Twice now, Lizzy Caplan has felt left behind. The first time was after Mean Girls, the 2004 high-school comedy in which she played goth outcast Janis Ian. The film was a phenomenon, setting Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Seyfried and Rachel McAdams on a shortcut path to stardom. But Caplan, whose acid-tongued one-liners most Millennials could still recite in their sleep? “I didn’t work again for a year afterwards,” she shrugs.
“At that time, the beautiful popular girl was the star of the movie, and the alternative girl was the best friend,” she says. “And that was all there really was.” Caplan, who has massive brown eyes and a presence that flits between spiky, cynical and sultry, could have easily played either – but Hollywood couldn’t see past the heavy eyeliner and stringy black hair. “The next job I got, I had dyed my hair blonde and gotten a spray tan.” She bursts out laughing. “A short-lived experiment.”
The second time was more recently, when she realised that none of the roles she was being offered seemed to represent her any more. After that post-Mean Girls blip she had spent her twenties playing “the very specific floundering lost girl trying to figure it out”.
Then when she was 30, she was cast in the acclaimed period drama Masters of Sex, as human sexuality pioneer Virginia Johnson, which ran for four seasons and earned her an Emmy nod. But when Masters of Sex was cancelled, she looked around and couldn’t see a place for herself.
“We have a lot being made about much older people figuring it out, and will always be endlessly fascinated by teens and people in their twenties figuring it out, but what about this middle part?” says Caplan. “Now I’m 40, it just feels like there’s this desert.”
Caplan is in a London hotel room to promote Fatal Attraction, a new, boiled-bunny-free TV remake of the 1987 erotic thriller, which we will get to later. Dressed in a floor-length cream skirt suit, her hair in a painstakingly messy bun, she’s “freezing”, but rejects with a chuckle the publicist’s offer of a dressing gown. On the floor beside her are the massive silver heels she wore for a photoshoot earlier and has now discarded.
“It’s not like this period of time is uninteresting,” she continues, tucking her feet underneath her. “I actually think it’s far more interesting than a girl in her twenties figuring it out. The stakes are higher now in every way. You have divorce, parenthood, your own parents getting older… And it’s such an isolating time if there’s not a lot of current art to make you feel less alone.”
So when Fleishman Is in Trouble came along, she felt a profound sense of relief. Based on the 2019 novel by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the Disney+ series tells the story of Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg), a 40-something divorcee whose hard-headed ex-wife Rachel (Claire Danes) drops the kids off in the middle of the night and doesn’t come back.
Caplan plays journalist-turned-stay-at-home-mum Libby, Toby’s best friend from college, who is on hand to listen sympathetically to his woes and call Rachel a bitch. But partway through the series, a switch is flipped, betraying how skewed Toby’s perspective is and revealing instead a potent story about the nagging discontent of 30 and 40-something womanhood.
The show spoke to some deep sadness that Caplan hadn’t been able to confront – or even put a finger on. “That heavy feeling – Fleishman identified it for me. ‘Oh, this is just mourning the loss of youth. That’s what it is.’ I found a great deal of comfort in that. It makes me feel better to know that there’s nothing I can do about it, and that it happens to everybody. I suppose that could make it feel extra bleak. But it didn’t. It was a weight lifted.
“Which is not to say that I was struggling as much as some of my friends are struggling. I got married and had kids late” – she married actor Tom Riley in 2017, and their son was born in 2021 – “so I kind of got a free pass from a lot of those feelings… but your life changes when you get older. And if we’re not making art about it, like, what are we doing?”
As soon as Fleishman finished shooting, Caplan started filming Fatal Attraction, pivoting from playing a frustrated suburban mum to a murderous femme fatale. You’ll know the story: Alex Forrest, played by Glenn Close in the original, has an affair with a married man and grows increasingly unhinged after he rejects her.
“I still think it’s a ridiculously sexy movie,” says Caplan. “It still has the scares and the suspense and it delivers completely.” It’s just that these days, “we’re not so good at writing women off as just crazy”.
In the re-make, which is zippy and sexy, if not exactly remarkable, Caplan wanted to draw out “the elements of Alex that were more overlooked by audiences of the film – her vulnerability, her loneliness and her sadness, instead of just labelling her as this psycho crazy woman”.
