SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for “The Executioners,” the finale of “Cape Fear,” now streaming on Apple TV.
Nothing good ever happens on a houseboat in a “Cape Fear” adaptation — just ask Juliette Lewis.
In Martin Scorsese’s 1991 version — for which she was nominated for an Oscar at 18 years old — Lewis’ character Danielle was seduced, assaulted and terrorized on her family’s houseboat by Max Cady (Robert De Niro), a serial rapist who used her as a naive pawn to get revenge on her father (Nick Nolte), the lawyer who’d put him away. She survived that boat ride, but washes up on the banks of the titular North Carolina river with bumps, bruises, a bit of whiplash and a complete loss of her innocence.
Lewis, on the other hand, had a blast.
“That was so fun, which is probably weird to say, but it was because I was with Jessica Lange and De Niro, and they’re doing push-ups between scenes,” Lewis tells Variety. “We all did jumping jacks to get our heart rate up to play that terror. That’s where I cut my teeth, and I learned the tricks of the trade. I take what I learned from that movie, and it’s fed me my whole career.”
Those lessons have particularly resonated this summer when she joined Apple TV and creator Nick Antosca’s series adaptation of “Cape Fear,” in which she plays something wholly different: Crystal, the show’s villain, and a vicious one at that. But in the opening scene of this week’s finale, she still ends up on yet another houseboat — and this time she isn’t so lucky.
Since she was first introduced as the masked-and-hooded mystery woman stalking Max (Javier Bardem), Crystal has been an unpredictable element in his otherwise calculated and manipulative plot for revenge against Anna (Amy Adams) and Tom Bowden (Patrick Wilson), the lawyers who got him convicted after they fell in love as opposing counsel. But as Anna learned in last week’s penultimate episode, Crystal is actually Max’s sister, and she was particularly cruel toward him in their youth before they seemingly shared a sexual relationship, which Anna believes resulted in a child. These grim discoveries came out of a brief buddy-cop partnership between Anna and Crystal.
“It was fun to play two people that kind of are enjoying each other’s company, or are they?” she says. “They’re both out to get something. They both know Crystal’s hiding something. It was fun having that dance with her, because I just admire Amy so much.”
But ultimately, Crystal can’t let Anna go because she’s been working with Max all along. Crystal can’t quite control her family dysfunction either, and when Anna reveals to Crystal’s son Luke (Max Mattern) that he might be Uncle Max’s spawn, it ignites a screaming match between them that gives cover to Anna to slip into the river and swim away — but not before Crystal stabs her through the hand. When Max arrives at Crystal’s houseboat, he proves that Crystal was nothing more than a tool that is no longer useful to him. She pleads with him that she may have been horrible to him as a kid, but so was he to her. “We’re even now, right?” she begs of him, before he puts a bullet in her stomach and one in Luke’s as well.
“In that scene with Javier, where our faces are so close, at one point the director wanted me to look in the camera,” Lewis says. “But I thought it was close enough. I like to keep some rules of cinema, and I like the way I am just looking at him. It was really special.”
Lewis has had the rare pleasure of locking horns with two Max Cadys, first De Niro and now Bardem. She says she felt the gravity of that moment on both occasions.
“They’re two greats of American cinema, and I very much felt that,” she says. “When I was working with Javier, oh my gosh, he’s fully consumed by the thing he is playing, and I just love it. It’s really something to witness, especially on the boat.”
Speaking of the houseboat, the finale treads some familiar ground for Lewis. In the film, De Niro puts Lewis’ character in the hold of the boat and she later sets him on fire. In the finale, after shooting Crystal and Luke, Max throws them both in the hold and sets the boat on fire, with their father (Ron Perlman) left to burn in a cage on the deck. Lewis recognizes the parallels, and commends Antosca’s clever nods. But she’s still wrapping her head around reliving the “Cape Fear” houseboat experience for a second time.
“I still do the push-ups and jumping jacks when I’m about to play a fearful scene, and that is because I saw Jessica and De Niro doing that,” she says. “You know, doing the series, it was a bit nostalgic to be on the houseboat again and playing a different person. But with all these high stakes, she fights. Ultimately, Crystal has to be a powerhouse of a villain for Max Cady. Nick knew that to bring me back, it can’t just be a little wink. It had to be something impactful.”
The loose grip Crystal has on her sanity is what first drew Lewis back to the “Cape Fear” IP, continuing a tradition started by Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, the stars of the 1962 original who appeared in small roles in the 1991 version. (The two movies and now the Apple series were birthed from John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel “The Executioners.”)
“I really wanted to play a fractured personality, and that’s the ingredients that Nick wrote for me,” she says. “This is somebody who’s been going in and out of institutions. That’s sort of the energy we’re bringing. This is someone who vacillates between different ways of being. You could call it personalities, you could call it energy, but she lives in extremes.”
Antosca gave Lewis a three-page backstory for Crystal, only some of which made it on screen. For that reason alone, she wants Crystal to survive the blaze on the houseboat, and it wouldn’t be a stretch. No charred bodies are given as proof by the end of the episode –– and the Bowdens ultimately spare Max’s life.
“And we were surrounded by water!” Lewis says, suggesting possible escape routes.
Regardless of whether it was indeed a watery grave for Crystal, Lewis holds onto one simple truth: “She’s going to haunt him till the end of time,” she says.