Patricia Highsmith spent nearly five decades creating monsters and sociopaths that readers couldn’t help but fall in love with. Her most iconic character was perhaps Tom Ripley, the charming con artist and murderer of The Talented Mr. Ripley who first appeared in 1955 and returned across four more novels and later on our screens. Her influence runs through countless psychological thrillers that followed, along with a handful of film and TV adaptations including Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Todd Haynes’s Carol, and, most recently, the 2024 Netflix series Ripley starring Andrew Scott.
She was also a handful to be around. A chain-smoking misanthrope who would rather spend her time with animals than humans, Highsmith had a reputation for a nasty mean streak and a habit of spewing offensive opinions. Just like her characters, she was a larger-than-life entity, which is exactly why Dutch filmmaker Anton Corbijn decided to make his own thriller centered on her.
“In a way, it’s much easier to play someone who’s absolutely horrible than someone who’s absolutely nice,” says Mirren.
A Talent for Murder, which will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September ahead of an October 23 theatrical release, sees Highsmith (played by Helen Mirren) living in Switzerland, where she moved toward the end of her life. She and her hundreds of pet snails are visited by a young man named Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich) who has been sent by her American publisher to convince her to sign a contract to write one more Ripley novel.
Though the character is based on the author, the rest of this smart thriller’s story is fictionalized, a playful metatake that serves as both an ode to Highsmith’s brilliance and a twisty ride that’s sure to leave audiences surprised. “I want people in the end to be mesmerized by her and fascinated by her,” Mirren tells Vanity Fair. “If it leads to people wanting to know more about Patricia Highsmith, that would be fantastic.”
“He’s a very intelligent actor,” says Corbijn of Ehrenreich, who plays a young American literary agent hoping to get Highsmith to write one more book.
A Talent for Murder is based on Joanna Murray-Smith’s play Switzerland, which debuted at the Sydney Theatre Company in 2014 before moving to the UK in 2018. Murray-Smith adapted her own script, with its razor-sharp dialogue, into the screenplay.
Corbijn, whose past work includes 2010’s The American starring George Clooney and 2014’s A Most Wanted Man starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, hadn’t made a feature film in 10 years, and found Murray-Smith’s play a fascinating experiment in myth versus reality. “It just gets complex and you don’t know anymore what’s what, what to believe,” says Corbijn. He decided to change the title of the film from Switzerland because he worried it gave the wrong impression. “It felt a bit like it was going to be about nice flowers in the meadows,” he says. “It didn’t feel dark enough.”
In the script, Highsmith is not only incredibly intelligent, but she seems to enjoy challenging her visitor at every turn. She intentionally makes him uncomfortable, trying to find his own most vulnerable points. “She was always a character that mesmerized me because she was so uncompromising,” says Mirren. “She had the guts and the balls to sort of be who she was.”
Mirren studied photos and a few videos of Highsmith that she found online—“God bless YouTube,” she says—to get to know the character. She was especially struck by a video from when Highsmith appeared on the late-night TV show After Dark in 1988. She was with another guest whose daughter had been murdered. “She has this very disturbing interest in this man’s backstory of a member of his family being killed, and it’s very uncomfortable,” says Mirren. “She was very much betraying herself at that moment—or maybe playing the role of Patricia Highsmith.”
But Mirren also discovered a softer side to Highsmith through her research. “She would fall absolutely, obsessively, madly, insanely in love with women,” she says. “So there was a great vulnerability in her as well.”
Olivia Cooke plays a woman who meets Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich) on a train in Switzerland.
Mirren physically transforms for the role, donning Highsmith’s short bob and her staple wardrobe of loose sweaters, oversized jackets, and button-down shirts. While watching the videos, Mirren noticed Highsmith’s neck. “She had this sort of slightly hunched look about her, always,” says Mirren, who had pads added into the shoulders of her costume to create the same effect. “It was brilliant. It really, really worked.”
She filmed all of her scenes in two weeks, mostly at a house in England, which she describes as “gloomy and weird.” Corbin says Mirren exceeded his high expectations, especially in the way she and Ehrenreich would face off in these battles of wit and manipulation. As the story progresses, Highsmith says she will only consider the very eager literary agent’s proposal if he helps her come up with a perfect murder.
Where the story goes from there should be left for audiences to discover on their own, but thanks to Mirren’s captivating and playful performance as Highsmith, A Talent For Murder becomes an unexpected way to honor her legacy. “We always want great artists to be a great person, and great artists are very often not great people at all,” says Mirren. “And this time it doesn’t take anything away from their greatness. If anything, maybe it adds to their greatness.”
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