Marnie Dickens – aka the talented scriptwriter behind Thirteen and Gold Digger – is bringing the much-anticipated Wilderness to our screens this week. And, yes, you better believe we’re excited about it.

Based on BE Jones’s novel of the same name, and starring the inimitable Jenna Coleman, the Prime Video series homes in on a British couple that seems to have it all… from the outside, at least. Liv and Will are young, attractive and seemingly very much in love, after all.

Throw in the fact that they’ve just upped sticks to start a glamorous new life in New York, thousands of miles from their provincial hometown, and it’s little wonder they’re the envy of everyone.

When Liv learns that Will has been having an affair right under her very nose, she’s absolutely shattered. 

Still, she pulls herself together just long enough to realise that revenge is her only option. And so, when her husband proposes a trip around America’s epic national parks to give their relationship a fresh start, Liv decides to set her plan in motion…

Watch the trailer for Wilderness below:

“I love that we were able to take this couple out of the domestic sphere almost instantly,” says Marnie of the starry revenge thriller. 

“The stakes are higher, the story is more intense, and it’s all a bit more explosive. The Grand Canyon is beautiful, but it’s extremely dangerous – and that that line is very fine.”

Marnie adds that her version of Wilderness does take quite a big detour from the book it’s inspired by.

“If you’re slavish to things, you can get a bit lost in the woods,” she says, noting that BE Jones was incredibly supportive of the departure. And, while the screenwriter doesn’t do spoilers, she does let slip that she felt compelled to delve ever deeper into Liv’s backstory for the six-hour series.

“Liv seems to be this everywoman,” muses Marnie. “She has spent her whole life trying to be more than the sum of her parts, kind of shaking off the generational trauma that her mum represents, and shaped by the forces of patriarchy. 

“She’s the biddable wife, the dutiful housewife… and then it kind of all goes for nothing, and she has to rebuild her place in the world.”

It’s not long, Marnie continues, before Liv has “weaponised the very system that’s kept her in place – and she has to do this to survive, which I find quite exciting”.

Us too, quite frankly. Here’s what happened when we sat down to chat with Marnie about her upcoming series, the stereotypes that women are forced to adhere to in TV and film, and everything in between.

Wilderness begins as a wife v mistress v cheating husband story, but it quickly becomes apparent that it’s not quite so clear-cut as all that.

I think we obviously lean into that at first, because I think it is true to life that when this happens: you become obsessed with the Other Woman, and want to know why she’s better than you. Not to show that side of things would have felt a bit unrealistic. But what  I really worked hard to do – and what Jenna Coleman and Ashley Benson’s incredible performances convey – is that once you get beneath that initial barrier, you’re just two women who’ve fallen for the same guy. And, as it turns out, he’s mistreated you both. 

In episode two, Liv utters a brilliant line to Cara…

“Nobody expects men to be nice; nobody expects women to be angry.” And you know, we are.

We are! And I love that TV is starting to dismantle this idea of the perfect woman. Once, we had to be likeable or messy, and now – as Wilderness proves – we can be both.

Historically, there are a couple of shows, like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and ER, that presented the sort of complicated female characters that I used to gravitate to as a viewer, but it was only ever a handful. Nowadays, you have Suzie Pickles [I Hate Suzie] and other amazing stories that do so much better than just, ‘I’m messy and I’m so difficult.’ Obviously, Liv does some absolutely dastardly things. However, it’s never – and I hope this does come across, as it’s what we really worked hard to do – consequence or conscience-free. She always feels the weight of what she’s done. But it feels weird to me that we’re only just doing stories like these, because women are the same as men: we’re all messy, and we all make mistakes, and we all try to do better or we don’t. It’s weird that we’ve kind of been stuck in these binary positions for so long.

Women in revenge stories have traditionally been treated as instruments within a narrative. Wilderness allows Liv the chance to be the story – how did you go about making that happen? 

We wanted Liv to drive the story, rather than have a series of events happen to her… keeping her sense of agency throughout was really, really important. And, as you say, normally, when a man cheats on you on screen, you become the woman in Fatal Attraction. The show that did it so well recently, in a really different way to Wilderness, was Netflix’s Beef: it offered a really interesting, quite messy exploration of what it does to you on a psychological level if you single-mindedly pursue revenge. 

What do you think we, as viewers, get from these dark and twisted revenge narratives?

I think there must be something cathartic about it. Take Promising Young Woman, for example: you’re just rooting for her, even though she does quite borderline things that you wouldn’t necessarily allow yourself to do. Still, you’re on her side, and it’s the same with Wilderness. We’ve watched episodes with test audiences who are like, ‘Just kill him!’

