who don’t necessarily say it. But they really love each other. When you love someone, you are allowed to reveal petty feelings and use language that you’ve been using for 50 years towards each other. We tapped into that very quickly. It’s that funny, weird thing when you’re playing a scene with someone, and as soon as someone goes there [and takes a real risk], you go, “Oh, I can go there, too.”

BATEMAN What’s nice about how the two brothers help each other is that they’re really encouraging the other one to do the right thing — and they both do. Obviously, [Jake] convinces [Vince] to do the right thing. He probably wasn’t encouraging him to kill himself, but [Jake’s] like, “Get out of your own way. Help your life and help those around you by stop being such a fuck-up.” Vince basically makes the ultimate sacrifice to clear the decks and allow Jake to live this life that neither one of them were really great at doing individually, but maybe once one of them’s gone, now he can go forward.

Vince was also trying to get Jake to be a little bit more authentic: “Stop being full of shit. Spend less money on the artifice and be a little bit truer to yourself, to your kid and your ex. Get rid of the big fancy place in Soho, and stop dressing like a douche bag and driving this weird car.” So everything goes back to basics. At the end, obviously, things on paper have never been worse for Jake. But really, probably, the future’s never looked better for him, because he’s pushing off of a really genuine, authentic, solid base, and he’s now going to live a more genuine life. So if you really search for what this show could maybe be about, it’s really these two brothers helping each other live the best version of this duo.

There’s a dreamlike coda, set to Ella Fitzgerald’s “Manhattan,” that reveals what happened to all of the surviving characters. Jake is seemingly at peace working as a bartender at someone else’s New York restaurant. Jude, how did you want to play Jake’s reaction to Vince’s death, and where do you think we leave him without Vince?

LAW Jason was very clear and helpful in overseeing the rhythm and the arc of this story so that you’re maintaining an audience, but also, for those involved in acting, [you’re considering] when you’re giving and what you’re giving. My sense was that you couldn’t see resolution in the immediate aftermath [of Vince’s suicide]. I think in that situation, you are so shocked, and I’m really glad that you don’t see Jake doing the look [over the ledge to see Vince’s dead body] or going downstairs or calling the police. I mean, why do you want to see all that? That’s shoe leather. You want that sense of, “It’s over,” and we talked a lot about this sense of the city suddenly coming into his life, and maybe for the first time hearing things, weirdly, with clarity. So that’s what I was trying to get to.

If you notice, he doesn’t really break down until he sees Mancuso. Because when the guy says, “Where’s your brother?” and for him to actually say — it makes me want to cry — “My brother’s dead.” All those little beats were considered, because we knew we then had to have a little grace note at the end, which is, “This is what he’s learned, and this is how life moves on.”

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Black Rabbit is now streaming all episodes on Netflix.