In the Netflix original series Ripley, based on The Talented Mr, Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. Eliot Sumner, the actor behind the show’s Freddie Miles, sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss his role in the series. One of the elements of his performance Sumner discussed was the challenge of being an English actor portraying an American character. “I got sent the audition in February 2021, and this was still pandemic time, so I’d been doing a lot of tapes but not getting much work, and this one comes up and I couldn’t really believe it,” he said. “I thought that I definitely wouldn’t get it. I did it the way that I heard it in my head, and I risked it all by playing Freddie as an English person. Intuitively, I thought it might add some contrast to the rest of the characters. … Steven Zaillian wrote to me personally, saying that he’d like to give me the part, which blew my mind.”
Another element that Sumner had reservations about was following the portrayal of Freddie by the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the 1999 film. “He’s one of my favorite heroes of cinema, and I knew that nothing could go up against the way that he played Freddie, so I had to make it as unique as possible,” Sumner said. “In a way, that freed me from the shadow, and Steven’s vision for Ripley was so ingrained in it being its own thing.”
In the majority of the series’ fifth episode, Sumner was required to play dead. Freddie would be dragged in and out of his apartment, and Sumner had to be still that entire time. “It was about four months of being known as ‘The Body’ on set,” he said. “It was physically quite taxing, as bizarre as that sounds, because I was just lying there, but the dragging around and not breathing for minutes on end … I’m sure they could have fixed that in post, but I wanted to do it properly.”
Regardless of the challenges, Sumner greatly enjoyed playing Freddie “Slipping into Freddie was really easy to do in a kind of scary way,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun. I find that his confidence and his arrogance, you don’t really get to see that every day in normal, polite society. I’m really sad that I might not ever get to play Freddie again.”
Ripley is available to stream on Netflix.