How Nicole Kidman and Rosy McEwen brought Kay Scarpetta to life

This article contains some Season 1 spoilers for “Scarpetta.”

It’s taken many years for Kay Scarpetta to arrive on television, but with Prime Video’s new series, viewers get two iterations of the beloved literary character. In “Scarpetta,” premiering Wednesday, the forensic medical examiner is played by both Nicole Kidman and Rosy McEwen, who skillfully solve murder mysteries across two timelines.

“I’m just proud this got made,” Kidman says, speaking over Zoom alongside McEwen. “It has been a long time that it has not been made. There was a reason you couldn’t make it two decades ago — maybe people weren’t interested, or we were just told they were not interested. But as we’ve shown over the course of decades now, people are interested in women in these very complicated roles.”

There have been several attempts to adapt Patricia Cornwell’s popular series of murder mystery novels into a film and multiple actors have been attached to play Scarpetta, including Demi Moore and Angelina Jolie. But it wasn’t until Jamie Lee Curtis stepped in as a producer of this series in early 2021 that an adaptation finally came to fruition.

“I was interested in the fact that such an important literary character had never been brought to a screen,” Curtis says, speaking via a voice memo. “The amount of stories and books available lent itself to a template for a TV series. I went to my [producing] partner, Jason Blum, when I found out that the rights were available, which shocked me, and said to him that we should partner up and buy the rights to her books. It was as simple as that: I just felt like Kay Scarpetta needed to come to the screen.”

Nicole Kidman as Kay Scarpetta. (Connie Chornuk / Prime)

Rosy McEwen as younger Kay Scarpetta. (Connie Chornuk / Prime)

Curtis’ Comet Pictures and Blumhouse Television enlisted longtime TV writer Liz Sarnoff as the showrunner. Sarnoff had read all of Cornwell’s books with her mom and had what she calls a “meaningful” connection to the series. Because there were so many novels, the first of which published in 1990, Sarnoff wanted to find a way to encapsulate the 1990s timelines from the early books alongside the more contemporary ones.

“In the ’90s, there was no DNA, so everything had a slower pace and a more methodical way about it,” Sarnoff says. “Whereas now you get rapid DNA in a few minutes. I didn’t want to miss either of those two things. I started to think the best way to do this was to do two timelines, one where she is starting out in her first really big job and the other where she’s a bit older and she’s coming back to try to right the wrongs of the previous time.”

That will also allow Sarnoff to adapt two books per season — Season 2 is already in production. “I felt it was important that the show really move,” she says. “I wanted to be able to have big story leaps in each episode.”

Season 1 is based on Cornwell’s debut Scarpetta novel, “Postmortem,” and her 25th novel, 2021’s “Autopsy.” The conception meant that the show would need multiple actors playing Scarpetta, with one as the lead of the series. Kidman jumped at the opportunity after reading the pilot, coming onboard as the star and as an executive producer.

“My sister is a massive fan of all the books,” Kidman says. “She’s a big crime fan and she finds it very comforting. She said, ‘There’s absolutely no question you must do this role.’ And I listen to my sister.”

McEwen, who shares an agent with Kidman, joined as the younger iteration of Scarpetta. “Not only do they bear an uncanny resemblance, but Rosy has very similar qualities to Nicole,” Sarnoff says. “She’s very porous. When you look in her eyes, you see everything. It’s fun to watch them both think.”

“Not only do they bear an uncanny resemblance, but Rosy has very similar qualities to Nicole,” says Liz Sarnoff, the showrunner of “Scarpetta.” “She’s very porous. When you look in her eyes, you see everything.”

(Larsen&Talbert / For The Times)

The actors had the opportunity to do substantial research in the month leading up to production in Nashville in October 2024. Kidman and McEwen worked with real-life forensic pathologist Dr. Amy Hawes to learn about the autopsy process, as well as the motivations for becoming a medical examiner.

“For me, what was important was getting trained for what happens when you hit a crime scene,” Kidman says. “How do you do an autopsy? What are you looking for? Why do you choose to become a medical examiner?”

The research helped lend authenticity to their roles.

“We wanted to understand the emotional turmoil of looking at dead bodies all day and what that does to you and what you bury and then what ends up coming through the cracks,” McEwen says. “We were by the book. We didn’t want anyone to see any holes in the process [or] any medical examiners to watch the show and say, ‘Oh, they’d never do that.’”

When it came to the character, Kidman felt the freedom to make it her own. She spoke to Cornwell ahead of filming and says the author told her, “There’s nothing you can do that’s wrong. You are her.”

“That was the most incredible thing,” Kidman says. “For someone who has created a person to say, ‘I can only see you now when I write.’ It was a massive passing of the baton because she owned her. Patricia was Kay. For her to go, ‘I’m going to give her to you and she belongs to you’ was a gift.”

The first season’s plot is complexly wrought. In the past, Scarpetta and Det. Pete Marino (Jake Cannavale) are investigating a series of murders that seem to be perpetrated by a serial killer. As Scarpetta works tirelessly to elevate her career in a frustratingly male-dominated world, she also balances a complicated personal life that involves FBI agent and potential love interest Benton Wesley (Hunter Parrish), and her computer-savvy niece Lucy (Savannah Lumar).

