Harlan Coben’s Lazarus premieres on Prime Video on 22nd October. Ahead of the launch, executive producer, Quay Street Productions founder Nicola Shindler and co-creator Danny Brocklehurst talked about the making of the latest Coben series to hit UK screens.
Based on an original story idea by author Harlan Coben and writer Danny Brocklehurst, Harlan Coben’s Lazarus follows Joel Lazarus (Sam Claflin) who returns home after his father Dr. Jonathan Lazarus (Bill Nighy) dies by suicide and begins to have disturbing experiences that can’t be explained. He quickly becomes entangled in a series of cold-case murders as he grapples with the mystery of his father’s death and his sister’s murder 25 years ago.
Interview with Nicola Shindler – executive producer
How did you first work with Harlan Coben?
Some years ago, Richard Fee [Executive Producer] had been talking about what makes very compelling television and how we wanted to make television that was like the best crime novels. You know that feeling you get at night where you can’t stop reading. Where you think I’ll just read one more chapter… I’ve got to read one more chapter? How do we turn that into television And we would say, ‘Who’s the best at doing that?’ We both loved Harlan’s work so we just said he will never answer us, we’ll never hear back, but why don’t we try and get in contact with him? We got in contact with him, and in less than twenty-four hours he’d got back to us and was talking to us about an idea. Because that’s Harlan. He’s just so full of ideas and loves talking stories and is really excited by the idea of a British TV show — unlike a lot of Americans I think who wouldn’t understand that. His work’s always been big in Europe, so he was open to the idea of setting something in the UK rather than America and he happened to have an idea that was a genius, still one of the best we’ve worked on, which he hadn’t been able to make work as a novel. We turned that into a ten-part series called The Five. We’ve done several more since.
How did Lazarus come about for Prime Video?
This one came with quite a brief outline. Harlan had written himself two, three pages of story and it had been mulling in his head for years, I think. He gave it to me and Richard and Danny [Brockelhurst], who obviously we work with as the screenwriter, and he said, I think this is a television idea. And I think this should feel quite different from our other shows.’ He went on that it has this ghostly element, a supernatural feel and that we should embrace that. So we started with those pages and then he and Danny wrote the first episode together.
What was in that first document?
So much! I think Harlan underestimates how much he had already in that first document. However, in brief his first idea is, you just get us a sense of the world that he wants and the characters. We knew who Laz [Sam Claflin] was in terms of his relationship with his dad and how important that was. We knew that he had a kind of social responsibility because of the job that he’d chosen to do as a forensic psychiatrist. So, you know he works with offenders in prison and there’s a certain kind of personality who does that. We also knew that he wasn’t in a relationship, but he had a relationship from many years ago. And we knew that he had lost his twin sister a long time ago. Some stories don’t have that much character after years of working on them. That was his very first document. He gave us all that.
What makes a Harlan Coben show a Harlan Coben show?
I think you know DNA wise that it’s always going to be a Harlan Coben show because even though Lazarus is slightly darker and there’s the ghost element, it has the humour and warmth that he brings to all his characters. These are huge characters who you can invest in. So, I think there’s always someone for the audience to fall in love with and identify with. And Sam’s character, Laz, in this one is just so likable and emotionally attainable that that’s the same. Overall, of course it’s just such a good story. You spend so much of your time thinking, ‘What’s going to happen? Please tell me what’s going to happen?’ And that’s Harlan’s superpower, whichever story he’s writing: his skill is to make you stay invested.
How do you deal with one of your main characters — Dr L [Bill Nighy] — being dead from the start?
You don’t think of them as being dead. And that’s the other thing that Harlan had. He often thinks about stories that have fathers and sons at the centre of them, so it was about that relationship from the off. And we knew that this character [Dr L] is primarily in one location, so the scenes that he’s in have to be written brilliantly — when you are not able to take a character anywhere else, you have to make sure that they live and breathe and have an energy about them which comes from brilliant characterisation and writing as opposed to action. So that was the challenge.
How did you come to get Bill Nighy as Dr L?
You know from the very first moment Harlan talked about his character, he talked about Bill Nighy. And actually, saying Bill Nighy is not a shorthand in any way for character development, but you know what he means when he says that. He means someone who is brilliantly educated, incredibly clever, very charming; someone you want to spend time with, someone who has an elegance about him. It sounds like a weird word to use about a character, but he just does. And someone who draws you in. It also gave Danny license to be funny in the scripts because Bill is a funny actor. We go to very dark places with this character but there’s humour all the way through that.
What would have happened if you couldn’t have got Bill Nighy?
