Anya Taylor-Joy is a con artist on the run from a lethal mobster in thrilling new crime drama Lucky
There is a particular kind of heroine that Reese Witherspoon is attracted to as a producer: A strong woman who is going to be hit with insurmountable obstacles, and, against all odds, she will overcome them. Lucky, the protagonist in Canadian author Marissa Stapley’s propulsive 2021 novel was the epitome of that woman. “Reese read the book, called me and said, ‘You have to drop everything and read this book. You’re going to love it,’” says Lauren Neustadter , president of television and film at Witherspoon’s production company Hello Sunshine. “I dropped everything. I read it. And I fell head over heels for Lucky.”
Lucky Armstrong is introduced to viewers as a woman in dire straits. She wakes up after a wild night in Vegas — her husband is gone, taking the obscene amount of money the two had just stolen with him. Now, more than one person wants her head. “It’s really a full-throttle kind of story,” says Neustadter. “Lucky’s sprinting through a casino. Lucky’s in car chases. There’s a lot of stuff you’ve never seen in Hello Sunshine shows that we are dipping our toe into here. But what made us know that Lucky was a perfect Hello Sunshine heroine is her unbelievable strength.”
For Witherspoon and Neustadter, there was only one woman they believed would perfectly portray the resourceful grifter. “It had to be Anya Taylor-Joy. I mean, she’s everything,” raves Neustadter. “You think about all her different performances — The Queen’s Gambit, Furiosa — they show that she can truly do anything. Physically, she had the strength to bring this character to life because there is a lot that Lucky’s going through and she is really, truly on the run from beginning to end. But also, emotionally, we needed an actress who could peel back all the layers of this character. This is someone who is heartbroken and hurt in a lot of different ways and she’s processing that over the course of seven episodes.”
To guide them through the character’s journey, Taylor-Joy (who also serves as executive producer) and Hello Sunshine looked to Jonathan Tropper, the creator of shows like Banshee, Warrior and Your Friends & Neighbors. Those shows, in their own way, embody the genres that make up Lucky. “Jonathan was a really trusted partner for us because he knows how to elegantly architect character, but also really do an amazing job of plotting out twists, turns and high-octane action,” says Neustadter. “He was an incredible collaborator, and I think he really loved Lucky.”
Tropper was, in fact, immediately drawn to the woman on the run from the source material. But what the screenwriter was most excited about exploring was never the book’s high-speed chases, but the relationship between Lucky and her incarcerated conman father, played by Justified’s Timothy Olyphant. “I love the complexity of Lucky’s growing awareness that this man she really loves, her only family her whole life, has done a number on her and is actually really bad for her — and it doesn’t make her love him any less. As a parent-child story, there’s something very universal about that, that we all grapple with in smaller or larger ways,” says Tropper. “I think the running is both a physical act and she’s also running away from her childhood, from her father, and from her upbringing.”
The series, like Stapley’s book, looks closely at themes of nature vs. nurture. “Lucky’s born into this life,” explains co-showrunner Cassie Pappas. “She’s been raised to see the world a certain way. How much of that is innately hardwired into your genes and how much of that can you outrun? Can you escape it? And in trying to escape it, are you going to become just like him? I was really drawn to the whole idea of how much is Lucky her father’s daughter.”
With a book that frequently turns to Lucky’s formative years, the challenge for Tropper and Pappas was incorporating that past into a thriller that needed to remain propulsive. “You could live in a flashback for an entire chapter in the book and what we needed to do in the show is quicker impressionistic flashes to her childhood,” says Pappas. Another challenge was translating Lucky’s inner monologue to the screen. As it happens, the actors on the show are experts in expressing complex feelings under the surface. “I don’t think it’s coincidence that in Anya’s first television show, she played basically a chess prodigy. When you look in her eyes, you can see the brain behind them,” says Tropper. The same extends to Lucky’s mother-in-law Priscilla Matheson, a dangerous mob leader, played by Annette Bening. “It’s hard to even feel like Priscilla’s a villain in this show, because Annette brings so much humanity to the character,” says Pappas. “You understand this woman, and how she got to this place in her life. And you can imagine her backstory of who she was and how she got here. She brings all of that into the subtext of everything she does.”
When it came to the adaptation of Stapley’s novel, Neustadter says the author gave the creative team permission to take Lucky and run with it. “She really trusted us,” says Neustadter. “When an author gives us that faith and says, ‘Go do something great with this,’ she knows we were going to take good care of her.” For fans of the book this means a few changes other than the structural. “We’re going to give you something a little different than you got in the book, so you’re not seeing exactly what was written on the page,” says Neustadter. “We’re going to twist it a little bit. We’re going to give you something delicious in its own way. And then, similarly, if people fall madly in love with the show, they can turn to the book and get a different experience. I feel like you know that an adaptation has gone well is when you can say, ‘If you love one, you’re really going to love the other.’ I think this is exactly that.”
Lucky, streaming Wednesdays on Apple TV