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Episode: Bonus Episode: Inside the TV Series "Dirty John" Part 1

Author: Los Angeles Times | Wondery
Duration: 00:14:14

Episode Shownotes

In the first of three special episodes about the making of the Bravo limited series "Dirty John," Christopher Goffard talks with actor Eric Bana about his portrayal of John Meehan and the parallels between actors and con men.“Dirty John” premieres on Bravo at 10 p.m. on Sunday, November 25. LA

Times Studios is participating as a producer on the Bravo series. You can also find the original L.A. Times series, plus 14 other pieces of narrative journalism, in a new collection called “Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders” by Christopher Goffard, published by Simon & Schuster.

Summary

In the first part of the special episodes about 'Dirty John,' actor Eric Bana discusses his portrayal of John Meehan, highlighting the complexity of embodying a character that is both manipulative and lacking self-awareness. Bana emphasizes the challenges of depicting Meehan authentically while integrating nuances from his acting background. He reflects on the parallels between acting and con artistry, noting that both roles necessitate understanding human emotion and deception, which could complicate his perception of trust in real life.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Bonus Episode: Inside the TV Series "Dirty John" Part 1) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:07 Speaker_00
I was at home in Australia, my agent called, and I'd been sort of dancing around finding something to do in this space for many years, but hadn't found something that I was really, really obsessed with.

00:00:21 Speaker_03
I'm talking to the actor Eric Bana, who plays the title role in Dirty John. It's late October and he's in the last week of a four-month shoot.

00:00:29 Speaker_00
And she called me and said, there's this project, just hear me out. I think that was the first thing, just hear me out on this one. Okay, there's a project and it's based on a true crime podcast and blah blah.

00:00:40 Speaker_00
So I spent the next couple of days with you in my car, listening to the podcast, which I was fascinated by and really enjoyed.

00:00:47 Speaker_03
We're in Ben's trailer at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in Burbank, and he's about to take a shuttle to the parking lot where they're going to film the scene of climactic violence in the eighth and final episode of the Bravo series.

00:00:59 Speaker_03
In a few days, he's flying home to Australia, where he lives a simple life as a family man and likes to tool around in vintage cars. But for four months, he's lived inside the skin of John Meehan, a Machiavellian grifter and seducer.

00:01:12 Speaker_03
I wanted to know what it was like to bring life to the role of a guy I'd spent so much time writing and thinking about. Now, Ban is not one of those actors who's in character every minute of the day.

00:01:22 Speaker_03
He didn't go around the set demanding people call him John and trying to swindle the grips and caterers. Everyone I talked to described him as a gentleman, and the American accent he uses for me had vanished between takes.

00:01:33 Speaker_03
The actress Connie Britton was already signed on to play Deborah Newell, and when he imagined her as Deborah and himself as John, he said he believed it.

00:01:41 Speaker_03
Another thing that drew him to the project was a sense that he could bring what he called nuance and complication to the role, rather than portray him as a one-dimensional villain.

00:01:50 Speaker_00
And I was excited by the opportunity that we would finally get to know John, because whilst he's very much alluded to in the podcast, he is the shark in Jaws, you know.

00:02:08 Speaker_03
From the LA Times and Wondery, I'm Chris Goffert, and this is a special episode of Dirty John.

00:02:27 Speaker_03
On the morning I'm supposed to interview Eric Bana, who plays John Meehan in the new Bravo series, I try to distract myself with a newspaper crossword puzzle. It so happens that 65 across is a four-letter word with the clue Bana of Hulk.

00:02:42 Speaker_03
This is a reference to Bana's role in Ang Lee's brooding and eccentric 2003 film about the Marvel character. Bana told me that people rarely ask him about that movie. If he's in an airport for some reason, people ask about Black Hawk Down.

00:02:56 Speaker_03
Women will often ask about the time traveler's wife. Sometimes it's Munich, in which he plays a Mossad agent. Banna's breakout role was in the Australian crime drama, Chopper in 2000.

00:03:07 Speaker_03
He played Chopper Reed, a homicidal real life gangster who manages to be funny and terrifying all at once.

00:03:14 Speaker_03
It was one of the roles on the mind of Alex Cunningham, the lead writer and executive producer of Dirty John, when she suggested Banna for the Meehan role.

00:03:22 Speaker_00
I think Chopper was far more methodical and made a lot more sense to me than John. I think John's much scarier, much scarier. I think he's very erratic and I think erratic is the scariest behavior in someone.

00:03:38 Speaker_02
but we absolutely felt that if we had an opportunity to get Eric Bana, we wanted to go get him.

