‘Gaslit’ Showrunner on How the Series Explores “Complicity and Why People Do Horrible Things”

New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was transformed into the red — or, rather, yellow — carpet on Monday for the world premiere of Starz’s upcoming political thriller Gaslit, starring Julia Roberts and Sean Penn.

The series — which also features Dan Stevens and Betty Gilpin — is described as a modern take on Watergate that focuses on the untold stories and forgotten characters of the scandal and centers on Martha Mitchell (Roberts), an Arkansan socialite and wife to John Mitchell (Penn), Richard Nixon’s attorney general. Martha was the first to publicly sound the alarm on the former president’s involvement in the Watergate scandal, which caused his presidency and her personal life to unravel.

Related Stories

Movies

'Rebel Nun' Review: Sister Helen Prejean, the Activist Who Inspired 'Dead Man Walking,' Gets a Lackluster Doc Portrait

Movies

Chloë Sevigny Joins Julia Roberts in Luca Guadagnino Thriller 'After the Hunt' (Exclusive)

Showrunner Robbie Pickering said his interest in Nixon and Watergate began when he was a child, and he saw his mom crying while watching his funeral on TV.

“She said, ‘He was a good man. He was a great man. He was misunderstood. And the liberals did this to him,” Pickering told The Hollywood Reporter. “I was like, ‘I’ve got to know everything about this guy.’ And I started learning about the people around him and this weird culture around him of complicity and cultural bitterness, which we still have today.”

The creator said he took inspiration from the worst qualities of himself and the people he knows and wrote them into the fictionalized version of Gaslit‘s real-life characters.

“The show really explores complicity and why people do horrible things,” he said. “One of the reasons is ambition. So, John Dean (Stevens) is just me writing myself as a young person in Hollywood, writing terrible scripts to impress somebody. John Mitchell, who’s Sean Penn’s character, just feels valued by Nixon. He feels valued by somebody in power, and I think we all know what that’s like to feel — it’s just this weird, seductive feeling.”

Despite the many flaws of the series’ characters, Pickering said creating a show from their perspective gives him hope because it humanized the “pathetic idiots” a bit, adding that some people are prone to be complicit in things that go against who they are.

“It gives me hope because the flip side of that is no matter how flawed we think we are, we all have the capacity to speak up and speak the truth and be heroic,” he says. “Martha was a very flawed person, so really going into her story, it gives you hope for as long as we have villains… as long as we have Putins, we’ll have Zelenskys.”

Because Gaslit is based on actual events and real people, the cast was able to deep dive into researching their onscreen counterparts — who they were, why they did the things they did and how they got to that point in their lives.

“I read Mo Dean’s book, A Woman’s View of Watergate, and I watched hours of the Watergate hearings, where she’s supporting her husband,” said Betty Gilpin, who portrays Maureen “Mo” Dean, wife of Nixon’s White House Counsel John Dean. “There’s so much going on behind her eyes, she’s such an enigma.”

Stevens also used the Watergate hearings to prepare for his role, which piqued his interest because it was “such a key moment” in history and “such an interesting story.”

“There’s a lot of footage of John Dean, sitting, droning on during the hearings, and he’s wheeled out on CNN pretty regularly as their resident corruption expert,” Stevens said.

Gilpin and Stevens star alongside Roberts and Penn, who take on the lead roles in Gaslit. The A-listers wanted to work together for years before finally getting the chance to in the Starz series, Pickering said, adding, “There’s this very deep love between them.”

Gaslit, which is based on Slate’s podcast Slow Burn: Watergate, premieres on Starz on Sunday.