“He claims that he remembers, but I think he’s rewritten that. “I’d met Rupert as a child when there were thoughts of me coming on board to direct one of the Harry Potters,” Shyamalan recalls. The most surprising addition to the cast? Harry Potter’s Rupert Grint, all but burning his Gryffindor robes as Dorothy’s booze-fuelled banker brother Julian. The cast is small but impressive: Toby Kebbell ( Black Mirror) and Lauren Ambrose ( Six Feet Under) play the weird and wealthy couple Sean and Dorothy Turner, and Tiger Free – best known as Myrcella Baratheon in Game of Thrones – plays nanny Leanne. Before season one had even premiered on the streaming channel, Apple green-lit a second. Servant is only Shyamalan’s second proper venture into TV, the first as executive producer and pilot director of Wayward Pines, a small-town detective story in the style of Twin Peaks. When you take away that artifice, it really helped the actors, especially as this is only a one-location show.” “The toilets flushed, the kitchen worked, everything was real. “We could’ve faked everything, but we chose not to cut corners,” says Shyamalan of the fully-functioning set. The couple – a news presenter and an experimental chef – own a cavernous Philadelphia townhouse that serves as the setting for the show, and was custom-built especially for the occasion. It’s the fifth show to be launched on Apple TV+ (the tech giant’s new streaming platform), and is very much in Shyamalan’s wheelhouse: a multi-layered mystery about an elusive young nanny employed to help a grieving couple by tending to a creepy replica doll that has replaced their dead son. Now, as his psychological horror show Servant hits the Internet, he’s at last become comfortable with his currency as a filmmaker. Reluctant to accept his image as a master of supernatural cinema, it’s taken the creator of cult horror thrillers like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and The Village several decades to make peace with his career. Surprisingly, he wasn’t always so sure of himself. Later, he says my collar reminds him of Wednesday Addams. He makes sure there’s coffee and that we’re sat comfortably, enthusiastically micro-directing our set-up as best he can. Within moments of our meeting at London’s Soho Hotel, he’s noticed the small handwriting in my notebook, and wants the lighting to be brighter so that it can be read properly. Night Shyamalan – a director whose films are filled with hidden clues and secret messages – is almost frighteningly aware of detail. Reel Talk is NME’s new weekly interview feature with the biggest names in film and TV.
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