‘We had to up the ante’: Robin Wright on her tense TV tale of incest and violence among London’s billionaires

The Girlfriend is a nail-biting drama that centres on a love triangle between a mother, her son and his girlfriend. Its director and co-stars take us behind the scenes

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too-pure young man, training to be a doctor, scion of the wealthiest imaginable family, meets a smoking hot young woman, but is she who she seems? His mother thinks not. The quickest way to describe The Girlfriend is to say that it’s sort of perfect. The perspectives shift between that of Cherry, the girlfriend (Olivia Cooke), and that of Laura, the mother (Robin Wright, who also directs). Whoever’s take you are watching, that’s who you believe. Baroque events, blood and guts, flagrant lies – it all unfurls in exquisite interiors and idealised London street scenes.

It is compulsive. I bit my nails to shreds. It’s not clear who’s the psychopath, but someone is – and the crisscrossing erotic tension gives it the inevitability of Greek tragedy. People this irresistible to one another never end up at peace.

“This is a triangular love story,” Wright begins, speaking to me from “the countryside”; she is still based in the UK since shooting The Girlfriend last year. “In a different world, Laura and Cherry would have been best friends, because they’re so alike. Their love for this one young man is from two different fields. A mother that’s possessive and overprotective – is she just being paranoid about this girlfriend, or is the girlfriend not to be trusted?”