From playing a “super meek” weatherman in “DTF St. Louis” to his dark turn as a man battling substance abuse in “Black Rabbit,” no two roles Jason Bateman takes on are ever the same.
“It was really fortunate to be able to play two wildly different characters in the same year, and they both turned out really well,” Bateman tells Variety‘s executive TV editor Michael Schneider during the “FYSEE Unplugged: Jason Bateman Retrospective” conversation in partnership with Netflix. “That’s just not something you can really control all the time.”
In “Black Rabbit,” which is currently streaming on Netflix, Bateman and Jude Law play Brooklyn-born brothers who reunite and get in business together. However, the two soon spiral into destructive patterns as they contend with their estrangement. To date, the show has earned nominations at the Golden Globes, Producers Guild, Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild awards.
Bateman says what drew him to starring in the show, and directing the first two episodes, was how unafraid the writers were to craft unlikable characters: “That is kind of a no-no in network television … It’s kind of tough to find that there’s no one to really root for in this show because everyone starts so broken and so flawed and so ethically flexible.”
