Before Nottapon Boonprakob made “The Evil Lawyer,” he had never spent much time thinking about the justice system. That changed the moment he started sitting in on courtroom proceedings – watching judges, lawyers and prosecutors move through rituals that, from the outside, look absolute and sacred, and from the inside, turn out to be something more unsettling: deeply, fallibly human.
“Once we started researching and speaking directly with people inside the system, it became much more human,” he tells Variety. “We began to see the individuals who are part of the system – their faces, their life experiences, their perspectives on the world.”
That dissonance – between the ideal of justice and the imperfect people charged with delivering it – sits at the heart of “The Evil Lawyer,” Nottapon’s second Netflix original following “Mad Unicorn” and the most ambitious Thai legal drama yet attempted on the platform. Produced by Songphon Jantharasom and co-directed by Jakkarin Thepvong, the series stars Rhatha Phongam as Jittri, a defense attorney notorious in legal circles for weaponizing technicalities and doing whatever it takes to secure an acquittal. Nat Kitcharit plays Mek, an idealistic young lawyer whose faith in the system is systematically dismantled after he is framed for the murder of the son of Anan (Songsit Roongnophakunsri), a powerful police chief. Backed into a corner and abandoned by the institutions he trusted, Mek turns to Jittri – the so-called evil lawyer of the title – who agrees to take his case on one condition: he must work for her.
