What To Know
- Prime Video’s new crime thriller Scarpetta features dual timelines of the same characters.
- Jake Cannavale portrays the younger version of the role played by his father, Bobby Cannavale, and revealed the biggest challenge of that task.
There’s been a lot of discourse about the onslaught of “nepo babies” lately, but Jake Cannavale fits into a very small class of Hollywood legacies — those who play the exact same role as their parents.
Yes, the actor, who has been at it for well over a decade and got his start opposite dad Bobby Cannavale in Nurse Jackie, joins the elder Cannavale in portraying Detective Pete Marino in Scarpetta, Prime Video’s new adaptation of the Patricia Cornwell novel series. While Jake plays Pete in the ’90s-set timeline of the show, Bobby portrays him in the present day.
When asked what the biggest challenge of essentially sharing a role with his dear old dad is, Cannavale’s answer was a bit tongue-in-cheek.
“I’d say the biggest challenge is you kind of just have to — once you do all this work with your counterpart off-screen — you kind of have to trust that they’ll do that on set and vice versa,” he told TV Insider, adding with a laugh, “I remember every time I was not working and my dad was on set, I’d be thinking like, ‘Dude, you better do what we talked about, or I’ll come down there.’”
The Cannavales aren’t the only actors splitting a role for the series. Sharing the role of FBI profiler Benton Wesley are Simon Baker, as the elder Benton, and Hunter Parrish. Parrish, for one, agreed with Cannavale’s assessment of the issue.
“That is one of the dangers of sharing a role is it does require a lot of trust, and the idea that at any point they could do something that doesn’t quite feel like you would be doing that,” Parrish said. However, he also contended that the good thing about the structure of Scarpetta is that the distant split in the dual timelines means some changes to the characters are to be expected. “People change. I’m not the same person I was six years ago. So there’s also that room for error when you have 25 years.”
Playing the younger version of Nicole Kidman‘s Kay Scarpetta is Black Mirror alum Rosy McEwen, who followed Kidman’s lead on the character … well, mostly.
Connie Chornuk / Prime
“Yeah, a blessing and a curse,” she said of the opportunity. “In lots of ways, we have this pool of inspiration to dip into, and I was always asking, ‘Does Nicole do this? Is she picking up things like this? How did she hold her scalpel?’… So you kind of felt protected and inspired by that. But then, yeah, there were some instincts that you have as an actor, and you’re just going for it, and then you leave set, and you’re thinking, ‘Oh God, I hope that was right!’ But you sort of just have to trust, and yeah, 20 or 30 years — that’s a long time.”
Find out how closely these actors resemble their characters when Scarpetta premieres with all eight episodes next Wednesday, February 11.
Scarpetta, Series Premiere, February 11, Prime Video