Luckily, it turned out that Bill was a fan of Harlan, so he knew his work. He totally identified and
understood what Harlan was asking for. And then he met with Harlan and Harlan was able to talk him through the story of what happens to this character, which is exceptional.
Interview with Danny Brocklehurst – co-creator, writer, executive producer
How did Lazarus come about?
We’ve done a lot of Harlan Coben shows for Netflix, some of which have been based on original ideas like Safe and some have been based on his books. With this one Harlan had this idea — he’d been past this old building and thought about the ghosts in the walls of a psychologist’s office and the stories that they know. So, he jotted it down. I think it was probably only two or three pages, just saying this is what this could be and what do we think? It was quite different to the Harlan shows that we’ve done, a bit supernatural, so we — including Nicola [Shindler] and Richard [Fee], who are brilliant story minds — all got together and interrogated it quite a bit, kicked it around… and then me and Harlan developed it from there into the six-part series that now exists. So, it was more of a fulsome collaboration than perhaps when we were doing one of his novels.
How do you collaborate with Harlan Coben?
Well, he lives in a different country so there is usually some travel involved! So, either he comes over here or we go over to New Jersey or New York, and we will carve out a week initially. It consists of us literally sitting in a room talking, kicking things around and writing. We try to shape the series, find the classic start, middle and end, and then just deepen some of the narrative threads. I think the reason me and Harlan work so well together is because he is very good at creating a thriller story and planning the twists and turns, whereas I tend to be very good on character and emotion. I see my role as trying to bring the character stuff, the heart, the soul— and I’m not saying that Harlan doesn’t do this too. It’s like, what is this person, what’s the relationship with them.
This is a story about psychologists and psychiatry — how did you research it?
Pre-Covid I had done an adaptation of The Dice Man for Paramount that for all sorts of reasons didn’t get made. That was set around a psychiatrist, so it was a world I’d looked into quite a bit. In fact, it was a world that fascinated us both. We talked a lot about Dr Laz [Bill Nighy] and this tragedy that he has had, how you would accommodate that knowing the job that you have to do. And then with younger Laz [Sam Claflin] it’s a classic trope — the returning son coming back to the place that they left with all the baggage that they left behind. The reason it’s been done a fair bit for years is because it is just very potent —that feeling of coming home, coming home to your sister [Alexandra Roach], coming home to your father, coming home to your friends and all the stuff that you left there. Old loves, demons, good mates. It’s always a good story to tell.
How did you approach bringing in elements of the supernatural to the story?
The truth is I normally write realism and so does Harlan. But I think that we both really like what you might call ‘grounded supernatural’ or ‘grounded Sci-fi,’ elements that just make you feel a little bit weird. For instance, can ghosts exist or is it all in Laz’s mind? Once we had the idea, we thought there’s no point doing things by half, you might as well really go for it. So, we want people to be asking Is Laz losing his mind? Is he mad? How can these people exist when they’re dead or does he conjure them up? It’s very unusual for us to do that because it’s not our natural strain, but I think we kind of enjoyed it.
You’ve worked with Harlan Coben on multiple projects now. How has your understanding of one another’s working methods, ideas and thoughts deepened over time?
We’ve become a bit like a band – like a well-oiled machine where each one knows each other’s strengths, weaknesses and we know how to draw them out of each other. We both know when something’s working, when something’s not working and importantly, we speak freely to each other. I’ll tell Harlan an idea’s rubbish; he’ll tell me an idea’s rubbish… or gold. I think we’ve just reached that place where as soon as we get in a room, we know that we will create a story.
How do you feel having Bill Nighy as your Dr L?
When you’re creating you quickly start thinking of people and Bill was top of our wish list. But you never know whether you’re going to get people of that stature or whether they’ll be available or whether they’ll even want to do it. I mean Bill is obviously just brilliant. I’ve loved Bill for years — his performance in State of Play is just masterful. He’s an extraordinary actor, one of those people where you’re never quite sure which way he’s going to take a scene. He’s great to watch.
Credits
Writers
Harlan Coben
Danny BrocklehurstExecutive Producers
Harlan Coben
Danny Brocklehurst
Nicola Shindler
Richard Fee
Sam Claflin
Wayne Che YipDirector
Wayne Che Yip (Episodes one and two)Producer
Matt StrevensProduced by
Quay Street Productions and Amazon MGM Studios in association with Final Twist ProductionsCast (series regulars)
Sam Claflin as Joel Lazarus
Bill Nighy as Dr. Jonathan Lazarus
Alexandra Roach as Jenna Lazarus
David Fynn as Seth McGovern
Karla Crome as Bella Catton
Kate Ashfield as Detective Alison Brown
Photo credit: Ben Blackall, Prime
Pippa Considine
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