Let the Right One In is an upcoming Showtime series based on the novel of the same name by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Though this isn’t the first time the story’s been adapted, it is the first to be brought to television. Previously, in addition to other media, two film versions were made in 2008 and 2010, respectively. As a first-time showrunner, executive producer Andrew Hinderaker told Entertainment Weekly that his small-screen version wasn’t the easiest project that he could have chosen.
Despite all that, Hineraker called the show’s New York shoot “fantastic," though he did concede that he did have an issue with a group of rats that were due to appear in an underground sequence. More specifically, there’s a moment in the pilot when this horde of rats stampede past Bichir’s feet, and since they wanted a real sense of authenticity and groundedness, they used real rats. Somewhere between 50 and 100 of them.
“A showrunning mentor of mine said that if you want to make a shoot difficult and hard to achieve, the things that you want to make sure you employ are winter, exterior, nights, children, action, special effects. We did all of them. I think ‘being on a ship in the water’ was the only thing that we didn’t do in the show,” said Hinderaker.
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The plot of the show follows a father named Mark Kane (Demián Bichir), whose daughter Eleanor (Madison Taylor Baez) was transformed into a vampire ten years before the beginning of the show. So now, Mark needs to kill so that his child may live while also attempting to find a cure for his daughter’s affliction.
“The moment came to unleash the rats, and these gentle, wonderful, lovely, more-mice-than-rats come stumbling out, doing everything they can to avoid the camera. You almost wanted them as pets. So, in the end, the rats you see in the picture are CGI because what we had on the day were a little too friendly for a horror show.”
The Characters and Changes to the Source Material
Bichir believes that Eleanor’s plight has resonance in the real world. According to him, in our daily lives, we often see when our kids’ dreams are broken or interrupted by different factors that people sometimes can’t control. So, as a result, we have to fight with love and determination to help them overcome that. Bichir was also able to lend his real-life restaurant skills to his character’s day job.
“She lived a normal life, she was a science nerd, she loved space, astronomy. But that all changed when she was bitten by a creature at the age of 12, and now she and her father have to live a life where murder is her only way to survive. They need to kill so she can feed off of blood,” said Baez on her character.
In the pilot, the two of them move to New York and right next door to another single parent and their child. Naomi Cole (Anika Noni Rose) is a homicide cop who, according to Rose, is someone used to doing things on her own. Presumably, she’s going to find one of her cases a little closer to home. Her son Isaiah (Ian Foreman) is a weird kid who likes magic and many other things other children don’t like, so he gets bullied a lot over it.
“It’s a very, very familiar environment for me. And to me is a nice way of honoring the 12 million undocumented workers who cook our food and take care of our babies and take care of our homes and help us to have a beautiful, happier, easier life. To me, the show is about many other things, not only, you know, fangs,” said Bichir in regard to shooting the show’s restaurant scenes.
Though the show broadly follows the original novel’s plot, several changes have been made. Most obviously, the setting has been changed, along with the characters’ names. Also, in the original book and the two film versions, the vampire’s guardian is not their father but rather someone who was in love with the vampire (in very different ways). According to Hinderaker, it was an easy decision to make their bond familial in this version.
“He doesn’t have any friends, so life is very lonely for him until the little girl moves in next door, and she doesn’t find him weird. It’s hard to find a magician weird when you’re out drinking blood! But she is somebody who is not judgmental of him, who actually likes him as a person, and for the first time in a long time, he has found someone who he thinks might be his friend,” said Rose.
Besides that, in a world that’s isolated from the big city, there’s going to be another family that is looking after a vampire child, loving them while also trying to find a cure for their affliction. This second family will include characters that are played by Grace Gummer and Željko Ivanek, in addition to a helper portrayed by Nick Stahl.
“One of the things that I was very interested to explore was the lengths a parent will got to for their child. Will the love that [Mark] has for his daughter save both of their lives or will it ultimately destroy both their lives and will he be sucked into the darkness of her affliction? What better way to explore that tension than with that profound and unconditional love that a parent has for a child?” said Hinderaker.
