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This article contains spoilers for the finale of Prime Video’s “The Girlfriend.”

After reading the pilot for “The Girlfriend,” Robin Wright could see how the entire series would unfold. She was initially approached to direct the first episode, but she was so entranced by the adaptation of Michelle Frances’ 2017 novel she came on board not just as a director, but as an executive producer.

And when it came to casting Laura, a fierce matriarch committed to protecting her son, Daniel, from his new girlfriend, everyone she pictured in the role was unavailable.

“My dream was Tilda Swinton,” Wright says, speaking from the Ham Yard Hotel in London alongside her co-star Olivia Cooke, whose Prime Video series premiered Wednesday. “The time crunch was getting narrower, so Jonathan Cavendish of Imaginarium [Productions] finally said, ‘Would you consider playing Laura? You know her so well.’ What interested me was expanding on each character and developing this show beyond the book, which was already very full and rich.”

Cooke was Wright’s first choice to play Cherry, Daniel’s working-class girlfriend, who may or may not have suspicious motives and a violent past. The actors hopped on a Zoom call at the end of 2023 and were immediately on the same page about the thriller series. Both were intrigued by the idea that each episode depicted the characters’ individual takes on the events, forcing viewers to frequently change their allegiance about who is right. Is Cherry deviously trying to push Laura aside for better access to Daniel, or is Laura paranoid and overbearing?

“I was enticed by the dual perspectives and delving more into that reality because that is how we operate,” Wright says. “That is the human condition. You perceive [something] in a different way than I do. We’re all a hero of our own story and of our own perspective, but we could be the villain in someone else’s perspective. That’s what happens with Cherry and Laura. Jealousy turns into a power struggle.”

“It’s really fun to dial up the maliciousness and the duplicitous nature of a woman,” Cooke adds. “To play all these different sides and all these different faculties. And both our characters contain them all.”

“It was almost like having the variety pack of being a female,” Wright continues. “It’s easy for the viewer to go back and forth, where you’ll be in favor of this one and then not in favor. And it’s always rooted in true emotion. Wherever Laura or Cherry is coming from, that’s her truth. That’s her story.”

“You’ve always got to champion the characters you’re playing in order to play them honestly,” Cooke says. “I completely understood where Cherry was coming from. A lot of that is lack and fear and scarcity. Not having a parachute or a safety net, and having to constantly strive and move forward. She’s a survivor and she’s scrappy, and she will be the quickest and most ferocious to her own defense.”

The conflict between Laura and Cherry aggressively ratchets up over the course of six episodes. After a rock climbing accident that puts Daniel (Laurie Davidson) into a coma, Laura convinces Cherry that he’s died. Cherry later threatens Laura with a knife — or does she? Cooke says she loved “having the excuse to go f— feral.”

“What’s fun about Laura’s perspective is Cherry seems completely unhinged and that there’s a real malevolent undertone to her behavior,” Cooke says. “But in Cherry’s perspective, it’s all coming from a place of just scrambling. She’s tried to put her best foot forward when she meets Laura for the first time and she’s tried to cover up her past a little bit by saying the odd white lie. And a mum sniffs that out immediately.”

Cooke describes Cherry as an “underdog trying to claw herself up.” “I want the audience to really be of two minds about her,” she says. “And women usually have to be so buttoned up.

“It’s always, ‘You can’t say that or don’t emote that,’” Wright chimes in. “This gave us an opportunity to do what a lot of women would like to say or do, but they can’t. You always have to be a diplomat. This was about being a human being. Women are very layered individuals. We can do 16 things at once. That’s why we can carry children for nine months and then raise them. I wanted to show all of those colors of a woman.”

The role gave Cooke the chance to showcase her range and expressiveness.

“Even just for my own personal life, it felt really cathartic to be able to be angry and be able to scream and be a person who wears their emotions so closely to the surface,” Cooke adds. “Cherry is effervescent. It’s always there waiting to come out. She’s so reactive. And I’m hypervigilant for the warning signs before I react. This was like a rage room.”

In the tumultuous finale, Laura drugs Daniel to keep him away from Cherry. After Cherry breaks into Laura’s house, the duo find themselves in a physical altercation in the basement swimming pool. An addled Daniel discovers them fighting and jumps in to protect Cherry, accidentally holding his mother under the water for too long. The immediate interpretation is that Laura dies at the hand of her son, which is what the actors shot on set in London last year.

