Primetime gives Merritt Wever one of the most fascinating roles of her career. Andie Bender is smart, capable and increasingly disturbed by the television show she is helping create, but she is also ambitious enough to keep going long after the warning signs become impossible to ignore. Wever is phenomenal in the role, particularly in the way she makes Andie’s discomfort feel completely sincere without ever allowing it to become an excuse for what she does.
As the producer working alongside Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen at the height of To Catch a Predator, Andie is often the first person to recognize when the show has gone too far. She questions decisions that others are happy to make and, for a while, feels like the character most likely to eventually put a stop to it.
Wever is phenomenal at sustaining that uncertainty. There are moments when Andie seems genuinely disturbed by what the show is becoming, enough that you begin to believe she might finally walk away. But each time, she finds a reason to stay.
That tension was built into the character from the beginning.
“Lance and I talked about the parable of the two wolves a lot,” says Wever. “Inside everyone are two wolves, one light, one dark. Which one wins? The one you feed.”
“If, as an audience member, you see that she has the chance to maybe go towards the light or go towards the good and then decides not to, I’m glad that you get the kind of inner experience of thinking, ‘Oh, maybe out of everyone this person, maybe this is the person who will. Oh, no. No, she doesn’t.’”
It also gave Wever the chance to play against the kinds of characters she is usually offered.
“I liked getting to play someone who doubles down in the opposite direction because I tend to play people who live in a different lane,” she says.
Written by Ajon Singh and directed by Lance Oppenheim, Primetime returns to the mid-2000s phenomenon of To Catch a Predator, the Dateline NBC investigations in which men were lured to houses by people posing online as minors before being confronted on camera by Hansen.
The film is less interested in debating whether the men being confronted deserve sympathy than in looking at what happens around them: the ratings, the performance of justice, the people producing it and the compromises that become easier to make once the show becomes successful.
Unlike Hansen, Andie is not based on a real person. Nor is she a composite of producers who worked on To Catch a Predator. She was created for the film, which gave Wever room to build somebody who belonged convincingly to that world without having to reproduce somebody else’s life.
What immediately attracted her was how specific Andie already felt on the page.
“I liked the smell of her,” Wever says. “I don’t know where he got her from. I don’t know what kind of initially inspired him to capture that flavor, but she was already there on the page when I got to her.”
Not having a real person behind the character also helped with something Wever has encountered when playing people who actually existed. Research can be invaluable, but it can also pull an actor away from the version of a person that exists within a particular film.
“When I’m playing a real person, there’s so much research that I can start playing the real version, and at the end of the day you’re playing the version that’s in the movie,” she explains. “I can sometimes actually get distracted by what’s out there and it makes it hard to come home to the version of the character I’m supposed to be playing for the project.”
With Andie, she could research as much as she wanted without having that problem.
“I got to do my research, but it never made me look back at the page and say, ‘Wait, but this isn’t really what she was like.’”
Some of the most fascinating moments in Wever’s performance come when Andie is presented with the possibility of leaving.
In one particularly great scene, she meets with the producer of a competing show who wants to recruit her. It would give Andie a way out of the increasingly troubling operation she has helped build, but Wever never plays the meeting as an obvious escape. Andie listens. She considers it. She seems unconvinced by parts of the pitch and, crucially, never makes it entirely clear whether she wants another job or simply wants to know that another job is available.
Asked whether Andie actually wants to remain with To Catch a Predator, Wever deliberately avoids settling the question.
“I almost don’t want to answer that,” she says.
“There’s an opaqueness to her. There’s a bit of a veiled, hidden quality. That’s the way that I think Lance chose to go in the edit. And I kind of almost want to respect that so that people can project onto her not just what they hope she’ll do, but why she does what she does.”
Earlier versions of the film apparently offered more answers.
“There were definitely versions of the script and versions of what we shot where Lance and I were quite explicit about why she does certain things and why she is the way she is,” Wever says. “What I hope is that maybe not having that in it just gives the audience the opportunity to wonder or want more. So I don’t want to fill in the blanks for them.”
