American Psycho‘s Patricia Bateman is a wild idea, but it doesn’t seem too likely.
The Sun is reporting that Barbie star Margot Robbie is in talks to star in Challenger and Queer director Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming remake of American Psycho. And if you’re having a hard time remembering any strong roles for women in either Bret Easton Ellis’ novel, available wrapped in plastic wherever good books are sold, or Mary Harron’s 2001 film adaptation, you’d be right. Which is why the intriguing part is that Robbie would be playing a gender-flipped version of American Psycho‘s protagonist, Wall Street serial killer (or is he…) Patrick Bateman.
Okey dokey.
A “film source” is quoted as saying, ““A remake of American Psycho is in the works and Margot is in the frame to play a female version of Patrick Bateman,” which is a bit weird because nobody ever opens a conversation with a topic sentence, but I digress. “Brett’s novel and the film were so controversial and the people working on the remake wanted to twist the narrative by having a female actress take on the lead of Bateman.
“There was a huge backlash about misogyny when the novel came out back in the Nineties and by having a female killer, it puts a different spin on the crimes. Margot’s career is on fire at the moment. Taking on a role this gritty will really show what a sensational actress she is. The finer details are still being ironed out but everyone that is involved in the process so far have said they are so excited to get it announced and start work.”
Right, so, first: intriguing! I’m personally not four square against gender-flipping American Psycho – it feels like the sort of puckish and provocative thing Ellis might have pulled back in the day when he was worth reading. Besides, they already sort of did it in the little-seen, little-loved American Psycho 2. And Guadagnino likes to mess with his audience, and he’s not afraid to put his own mark on a classic – see his remake of Suspiria for a prime example.
But, second: probably bullshit! Putting aside that the source sounds like a press release written by ChatGPT, nothing about it rings true. Certainly, you don’t “fix” the misogyny in American Psycho by having a woman dishing out the mutilations. It would, at minimum, require a top-down rethink of the whole story and, given that the last name being bandied around for the lead role was Austin Butler, I doubt screenwriter Scott Z. Burns has done that.
Third: while Robbie might be feeling the need to prove herself as a “serious” actor, she’s well and truly smart enough to know that this ain’t it. If this is even a thing, which I don’t think it is. The obvious next step for her is the kind of roles that get Academy Award votes and, while American Psycho might garner that kind of attention, it’s not a safe bet. I’d expect a biopic before too long, though – that’s the sort of thing that gets awards attention, not literary serial killer movies.
So, tl;dr: Margot Robbie is probably not playing the lead in Luca Guadagnino’s American Psycho.
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