00:03:43 Speaker_03
This is Richard Suckel, who is an executive producer of the show. Suckel has produced films like American Hustle and Wonder Woman and the TV show 12 Monkeys, but this is his first foray into limited series television.

00:03:56 Speaker_03
He tells me about meeting Bana in March of this year. Suckel and showrunner Alex Cunningham went to have drinks with Bana, who is in town promoting a film.

00:04:04 Speaker_02
We went over to and had drinks with him at the Hermitage Hotel on Burton Way in Beverly Hills. Really, he was interested in knowing exactly the way in which Alex was going to tell the series.

00:04:16 Speaker_02
You know, was she going to tell it in a linear fashion from beginning, middle, and end?

00:04:20 Speaker_02
How close was she going to stick to your podcast and the way you structure the podcast with the opening of the reveal that somebody's dead, but you don't know who's dead?

00:04:30 Speaker_03
Within days, Bana had committed, even before the pilot script had been written. I worried that whoever ended up playing John Meehan would insist on softening him and try to make him redeemable and what TV executives like to call relatable.

00:04:44 Speaker_03
I thought the chances of this happening increased with the size of the star. In the case of Bana, this worry proved to be unfounded. I asked Bana what he thought John Meehan told himself when he looked in the mirror.

00:04:55 Speaker_03
What explanation he gave himself for his behavior, which was, at times, not just monstrous, but illogical and self-defeating.

00:05:02 Speaker_00
Because I came to the conclusion that John didn't really know what he was doing. And once I came to that general conclusion, things became a lot easier.

00:05:11 Speaker_00
Because I think it's human nature for us to try and come up with these perfect answers that explain. People, sane people are in therapy all their life and still can't work themselves out.

00:05:23 Speaker_00
So why the hell would I expect in the third person, fourth person, second person, to come up with a version of John Meehan that makes sense when he himself wouldn't have known what the hell he was doing or who he was or why he was that way.

00:05:38 Speaker_03
This view of Meehan extended to the question of whether he loved Debra Newell.

00:05:42 Speaker_00
The one thing I felt, as odd as this sounds, is I really felt that John probably didn't really know himself. And once I sort of came to that, thought that made things easy.

00:05:55 Speaker_00
Because I think people can go through the motions in a relationship, especially sociopaths are very adept at adapting, as you know, behaviour that

00:06:07 Speaker_00
is the behavior they think they should be adapting to get what they need or to appear normal to other people and so forth.

00:06:13 Speaker_03
For years, Bana was best known in Australia as a comedian. Geoffrey Reiner, who directed all eight episodes of Dirty John, told Bana, I want you to make me laugh every day on set.

00:06:23 Speaker_00
We should film the first episode that any woman would be very happy to be in his company and that there's nothing really there. to set off alarm bells and so forth.

00:06:35 Speaker_00
So it was about just making him first and foremost completely believable and real and somewhat likable in the beginning as well.

00:06:46 Speaker_00
So I decided that it would be interesting to show a very juvenile side of John because the way I interpreted a lot of the behavior was like reminding me of kind of a teenage, like not even a pre-teen child who wasn't in control of himself.

00:07:04 Speaker_00
And so decided to incorporate some of that in the performance, which you'll probably see in the later episodes.

00:07:13 Speaker_03
John Meehan in real life liked to adopt a tone of almost theatrical menace when he wanted to frighten people. He told them to pray hard, to enjoy their time left on earth, and so forth. It was as if he took a tough guy Halloween mask off the shelf.

00:07:27 Speaker_00
He wasn't a very good writer. Some of his dialogue, I was like, he's like the worst bad guy ever. Like some of the stuff that would come out of his mouth I thought was, I tried to lean into that.

00:07:39 Speaker_00
I was like, I like the fact that this guy kind of thinks he's a bad guy and got this kind of gangster edge and he's just, he's like a bad caricature out of a good fella's mood.

00:07:49 Speaker_00
He's like the guy that's trying really hard that would have been kicked out in the first two hours out of the card room. And that's kind of fun in a way to not shy away from and to kind of embrace.

00:08:10 Speaker_03
A lot of people who listen to Dirty John wrote me with the same question. Why didn't Deborah just leave John Meehan?

00:08:17 Speaker_00
You know, when people are judgmental about Debra, where I feel really protective of her is in a sense that this is a, it's not a fair fight at all. It's not a fair match.

00:08:28 Speaker_00
This is like an unseated tennis player coming up against the top 10 in a tournament. John was incredibly adept at what he did and he was skilled and he was practiced. You should be falling for John. I think

00:08:44 Speaker_00
it's easy for people to be judgmental because they like to think that they won't make the same mistakes, right?