“There was an aerial shot of mom dead in his arms,” Wright says. “It was beautiful. He was holding her and he looks at Cherry and mom was dead in his arms in the way I had held him in Spain. But the [producers] cut it out because it showed that she had died.”

The decision to have Daniel accidentally kill (or not kill) Laura resulted from a “big discussion,” as Wright puts it. The obvious conclusion was to have Cherry purposefully murder Laura, but Wright pushed against that.

“I said, ‘It needs to be the son that kills his mother because he will never get out of her clutches when she’s alive,’” Wright says. “He’s going to be in the middle of this war zone for the rest of his life. When he comes down [to the pool], he’s in a stupor. He’s almost hallucinating. When he dives in the pool and he sees [Laura] trying to drown his girlfriend, he doesn’t know what’s happened prior to that moment, which is she’s tried to kill mom. He has no sense of time and space because he’s under the influence.”

Cooke says she didn’t play the scene as Cherry wanting Laura to die. “Maybe people will read it as that, but I didn’t,” Cooke says. “She knows it’s gone too far. That’s what I played in the moment, shouting at Daniel to snap out of it. But, you know, she did get the house.”

Shooting the pool altercation was a challenging day. Much of the series was filmed in a private house in London’s St. John’s Wood neighborhood, which had an actual swimming pool in the basement. Although the pool was supposedly heated, the actors didn’t experience any warmth.

“It was f— hard,” Wright recalls. “For me, it was like waterboarding. People think, ‘Oh, my God, so much fun to act in those scenes.’ No, it’s not. It’s really tough. We were all drowned rats and freezing cold.”

Still, Cooke says it was enjoyable to go to such intense limits emotionally.

“It’s fun being able to go to the very edge of your emotional capacity in a very safe, fun, embracing environment,” she says. “We wouldn’t have been able to do that in the pool, and be able to try and murder each other and then laugh, if it wasn’t built on trust and love. … These characters do very heightened, crazy stuff, but it’s still seeped in honesty and naturalism, which you need in order to go on this journey.”

At the end of the finale, Cherry and Daniel move into Laura’s mansion with the blessing of Daniel’s father, Howard (Waleed Zuaiter). Daniel discovers a voicemail from Laura recounting how Cherry’s mother, Tracey (Karen Henthorn), warned of her daughter’s malicious motives. But while Daniel is clearly in trouble, Wright says you’re not necessarily meant to interpret it as Laura being completely out of the picture.

“We wanted to leave it a little bit open,” she says. “You see the pregnant family living in the Sanderson house and mommy’s gone. Could Laura still be alive? Did she really die? Has she just been shunned to the priory?”

Wright says they wanted to leave it to the audience to decide what happened.

“But Daniel is awakened,” she adds. “If Laura is alive, he could go back to her and say, ‘I now believe you and now I’m with a crazy woman and afraid she’s going to kill me in my sleep.’ There are many iterations where it can go if there is a Season 2.”

As of this interview, no announcement has been made about another season. Cooke, who also stars as Alicent Hightower in “House of the Dragon,” says she would have to get permission from HBO to be part of a concurrent episodic series. Plus, as Wright notes, it’s all about the algorithm. “You always have to wait and see if it’s a semi-success,” Wright says. She adds, turning to Cooke, “If there is a Season 2, I think you should kill the cat in Episode 1, gut it and wear it as a hat.”

For Wright, that’s part of the appeal of being an executive producer — she could brainstorm all the unhinged things that could happen between the characters. She loved coming up with story ideas and character backgrounds, and helping to sculpt the ending, which differs from the novel, was pure joy.

“This was my first opportunity to develop something from the ground up,” Wright says. “I took a bunch of personal stories, things that I’ve heard, and threw them in there. Like Laura kissing her son on the lips — that came from a friend of mine. And Laura spraying Cherry with her perfume in a shop and saying, ‘Daniel loves this,’ came from someone on set. Things were constantly percolating.”

Wright directed the first three episodes, setting the visual and thematic tone for the series, while Andrea Harkin took on the latter three. The actor says there was a real freedom on set, which was helped by the rehearsals the cast was able to do before filming. She made it a point to always give the actors their own take for each scene.

“Generally, I’d use the take where they went for a free-for-all,” she says. “You get locked in a box as actors. We all do. You pick a choice and you stick with that choice. But when you throw that out the window, the s— that comes out of actors is amazing. That’s what’s so beautiful about being able to direct and being an actor myself. I love watching how it evolves and the light that comes out of them and the emotion that’s brought to the surface.”

