‘The Watcher’ star Naomi Watts calls final scene “indictment of the American Dream”

The Watcher

The Watcher star Naomi Watts has opened up about the show’s ambiguous finale.

The actor, who plays Nora in Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series, shared her thoughts on the unravelling of her character alongside her partner Dean, played by Bobby Cannavale.

Discussing the final moments, which see Dean spying on a new family in his and Nora’s New Jersey mansion after being stalked, Watts called it a “really dark” examination of the couple.

The scene sees Dean then call Nora to lie and say he went to a job interview, not knowing that she was also watching the house in a car right behind him.

“They feel like the house is going to solve their problems, and it ends up being the catalyst that causes a whole lot of new problems that they didn’t anticipate,” Watts told Entertainment Weekly. “Now, they’re just trying to figure out who the other [really] is.”

Speculating on Dean’s motivations and his obsession with the Watcher, Watts added: “The cycle continues, and we’ve gone too far believing in this American Dream with such entitlement and the fear of no longer being relevant anymore if that dream isn’t realised. It’s a vicious cycle.”

The actor also explained that Murphy and the writers left plenty up in the air without divulging all the answers to the cast.

“We were all constantly speculating and finger-pointing to each other, trying to see what stories lined up,” she explained. “That’s fun, and it helps to our advantage as actors to keep up the mystery as we played it. Not knowing is the beauty of it, and it adds to the tension of how you play it,” she says. “It wasn’t spelled out to us, either, so our guessing was just as fun as yours!”

Following the show’s debut, many viewers criticised the ending, one person calling it “horrendous”.

The Watcher has been created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, who most recently collaborated on Netflix’s Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.

The post ‘The Watcher’ star Naomi Watts calls final scene “indictment of the American Dream” appeared first on NME.

Ella Kemp

NME