But this is not one of those supposedly feminist remakes in which the woman is transformed into a two-dimensional badass. “There was never a conversation about making her the hero of the piece,” insists Caplan. “This is slightly more grounded in reality than the film but it’s still Fatal Attraction. The stuff Alex does is still pretty off the wall, and it doesn’t forgive her for the things she does, but it definitely shades in some of the lines. There wasn’t really an appetite for that in 1987.”
Back then, “it worked very well for her to just be the villain and for him to be the good guy”. Which he blatantly is not. “He’s really violent towards her, he fully cheats on his wife, he betrays his child. [But] it was just so easy at that time to say, ‘Oh this really good, stand-up guy just made one silly mistake. It could happen to anybody.’ People saw it as a cautionary tale about affairs.” She scoffs. “We were not interested in telling that story.”
They’re very different shows, but Fatal Attraction and Fleishman wrongfoot the viewer in similar ways – seeming to orbit around a male perspective before flipping things on their head. It was a trick Brodesser-Akner came up with as a journalist after years of writing celebrity profiles for GQ and The New York Times. “She realised that when she wrote about a man people read it, and when she wrote about a woman people didn’t,” says Caplan.
“It’s bad enough that men aren’t interested in hearing women’s voices, but there are so many women that immediately tune out. There’s so much interesting, fascinating, dark, f**ked up, hilarious, wild shit that comes with, like, childbirth and new motherhood. And you don’t see a lot of shows about that. Because like, ‘Oh, who’s the audience for that?’ It’s insane. We’re human beings.”
Then again, Caplan is no stranger to internalised misogyny. When she was growing up in Los Angeles, she presented herself to the world as a “guy’s girl” – a soccer champ who was friends with all the boys. “You say to everybody, ‘Oh no, I’m not into all that girly bullshit,’” she recalls. “‘I’m into the real stuff. The man stuff.’” She shudders. “God, it kills me to equate ‘real’ and ‘man’. But it’s true. Spoiler alert,” she smirks, “it doesn’t work.”
Tempting as it is to try and sidestep the patriarchy by sneering at femininity, that doesn’t actually get you a free pass. “It’s easy to think, ‘Oh, boys are easier to hang with, I’m better with boys, it’s less complicated,’ and in some ways I suppose it can be simpler to have friendships or working relationships with boys, but at the end of the day, being a girl in the world is infinitely harder to do than to be a man in the world. It just is.”
It’s harder still when you’re in the glare of the spotlight. I wonder whether, despite her frustrations after Mean Girls, Caplan is glad she wasn’t catapulted to the same level of fame as her co-star Lindsay Lohan, given the tabloid attention, legal troubles and addiction issues Lohan has so publicly battled in the years since. “I mean, she was so young,” says Caplan. “She was such a talented kid actress but she was also a lot younger than us.”
Caplan was 21 when they filmed Mean Girls, while Lohan had only just turned 17. Caplan had spent most of her childhood playing piano and football; Lohan had started modelling at three, and thanks to 1998’s The Parent Trap was famous by 11.
“She was experiencing a completely different version of the job at that point already. But she was always so sweet to me, and just felt so young and was just, you know, figuring it out. When you’re that age, I really challenge anybody to have that much attention and pressure put on them and to come out unscathed. Like, that is not possible. Honestly, I cannot imagine it.”
In some ways, things are better for young people now – certainly tabloids and talk show hosts would be raked over the coals if they spoke about today’s young stars the way they spoke about Lohan in the Noughties. But social media is its own battlefield, and Caplan detests it. “It’s just this 24/7 social feeding frenzy, and it’s f**king up everybody’s head,” she says.
“I hate it. I hate it for young people. It terrifies me for them. It’s like we’re experimenting on this generation to see how bad it is before we start actually putting real rules and regulations on it. It’s created a lot of nastiness. And undue pressure on girls. I don’t remember caring what I looked like when I was young. And so to see these kids who are like 10 and 11 doing sexualised, pouty poses. Come on! It’s weird.”
How did she manage to avoid the pressure to join? “People told me it was important to do it, but I just couldn’t. I hate it too much. It’s everything I hate about this job. Why would I sign up to do more of that?” She glances down at those discarded heels. “The entire job description [of acting] is to convince people you’re somebody else, and so you spend every minute of your off time showing people who you are in reality?”
She sighs. “I don’t know how that helps your craft in any way.”
Fatal Attraction is available on Paramount+ from Monday 1 May
