Oscar winners Alfonso Cuaron, Cate Blanchett, and Kevin Kline have teamed with Apple TV+ for the new limited series “Disclaimer.” On Wednesday, the streaming service debuted the first teaser trailer for the show, which begins streaming on October 11.
The event series is based on the bestselling book of the same name by Renee Knight and focuses on an “acclaimed journalist named Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett), who built her reputation by revealing the misdeeds and transgressions of others. When she receives a novel from an unknown author, she is horrified to realize she is now the main character in a story that exposes her darkest secrets.”
Continues the synopsis provided by Apple, “As Catherine races to uncover the writer’s true identity, she is forced to confront her past before it destroys her life and her relationships with her husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) and their son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). The ensemble cast includes Lesley Manville, Louis Partridge, Leila George, and Hoyeon, and features Indira Varma as the narrator.”
The Oscar bona fides are strong with “Disclaimer.” Cuaron has won four Oscars including Best Director and Best Editing for “Gravity” and Best Director and Best Cinematography for “Roma.” (“Roma” also won Best International Feature at the Oscars, but the award goes to the home country – which in the case of “Roma” was Mexico – and not the individual filmmaker.) Blanchett is a two-time Oscar winner (for “The Aviator” and “Blue Jasmine”), while Kline won Best Supporting Actor for “A Fish Called Wanda.” The crew of “Disclaimer” also includes Oscar winners like cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, makeup department head Elizabeth Yianni-Georgiou, and composer Finneas O’Connell. (Actors Manville, Cohen, and Smit-McPhee are former Oscar nominees, as is the show’s other cinematographer, Bruno Delbonnel.)
“Disclaimer” is the first television series from Cuaron. He previously told Vanity Fair he didn’t necessarily approach the seven-episode show any different from his work as a feature filmmaker.
“In television, you go A, B, C, D. In film, you find a way to go from A to D directly. Here it was about experimenting with something different. I have never done something so overtly narrative,” he said to the legacy outlet.
“The miscalculation is that I don’t know how to do TV. And I don’t think that at this stage, I want to really learn,” he added with a joke, before praising Apple. “They were very generous when I said I could only do it as a film. In a TV show, you shoot five pages a day, and sometimes even more. I shoot one page a day. So the shoot was very, very long. We were shooting with pandemic restrictions and with actors getting COVID, meaning changes of schedule and domino effects happening.” (According to Vanity Fair, Cuaron likened “Disclaimer” to a seven-hour movie, although he wasn’t quoted as directly calling the series a seven-hour movie.)
In keeping with the theatrical approach, “Disclaimer” will premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The show, which will likely be among the top contenders in the limited series race at the 2025 Emmys, debuts on October 11.
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