Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series The Watcher, starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale as two stressed-out and creeped-out parents and based on the New York story by Reeves Wiedeman, premiered its first episode on October 12 at the Paris Theater in Manhattan. The show is a twisty, spooky, and at times silly thriller about happenings at the infamous New Jersey residence of 657 Boulevard. Episode one shows an iconic Margo Martindale harvesting arugula for the “most delicious fucking salad” of her entire life, Terry Kinney obsessing about a dumbwaiter, and Jennifer Coolidge telling a snobby country-club member named Stephanie to “eat a dick.” Yet the show is at its most spine-chilling when the family starts to receive letters from someone named “the Watcher” who is, um, watching them — and who alludes to unknown mysteries that lie within the walls. There are creepy neighbors, a potential stalker and/or ghost, and a police force that does nothing to help. And for some of the cast, a freaky next-door neighbor isn’t anything new.
“When I was growing up,” actor Richard Kind told Vulture, “there was a kid, Vinny; he used to take mice and rats and tie them to little army soldiers and throw them into our yard. It was the scariest stuff in the world. I don’t know what he’s doing today. After I left for college, I never went back; I didn’t see Vinny.” It’s giving twisted Toy Story. For Terry Kinney, he says he grew up in a town that had more than one horrific thing happen: “I went to a Catholic grade school with a guy, and I was reading the newspaper one day and I saw, ‘Awful Murders in Lincoln, Illinois,’ and it was the kid I went to grade school with. He was always eccentric; he was a guy that memorized part of the Encyclopedia Britannica. There were a lot of occurrences like this in this sleepy little town.” Kinney went on to even describe one instance he used for his own role in The Watcher, saying, “I kind of pulled from this guy who used to walk by our house for my character because he was a very benign person. But if you responded the wrong way, and he thought you were mocking him, he could become very dangerous suddenly. So we tried not to do that.”
Regarding scary neighbors, Naomi Watts told Vulture that she’s “been lucky, I suppose.” She continued, saying, “It would be very haunting, and I think that’s what’s so compelling about this story, is that you imagine yourself to be not wanted in a community and to be suspecting everyone around you is playing a part in wanting you to get the hell out. I think that would be very disturbing.” Though, the most mysterious answer to our question came from Margo Martindale. “Maybe when I was in school at the University of Michigan; there was somebody on my dorm floor,” she said. When asked to elaborate, Martindale said strictly, “No, because that would probably bring bad feelings to that girl.” Also at the premiere was Sandra Bernhard, who stars in the upcoming season of Murphy’s AHS: NYC. She doesn’t so much have a “scary” neighbor as an “annoying one”: an L.A. hoarder.
