Sumith Prasad
Amazon Prime Video’s psychological thriller series ‘Dead Ringers’ revolves around the twin gynecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle, who dream of opening a high-end birthing center to revolutionize the approach to childbirth and the human reproduction process. As two closely bonded sisters, Elliot and Beverly try their best to fulfill their aspirations, only for their lives to change drastically when the latter gets into a relationship with an actress named Genevieve. Since the series is a retelling of the eponymous 1988 film by body-horror auteur David Cronenberg, the viewers must be wondering whether Jeremy Irons, the lead performer of the film, is in the show. Let’s find out! SPOILERS AHEAD
Jeremy Irons is Not in Amazon Prime Video’s Dead Ringers
No, Jerome Irons is not in Amazon Prime Video’s ‘Dead Ringers,’ a retelling of David Cronenberg’s film in which the actor plays the protagonists Beverly and Elliot Mantle. Irons’ involvement in the 2023 project to play the protagonists became an impossibility when the head writer of the series Alice Birch and her creative team flipped the gender of the protagonists Elliot and Beverly Mantle from male to female. Even if the gender flip didn’t happen to conceive the series, it is unlikely that the actor in his 70s would be able to play the Mantle twins, who are seemingly in their late 30s.
To clarify, Birch’s show is not a sequel to Cronenberg’s film but a retelling of the latter. Since Irons’ Mantle brothers die in the film, there wasn’t any scope for Birch to conceive a sequel to the body-horror classic. While the film focuses on the twins’ sexual exploitations, the series concentrates on childbirth through Beverly’s wish to be a mother and Elliot’s efforts to nurture embryos without a human body, which further justifies the gender flip that made Rachel Weisz the lead performer of the show. Although Irons is not in the television series, his portrayal of the Mantle siblings heavily influenced the characterization of the Mantle sisters and Weisz’s performance.
According to Birch, Irons’ interpretation of the Mantles is the foundation of the Mantle sisters in the series. “What we wanted to retain from the film was the brilliance of these characters; we wanted these women to be absolutely at the top of their game, to be unapologetic, and to be having a really, really good time,” Birch told GamesRadar+. “That’s what Jeremy Irons’ character seems to be doing in the film until, well, you know, it all goes wrong,” the head writer of the series added. Having said that, Weisz’s portrayal isn’t an imitation of Irons’ portrayal of the Mantle twins in the film.
Since the show’s protagonists are two women, the nuances of the character are drastically different from the nuances of Irons’ characters in the film. Weisz’s incredible performances as Elliot and Beverly do justice to the change. “We knew them [the Mantle twins] being women would change everything. It means that when they’re coming into a room and there’s a patient there, there’s a different kind of shared understanding. There’s not that othering that happens in the Cronenberg film. But we never really consciously talked about how it would change things,” Birch added to GamesRadar+.
Although Jeremy Irons is not in the series, Birch is positive that there is enough in her and her team’s creation for the ardent admirers of Cronenberg’s film to love and celebrate. “I think once we’d started building our characters, our Mantle twins, it was just about following them and they took us on quite a different journey. Then you’re going through and making sure that there are little Easter eggs, little nods, and little reference callbacks to the film. That was a lot of fun, but I wasn’t trying to banish it all. It was there, just behind us,” Birch told ComicBook.
Read More: Dead Ringers Ending, Explained
