Some actors are not made to play mere mortals. Their looks are otherworldly, their presence imbued with that rare mystique. In the parlance of the young, they are pure aura and total rizz. And they’re singularly well equipped to play gods.
“Jeff Goldblum as Zeus,” says Charlie Covell, the creator of Netflix’s new blockbuster comedy drama, Kaos. “Those four words encapsulate what the show is.” Covell, who’s speaking to me over Zoom, has charged Goldblum with quite the task: playing the King of the Gods in a series that reimagines Greek mythology for the present day. It is an inspired choice. A career that began with him being typecast as maverick scientists – chaos theorist Dr Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, and MIT-educated techie David Levinson in Independence Day – has evolved into something bigger. Brand Jeff: smooth, charismatic, unique.
Sitting across from me in a plush London hotel room, on one of the hottest days of the year, Goldblum leans in, his bug eyes popping. I am sweating conspicuously; he is wearing a leather jacket and looking as dry as the glass of chenin blanc he should be sipping by some Italian lake. So how would he describe Covell’s vision? “Uniquely sexy and romantic and emotional and moving and touching and complicated and charismatic,” he says, the adjectives rolling off his tongue with well-practised, all-American sincerity. “And, in the case of Zeus: cruel, surprising, unexpected. I liked all that.”
Where Goldblum looks like he might enjoy squatters’ rights in the honeymoon suite at the Ritz, his co-star, Janet McTeer, has more domestic surroundings. She is speaking from her house in Maine, which serves as a homely, timber-clad background for the actor, who was born on Tyneside. In Covell’s world, however, McTeer is no mere New England expat. She’s Hera: Zeus’s other half and Queen of Mount Olympus. “The idea of playing a god,” she says, “I just found very funny.”
Yet there is also something unearthly about McTeer. More than 6ft tall, she is statuesque where Goldblum is manic – and, crucially, can go toe-to-toe with her co-star. “I was the calm one,” she says with a chuckle. “He was always being incredibly interesting and incredibly all over the place. With him allowing himself to be like that, I could be even more man-patting.” She describes coaxing Goldblum out of his distractions – “I know you want to play the piano, Jeff, but it’s time to sit down” – an anecdote in which the co-stars’ dynamic seems to closely reflect that of their onscreen counterparts.
Humans mirroring gods; gods mirroring humans. This speaks to something crucial in Covell’s vision for this new interpretation of the Greek mythos. The gods may have supernatural powers – they might be able to use servants as skeet-shooting targets, or condemn upstarts to have their entrails pecked out – but they are not very nice folk. Great, but not good. If the family – from Zeus and Hera to rogue son Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan) and brooding uncle Hades (David Thewlis) – share one genetic trait, it is, paradoxically, frailty. “We have to think about a dysfunctional family,” says Covell. “That’s the kind of key with all of this.”
And while the patriarch (and matriarch) take centre stage, soon enough the whole extended brood get in on the action. Gods, prophets, nymphs and Amazons: everyone has a role to play. “It’s like being in charge of a very big company,” says McTeer, whose character has command of marriage, women and family. “But it doesn’t deny the fact that, at home, you still get really cross if your kid puts his feet on the freaking sofa with his dirty shoes.” That tension is where the human interest comes from. Just as viewers get hooked on Keeping Up with the Kardashians not for the lifestyle porn but for the moments when they bicker like real sisters, so too is Kaos a back-to-basics dynastic saga. Mother first, goddess second (not unlike Kris Jenner).
Covell’s vision for Kaos has developed over time. They were an accomplished actor – appearing in series such as Peep Show and Russell T Davies’ Cucumber – before focusing on writing for the past decade. The genesis of Kaos (the moment, in the minds of Ancient Greeks, when life, the universe and everything sprang from pure Chaos) was back in 2000, when they produced a short, comic play about Clytemnestra in the underworld. “And the underworld was this disorganised, dusty s***hole,” they add, succinctly. “And Clytemnestra was being processed by this faceless underworld worker.” From those roots, the project stayed on the back burner as Covell worked on hit black comedy The End of the F***ing World, which ran for two seasons on Channel 4.
Fans of that show – which was based on an acclaimed graphic novel by Charles Forsman – will recognise similarities in the world of Kaos. For all the dark themes (TEOTFW was about a psychopath; Kaos is about a whole family of them), both shows pair spunky, stylish dialogue with a poppy visual backdrop. Covell’s version of Mount Olympus looks like Mar-a-Lago, and Goldblum’s Zeus haunts the mountaintop in a series of tracksuits that might’ve proved too garish for Jimmy Savile. “We found that tracksuit in LA,” muses Goldblum, reflecting like a proud parent. “It’s an existing one, with a lightning bolt on it. Is it Gucci?”
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For Covell, the key influence was the photography of Slim Aarons. Aarons chronicled the lavish lifestyles of socialites and playboys in the second half of the 20th century, depicting their decadent lifestyles in austere tableaux. “Olympus has this sterile beauty,” Covell observes. “We were influenced a lot by those sterile pictures of wealth that his photographs conjure.” After all, what are the Olympians if not the ultimate cosmopolitan elites? Down on earth, the humans are roiling and rage-filled, cursing the gods for their terrestrial misery. “The gods want everything like they want it, they want everything to be beautiful,” says McTeer. “They have all these humans who die and work for them, and what’s wrong with that? I think of them as the one per cent.”
You feel it in your solar plexus when they go for each other in those big scenes
Charlie Covell
For Covell, it’s not quite so simple. “I’m not trying to make a didactic political point,” they demur. “There have always been ruling classes and people that abuse power. That’s as true now as it was at any point in history. I think that’s a timeless theme.” And Kaos has the sort of timelessness that would make Chronos weep. Its name evokes the negative space that existed before Gaia (the earth), Pontus (the sea), Tartarus (the underworld) and Eros (love) emerged. The stories – which include a spin on Orpheus and Eurydice, a tale that has inspired writers from Ovid to Baz Luhrmann, by way of Tennessee Williams and Nick Cave – spring forth both fresh and familiar.
“These myths still resonate,” judges Covell. The success of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson book series (which has been adapted for screens both big and small) is testament to that. And Kaos is, perhaps, a bold attempt to pull together a Greek Mythological Cinematic Universe, where everyone from Prometheus to Medusa gets their time in the sun. “There’s a link to how stories – especially these epic stories – were written,” says Goldblum, who joined the MCU in 2017, playing the Grandmaster in Thor: Ragnarok. “I think that has some link to the DNA of the imagination of people who made comic books and superhero movies.”
It feels, at times, like half the actors in Hollywood have had a crack at a superhero flick (McTeer is also part of the MCU, thanks to the TV show Jessica Jones). Many of these roles rely on a sleight of hand that can take a seemingly schlubby stooge and turn them into a sculpted adonis. Anyone, it seems, can play a superhero – but not everyone can play a god.
“I can’t imagine anyone else doing it now,” says Covell of the Zeus role (though Hugh Grant was originally attached). “There is a kind of otherworldliness about [Goldblum and McTeer], but they are also deeply human actors. You feel it in your solar plexus when they go for each other in those big scenes.”
And that, in short, is Kaos’s central trick: to bathe its human stars in a golden light that makes them gods, and then turn these divine beings back into bickering, flawed, fragile mortals.
‘Kaos’ is on Netflix from 29 August