00:08:49 Speaker_00
But I always come back to how many times have you in your life rehearsed something in your head about how you're going to deal with someone that you love or hate, right? You go through that script. This is what I'm going to say tomorrow.

00:09:02 Speaker_00
This is what I'm going to say. I'm going to deal with this family member

00:09:05 Speaker_00
Sunday at lunchtime if they do that again, this is what I'm gonna say and then on the day Sitting across the table from that person you're looking in their eyes and those words never come out They never ever come out because when you're in the presence of someone changes everything There are probably actors out there and I think Eric would say this himself who have to love the people they're playing I don't think Eric got into acting for that.

00:09:29 Speaker_03
This is Alex Cunningham the showrunner

00:09:31 Speaker_01
Eric got into acting to play people who are not him, and to inhabit them and walk them around and show people why they're interesting. And I think because of that, he's not trying to make you love John, and it actually makes John much more real.

00:09:49 Speaker_01
magnetic and charismatic in the way that I have to imagine that John Meehan was for a lot of people in the way that there are so many things on television shows and also in real life where I find myself going, you know, if someone had just asked one question,

00:10:07 Speaker_01
this wouldn't have happened. Why did they not ask that one question?

00:10:11 Speaker_01
And when you get around someone like Eric, even in real life, you can see how someone would choose to not ask that question, that they don't they don't want to break the spell or whatever.

00:10:23 Speaker_03
I asked Bana whether he thought there were any parallels between John Meehan, con artist and chameleon, and the craft of an actor. I was semi-worried that he'd take offense. I was mistaken.

00:10:35 Speaker_00
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. There's not a whole lot of difference, in fact. For sure. You know, there's definite parallels. He's like, as you say, he was constantly grabbing a different mask for every person. And I think that's what we do.

00:10:52 Speaker_00
I think, you know, we're... kind of carcasses looking for skin in the mask, you know, every time we go to work, you know, just selfishly taking whatever bits and pieces we need from anyone that we love or hate or merciless.

00:11:08 Speaker_00
So, no, in many respects, we're just a more respectable version of some of his behavior.

00:11:16 Speaker_03
Carcasses, huh?

00:11:18 Speaker_00
Yeah, whatever is necessary. Skin, brain, heart, Yeah, features, physical, anything.

00:11:32 Speaker_03
Later that day down the block I watched the filming of the violent climactic parking lot confrontation between John Meehan and Tara Newell.

00:11:39 Speaker_03
Anna and Julia Garner, who plays Tara, stood nearby as stunt doubles dressed exactly like them ran through the carefully choreographed knife attack, over and over.

00:11:49 Speaker_03
We all watched as Kippy the stunt dog, playing Cash the miniature Australian shepherd, tore the stuntman's pant leg to shreds. When the stunt doubles were done, Banner and Garner came on to do it themselves. It was disturbing to watch.

00:12:02 Speaker_03
Garner looking small and overmatched, Banner looking huge, his face contorted with rage.

00:12:08 Speaker_03
Banner told me he sometimes feels affectionate toward characters he plays, but in this case, it's more complicated, and he's looking forward to forgetting how to think like John Meehan.

00:12:18 Speaker_00
I think with this character, what's been different is I just, it's terrible. It does make me feel dirty, you know, it does. I do go home at night and feel a little like I don't want to make eye contact with a lot of women.

00:12:33 Speaker_00
You're opening neural pathways when you're playing these characters that make lying and deceiving and pretending on a different level to how you normally would as a person. And after a while it starts to become easy to tap into.

00:12:50 Speaker_00
You sort of shorten the gaps between the two and it sort of makes you aware of how much people could be lying in real life.

00:12:58 Speaker_00
I'm constantly allowing myself to think about what people could do or say once they leave a room or once they... I like playing spot the John and Debra in a restaurant. I'm always trying to spot the John in the room now all the time.

00:13:16 Speaker_00
and then trying to come up with a narrative of how that person is misrepresenting their life. And it's not a healthy way to think, but your brain is just trained to just do that now after a period of time of inhabiting this character.

00:13:29 Speaker_00
So I guess that's what I'm referring to in terms of when you finish, you hope that all that stuff those neural pathways get cut off. As a friend of mine said, he says, you bastard, he says, you're going to make things so much harder for so many men.

00:13:42 Speaker_00
He says, and the worst thing is you make it hardest for the ones that are the nicest.

00:13:50 Speaker_03
Dirty John premieres on Bravo at 10 p.m. on Sunday, November 25th. And here's a reminder that before it was a TV show, it was a work of journalism.

00:13:59 Speaker_03
You can find the original LA Times series plus 14 other pieces of narrative journalism in my new collection. It's called Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders by Christopher Goffard, published by Simon & Schuster.