I think that is testament to Jenna’s amazing performance, and the fact that the show is shot so that you’re right on her shoulder, experiencing these horrible betrayals yourself. But I also think it’s because, as women, we are taught to be so good and quiet – and it’s so lovely to watch someone not having to be any of those things.

I suppose it plays into that ‘Good for her!’ trope, which sees us root for women doing terrible things as part of a satisfying revenge arc.

I find it absolutely fascinating when you can watch women being cruel or manipulative and still not see them as a villain. I guess I have always gravitated towards anti-heroines. But it’s weird when I see Liv described as one, because I think, ‘Oh, I just love her and want her to prosper!’

I felt the same, and I suppose a lot of that is down to Jenna Coleman’s performance. How did you feel when you secured her for the role of Liv?

Jen is amazing. I’ve watched her in lots of things, but I think it was The Cry where I was like, ‘Wow, she’s definitely one of the country’s best actresses.’  But she’s not just naturally fantastic; she’s extremely well prepared, too. Every single scene, she’s broken it down, she’s got her notebook, and she takes it exceptionally seriously. So when she said yes, she read all of the six scripts, and we got on a call with her – she was just asking the right questions. She’s extremely respectful [and] so collaborative. And then you get this extra bonus that she has amazing chemistry with Oliver [Jackson-Cohen, who plays Will], which is just so lucky. There’s a natural humour and warmth to them, I think.

I really think that comes through, which is great because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of ‘it’s a horrible marriage and they have no reason to stay together’.

We had this discussion the whole way through the series: ‘How, when and where does Liv fall out of love with Will?’ And I think it’s not as simple as that because she loved him five minutes before she found out about the betrayal. Her heartbreak doesn’t change that. So I think she’s in a constant tussle with herself: can she let this go?

Let’s talk a bit about getting Taylor Swift’s Look What You Made Me Do as your title credits song. What a coup!

It is a coup. I must have heard the song, I don’t know, 300 times, and I still really enjoy it, and it still gives me goosebumps every time I hear it.

When I’m scripting my shows, I always put in the songs that I want, and this one is all about Liv’s playlist. Every song you hear is the one that she herself would be listening to at that time: every song is included for a reason, because I think music is a really interesting way of showing the audience what someone’s experiencing beneath the mask they’re putting out to the world. So I put the song in there, and I wrote Taylor, essentially, a love letter, explaining why the song, why her, what the themes of the show were, and then, in a sort of dream-come-true moment, she said yes.

Taylor’s isn’t the only banger; it’s an all-female soundtrack, which is very deliberate from me and the creative team. And, without giving a spoiler, there’s a fantastic Britney Spears track in episode three at a moment that you might not expect it…

How do you feel about people are already comparing Wilderness to Gone Girl?

I think it’s quite a quick and easy comparison to make, and I guess there haven’t really been many modern revenge tales. Personally, I would say Promising Young Woman is closer to us in tone; Emerald Fennell did such a fantastic job of straddling this line of really bleak truth about societal issues – without losing a sense of twisted bubblegummy fun. 

Do you think Wilderness is best watched episodically or binged in one greedy gulp?

I come from a soap background, and I love cliffhangers. I don’t see why there’s like a kind of guilty pleasure to them; it’s just, good storytelling. You want to feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, what happened? Did that just happen?’ And then you find out. 

Obviously, the quicker you find out, then the shorter there is to speculate on what could have happened. So, I used to love watching Line Of Duty each week because of the collective experience. If you binge something, you can’t talk without asking, ‘What episode are you on? I’m on this one. Don’t talk about it!’

At the same time, if something’s addictive, then people want to just consume it in one go. And I do feel because Wilderness is very twisty-turny, people will want to see what Liv is going to do next.

When you’ve got a really good TV series like this one, it almost changes your perception of time. A two-hour movie might be too long at 10pm, but I would watch all six episodes of a series, which doesn’t make any sense.

No, I do know what you mean. But then I’m not very good just having one biscuit; if I have a Hobnob, that’s it, game over. And then obviously feel extremely unwell after eating a whole pack. And I sort of feel the same after I’ve properly inhaled a TV show. In the moment, I love it, and then I worry I’ve burned through it too fast and haven’t had enough time to consider the nuances. Maybe people should binge it, then rewatch it episodically to find out more?

Finally, if anyone’s on the fence about watching this one, what would you say to them? 

Firstly, I’m sorry to hear that they’re on the fence. But, while you might think you know what you’re gonna get with a ‘woman scorned’ series, and you might think if you’re a man then it’s not for you, but this one deals with some big universal themes: heartbreak and love and revenge and trying to find your place in the world. And there’s also a chance to enjoy a delicious playing out of your most twisted revenge fantasies – the things you can’t obviously do in the real world, but watching someone else? Vicarious fun!

Wilderness is available to watch on Prime Video from 15 September.

Images: Prime Video