Andie never feels confused about what is happening around her. That would make her choices considerably easier to forgive. Instead, Wever plays her as somebody intelligent enough to see the moral compromises being made and complicated enough to continue making them anyway. Ambition is clearly part of it, but reducing her entirely to ambition would make her much less interesting.
There are scenes where Andie’s concern for the people around her seems completely genuine. There are others where that same empathy can begin to look like another skill she has learned as a producer, one that allows her to manage difficult personalities and keep everybody moving in the same direction. Neither interpretation ever entirely cancels out the other.
That becomes even more complicated in her relationship with Hansen.
Andie spends much of Primetime managing him, but managing him and enabling him are often dangerously close to being the same thing. She understands how to deal with his ego and when to push against him, while also helping maintain the system that allows his worst instincts to keep escalating.
Wever and Pattinson did surprisingly little work together beforehand to define that relationship.
“I feel like we both did our own prep and our own work and had our own process before filming,” she says. “By the time we got to set, we just did it.”
There had already been extensive conversations with Oppenheim and Singh individually, so bringing those separate interpretations together once the cameras started rolling felt more useful than trying to coordinate them in advance.
“I liked that we were both able to just show up and do our different versions,” Wever says.
She describes Andie and Hansen as two people who can occupy completely different places even when they are standing in the same room.
“Maybe it makes sense that they are characters on opposite ends of the seesaw and they have to keep adjusting to each other,” she says. “When one is up here, one has to be down here. And when one is up here, the other has to be down there. It’s a constant kind of dance.”
Pattinson makes Hansen larger, stranger and increasingly consumed by the role he has created for himself, while Wever works in smaller shifts. A look held for slightly too long can tell us that Andie knows something is wrong even when she continues helping Hansen do it.
The film around her becomes progressively uglier as the distinction between journalism and entertainment starts to collapse.
To Catch a Predator was built around a strange combination of reality and performance. The men arriving at the houses were real, but almost everything surrounding the confrontation had been constructed for television: hidden cameras, people posing as children, carefully prepared locations and Hansen waiting somewhere off-camera to make his entrance.
Andie understands that theatricality because creating it is part of her job. She knows how to turn what is happening into television, which makes her particularly important as Primetime begins questioning what happens once real suffering becomes content.
Nightcrawler came up during the conversation, although Wever says it was not one of the films discussed with Oppenheim during production. Their reference points went further back, particularly Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole and Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd.
“I feel like this story, this film exists within a lineage of certain kinds of stories that get told every so often,” Wever says. “The shape of them or the container or the exact details of the plot may change, but the moral is always the same.”
Ace in the Hole was released in 1951, yet the same concerns about media, spectacle and exploitation still feel just as relevant today.
“The need for the story to be told is always present.”
The formats may have changed, but the same appetite for turning suffering into entertainment remains.
Wever is also wary of pretending that a film pointing any of this out automatically does something to fix it.
“As much as films often reflect truth, the idea that they enact change, it’s a lot harder to use them for that,” she says.
It gets at what makes Andie so uncomfortable to watch. She frequently understands that something is wrong, but awareness alone never seems to be enough to make her leave.
Wever leaves enough unanswered that even after the film ends, it remains difficult to decide exactly where sympathy for Andie should stop.
The response to Wever herself has been much less complicated.
Asked how online she is, and whether she had seen the outpouring of people once again declaring Merritt Wever the best part of whatever she happens to be in, her answer is immediate.
“No.”
Her instinct is instead to talk about Skyler Gisondo.
“My honest answer was like, pivot, steer the car towards, ‘Isn’t Skyler amazing?’” Wever says. “My first instinct is to pivot and start talking about how wonderful he is and how I’m so glad that he’s in the film.”
Eventually, she allows herself to accept some of it.
“Anytime that people appreciate your work as an actor, especially when you’ve been doing it long enough, to feel seen is a gift.”
Primetime is now available on digital.
