SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains major spoilers from “East of Eden,” now streaming on Netflix. Zoe Kazan has spent much of her life thinking about family legacy on and off screen. More than 62 years after her grandfather Elia Kazan famously directed James Dean in an adaptation of the fourth and final part of John Steinbeck’s novel “East of Eden,” the younger Kazan has taken on the Herculean task of tackling the full literary epic in a sweeping new Netflix miniseries, which premiered on Oct. 1.
But rather than focusing strictly on the men of the Trask and Hamilton families, this adaptation shifts the spotlight to Cathy Ames (played by Florence Pugh, also an executive producer). Instead of being depicted merely as the amoral villain who shoots her husband Adam Trask (Christopher Abbott) and abandons her newborn twins to return to a life of prostitution, Cathy is reframed as a complex antihero whose choices ripple through generations of the Trask family. This shift also required trimming other major characters in this adaptation.
Mike Faist, who plays Adam’s brother Charles, and Ciarán Hinds, who plays patriarch Samuel Hamilton, take on reduced roles compared to the novel. By tightening those subplots, the series focuses more by design on exploring the inner lives of Cathy, Adam and Lee (Hoon Lee) — the Trask’s cook and housekeeper who becomes a second parent of sorts to Charles’ twin boys, Cal and Aron. Or did I read this book and learn how to think about those things from it?
This is one of the books that made me who I am. It’s not like my other work, but across a lot of my work, I’m thinking about families and the way people hurt each other by loving each other, or hurt each other in the name of love, and how terrible it is to be put in a box by someone’s conception of you and how you break out of that box. The reason for me to do this was to tell that intergenerational story.
Cathy bounced off the page at me, but I don’t know that I would’ve raised my hand and been like, “I have to do this with six years of my life,” if it had just been for Cathy. We interviewed a lot of directors for this, and one female director I talked to really objected to me putting as much emphasis on the boys as I did. She was like, “If you were a real feminist, you would’ve made this whole thing about Cathy.” It was a really clarifying meeting to have, because it made me understand even more deeply why these men’s stories speak to me so loudly, which is to say that I do not think of my own relationship to feminism as being a relationship that excludes men.
I’m only interested in a version of gender parity that celebrates cis men, cis women, trans men, trans women, nonbinary people. I’m not interested in a small slice of humanity. The humanity of all of these characters — and getting to chart that over time and see how change happens, or doesn’t happen, in the family — is what drew me in.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
