Susanne Bier On Creating Intangible Tension for ‘The Perfect Couple’

There was a palpable excitement when the first trailer for Netflix’s The Perfect Couple dropped, and it’s easy to see why. Beachy murder mystery? Check. Huge, starry cast? Check. One of the biggest reasons to tune into the adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s novel, though, is because Susanne Bier directs the entire 6-part series. With her attention to detail and skill of wiring up the tension, Bier helms her most captivating mystery yet.

I admitted to the Emmy Award-winning director that the setting of Nantucket intimidated me, and she admitted that she felt the same. When you are so far separated from the setting, you feel like an outsider, but that only makes you more curious to observe the habits of the people who feel comfortable or entitled in this universe. Does an outsider, like the rapt audience of Couple, have an advantage of sniffing out the killer?

“Part of that wealth is meant to intimidate you, and it’s meant to make you feel that you are inferior,” Bier says. “You always think that these people have some kind of secret recipe on life that is inaccessible for us mere mortals. I’ve never been part of that world, and when I get to those places, I feel so uncomfortable. I always think that I am going to do the wrong things. When I went on one of those helicopter rides, we went all around and we landed on a private airfield on Nantucket. My God, I’ve never seen so many private jets. That’s a very real thing. Does that make them lovable, warm, kind, generous, honest people? No, it really doesn’t, but we are making them worse than they really are.”

At first, Bier relied solely on the scripts to help her construct the story and mood, but she admits that reading the original source material helped her in a way that she didn’t expect.

“I tend to read the novels, if I haven’t already like with The Night Manager. I tore through that before I ever got involved in it. With The Perfect Couple, I really just read the scripts at first, but then I read the book about two or three weeks before we started shooting. It was very inspiring, because there is so much Nantucket texture in the novel, and it helped me understand how to treat it visually much more than I did before.”

There is an art to wrangling so many famous faces on screen at one time. You have to be able to let actors and their characters stand out but also work together as an ensemble unit together. With series like The Undoing and The Night Manager (not to mention the huge cast of Bird Box), Bier knows how to guide the narrative in a way without letting anyone get left behind.

“I love the energy that comes with a big cast,” Bier says. “When you have so many people in one room it makes it more explosive, and you have to make sure that the energy is going into the right direction. There is always a kind of intrinsic, chaotic element to a huge cast–you have a lot of artistic points of view. It’s all about challenging all the energy so that all the cars on the motorway are driving the same way with the same vision.”

I even gushed over the inclusion of French queen, Isabelle Adjani. Bier shares my enthusiasm.

“For those who don’t know who she is, they need to be put someone in a dark room until they have seen everything she’s done,” she says with a laugh. “[She is] so particular, so magnetic, but she’s also so funny. The more distinct and the more unusual every single member of the cast is, the better all of them are together.”

With so many elements firing on all cylinders at once, how does Bier juggle it all? The tone has to be fun enough to lure you in but serious take the crime seriously. You have to be entertained but never lose that sense of dread and danger. With every episode, at least in my household, there is a new prime suspect with a reasonable motive, and Bier explains that you can’t ever see the strings being pulled.

“It needs to look effortless,” Bier says. “It should be like the most beautiful model walking down the runway wearing a dress that took about 400 people half a year to make. We all know that in the back of our mind, but we can’t ever see that in the final product. A lot of it has to do with timing but also about the details. If someone turns their eyes up and down, it can be as small as that. It’s about precision in of any microsecond, and that can create tension. It’s intangible. You can find the truth in very, very miniscule moments.”

Nicole Kidman’s Greer Garrison Winbury seems like she would write a story much like Hilderbrand’s. By the end of the series, she has revealed some dark secrets about her past and her high-profile career takes a severe left turn. Would Bier prefer to read the work that made Greer a rabid fanbase? Or is she looking forward to what’s on the horizon?

“Oh, new Greer–no question,” she says. “You know that is going to be juicy.”

The Perfect Couple is streaming now on Netflix.