“I’ve never acted opposite my director before,” Cooke adds. “The chain of command was so short. Robin was acting with me, but also watching to see what I do and changing her performance to my reaction, which was amazing. It makes it very alive and kinetic.”

Ultimately, it’s up to the viewer to decide whether Laura or Cherry is the villain of “The Girlfriend.” And, as Wright says, it’s simply a matter of how you see things.

“You as the viewer get to decide: Is there a truth, or is it just subjective?” she says. “Because it is subjective for each of our perspectives and we own it. It happened the way you personally know it happened. But the truth lies somewhere in between.”

Being a Palestinian under Israeli occupation will not help someone make a good film, according to Rashid Masharawi, but a good film-maker will help Palestine.

With his anthology film From Ground Zero (in Arabic: From Zero Distance) he attempts to do just that by bridging the space between the Palestinians in Gaza who have endured a campaign of annihilation behind closed doors to those around the world watching as a genocide unfolds in real time.

The result is a collection of 22 shorts by Palestinian film-makers, ranging from documentary to vignettes and animation, which turns our attention not only to the past – and to the unrelenting violence of the present, when the death toll in Gaza continues to climb – but also to the future and what cannot be taken.

“Cinema can protect memory and can keep Palestinians on the ground because films are like dreams, ideas. Nobody can occupy dreams. Nobody can occupy ideas. Nobody can occupy memory … Nobody can occupy your imagination,” said Masharawi in an interview in London ahead of the film’s release in UK cinemas on 12 September.

“We have to be optimistic. We have to tell the people: ‘Tomorrow it’s a better day. Keep dancing, keep creating, keep making films, because it means you have the future.’”

In a poignant start, we see in Selfie by Reema Mahmoud a woman compose a letter to an unknown friend that by the end is a message in a bottle cast into the sea. In Soft Skin, Khamis Masharawi captures young children learning stop animation to convey the horrors of parents inscribing their limbs with their names should a bomb hit.

But there are moments of dark humour too in Hell’s Heaven as the narrator wakes up in a body bag. Only one film, Taxi Wanissa, is left incomplete as director Etimad Washah appears with a testimony partway through: with the death of her brother and his children, she could not continue.

In the anthology – which was Palestine’s official entry to the 2025 Academy Awards – we see as people forge ahead despite being beset with new, unimaginable realities. And yet with the persistent buzzing of drones overhead, people continue to dance. In a sky that often rains bombardments and less often aid, children still fly kites. The weight of books left behind is measured against that of grief, and the sea is described to us as the only horizon. Drum sets are made from empty food tins, tea is shared, songs are still sung.

The films are noticeably devoid of the images of violence and maimed bodies that have poured out of Gaza for nearly two years – which made it “possible for people to watch and deal with” these films, added Masharawi.

Filming months after 7 October and into 2024, film-makers became both the storytellers and the story. Thoughts of cinema were difficult to prioritise when refuge, food, loss and trauma took precedence under bombardment. When electricity was cut in the enclave it was impossible to charge equipment, and at times days passed with no communication.

The process was difficult, admitted Masharawi, not just as a Palestinian born in the al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza, but as a human being. It means having to face all that Israel is doing, he said, and with members of his own family killed and homes destroyed, it’s very difficult, he added, to always share personal stories.

“I believe in the power of the cinema, the image, the culture, the documentation,” said Masharawi resolutely. “It’s very important because people get used to, with time, slowly, the images they are watching on televisions. It’s the same. They see explosions, they see ambulances, they see martyrs.

“This reminds them who they are, these people you are discussing. It’s very important,” he added.

If the film serves to remind us of the lives behind the more than 64,000 killed in Gaza, it also reminds us of the attempts made to silence Palestinian voices.

In July, Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen was killed by an extremist Jewish settler in the West Bank after working on the filming of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. The industry itself has seen a shift over time – “very late”, adds Masharawi – as a growing chorus of film professionals calls for boycotts and signs open letters condemning the worsening humanitarian crisis.

“Some things,” said Masharawi, “if it comes late, it’s better than if they did not come at all.”

But the tide of public opinion has held little sway over Masharawi, who since becoming the first Palestinian to show a feature at Cannes with Haifa in 1996, returned to Cannes in 2024 in protest. After organisers expressed their desire to keep politics out of the event, Masharawi staged tents like those in Gaza and screened From Ground Zero.

“It’s very important,” he tells me, “to make the films for life, for tomorrow – to make it with hope.”