In the present, Scarpetta and Benton, now married, return to their Virginia hometown, where the murder of a young woman seems to connect to her earlier case. Marino (Bobby Cannavale) has married Scarpetta’s sister Dorothy (Curtis), and the couple, along with Lucy (Ariana DeBose), are living on Scarpetta’s vast estate.

Cornwell read the scripts, but allowed Sarnoff to make the story her own. One major alteration is how the death of Scarpetta’s father impacts her future career. In the series, she witnesses his murder as a young girl — a far more violent moment than in the novels, where he dies of cancer. The narrative swap imbued the character with a more substantial motivation.

“She has the desire to be right and to right wrongs,” Kidman says. “And, ultimately, she makes mistakes that she wants to go and fix. She feels a very deep desire to seek control. It’s why she’s so quiet, determined and powerful. Kay is powerful, but she carries things in an interior way.”

“Sometimes you feel like to be powerful you want to puff up and be louder,” McEwen says. “But actually, as I was watching Nicole, I was like, ‘No, power is quiet. Power is stillness.’ I think she grows into that. I’m quick to react and be emotional, but actually having the strength to take a second to think how you’re going to respond and then respond — that’s how she’s learned to make her way through this world.”

To prepare to play Kay Scarpetta, Nicole Kidman, left, and Rosy McEwen worked a forensic pathologist, but Patricia Cornwell also let the actors develop the character.

(Larsen&Talbert / For The Times)

Both timelines were filmed simultaneously. The production took place in two-episode blocks and was primarily chronological, with directors David Gordon Green and Charlotte Brändström at the helm. The actors watched each others’ dailies and McEwen would sometimes sneak on set to watch Kidman in action. Having a few weeks of rehearsal ahead of filming helped McEwen and Kidman to establish the similarities in their performances, as did work with Kidman’s dialect coach.

“We’re operating in different spheres, realms of her life, so it’s more about: What are the things that you still have as you’ve gotten older mannerism-wise?” Kidman says. “What are your emotional tics or the things that soothe you or that just come with who you are that actually never change? What has changed was up to me.”

“I had little movements I could pick up on that I was able to take from Nicole, which was really helpful,” McEwen adds. “But about a month in, I had to slightly release and run with everything that we’d put together and trust that she was there. I couldn’t keep going back to the future because that’s not how you would exist. You have no idea what is going to happen to you in 30 years time.”

“There’s an enormous amount of work that goes into it to then go, ‘OK, now I’m free. It’s it,’” Kidman adds. “You have to be incredibly studious and disciplined, and then you have to be have the ability to be emotionally free and responding in the moment to what’s going on.”

Sarnoff withheld the final episode from the cast during most of production, in part because she hadn’t finalized the ending yet. By Episode 6, it became clear to Sarnoff how she wanted to conclude each timeline, including what the final shot would entail. The closing sequence, where Scarpetta is chased through her home by the murderer, was filmed on the final day of shooting. The reveal is completely unexpected. “You do need to watch very carefully for the clues,” Kidman says. “Nothing is not important.”

“It was important to me in Season 1 for Kay to come into the present day very ambitious, wanting to have it all,” Sarnoff explains. “And by the end of it, she’s just desolate. It’s a really bad scene. So I had to consider, ‘Who is the murderer and how is it a betrayal to her?’ Patricia’s books wrap up quickly. If you do that in a finale, it doesn’t work. People like a big, dramatic ending.”

The cliffhanger ending is jaw-droppingly intense, but there is also an emotional fallout for Scarpetta and her family. Dorothy and Marino have moved out, Scarpetta is separated from Benton and Lucy is on the outs with her aunt.

“What’s great about this is that, yes, you have all the crime, but you also have the family,” Kidman says. “By the end, we’re completely fractured and alone. So you have this emotional journey as a family that ends in wreckage.”

McEwen says what makes the show unique is its level of scientific detail and its humanity.

“It’s also so refreshing to see a woman whose life doesn’t revolve around a man and relationships,” she says. “Obviously that subsequently happens in her life, but she’s there to work. She’s driven and she’s focused. I like seeing that on my screen.”

The series is compelling not only because of its central female character, but because it was also made primarily by women.

“What’s unusual about this is that the books are written by a woman, the showrunner is a woman, it is produced by two women,” Curtis says. “It stars women. It focuses on a family of women, including a queer child. And many of the crew were women. Many of the post-production people were women. In that sense, I think we’re making advances.”

Prime Video initially greenlit “Scarpetta” with a two-season order and Season 2 will pair 1993’s “Cruel and Unusual” with 1994’s “The Body Farm.”

“Going into Season 1 was so daunting,” Sarnoff says. “You don’t know how anyone’s going to be or what’s going to happen or what the performances are going to be like. Now we have so much more knowledge. Everybody is excited to do it again.”