The Miniature Wife’s Matthew Macfadyen Thinks Les Is “Sweet" — At First
Should Les and Lindy Littlejohn stay together on The Miniature Wife? Or are they doomed?
**SPOILER WARNING! Minor spoilers below for The Miniature Wife on Peacock!**
Peacock’s new black comedy, The Miniature Wife (now streaming), follows the volatile, 20-year marriage of Lindy (Elizabeth Banks) and Les (Matthew Macfadyen) Littlejohn. She’s a Pulitzer-winning author who can’t conjure up a second book idea, while he’s a failed inventor obsessed with creating something revolutionary that will change the world and make him famous. They’re perennially in couple’s therapy until the shoe finally drops when Les "accidentally" shrinks her with his experimental agro-tech formula.
All hell breaks loose for the Littlejohns as their frustrations and anger with one another play out dramatically across the 10 episodes of the season. Adapted from the short story of the same name by Manuel Gonzales, the feuding Littlejohns will have audiences wondering how and why the two have remained married for so long.
Answering that question is partly what attracted series showrunners Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner (Goliath, Boardwalk Empire) to tell the story of a couple pushed to extremes.
Peacock Blog recently sat down with the showrunners and Macfadyen to get their thoughts on who is the villain of the piece. Read more, below:
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Matthew Macfadyen defends some of Les Littlejohn’s behavior in The Miniature Wife
The Miniature Wife tells the love-hate story of the Littlejohns' marriage in the present and through non-linear flashbacks that reveal how the couple started to fall apart across their two decades together. In the past, Les (Macfadyen) is supportive and loving. He defends Lindy when her awful mother tears her down, and he's her biggest cheerleader as she writes her first book.
"He's sweet, isn't he? He's nice,” Macfadyen told Peacock Blog as he defended past Les. "He hasn't been completely overrun with narcissism and madness."
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Les loses that sweetness when he moves their family to St. Louis, Missouri and starts a lab that becomes his obsession. The two become resentful of one another, eventually evolving into the worst versions of themselves, which they play out in the present.
Asked if he imagined a specific moment in the past where Les fell to the dark side, Macfadyen laughed and said, "No, the boring and truthful answer is that there's never one point you decide. You're playing moment by moment and it's all jumbled up. We had a wonderful script, and you just play those moments and hope that it all fits together."
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As the Littlejohns continue to emotionally hurt each other, viewers will wonder: Should we be rooting for them or not?
Gonzales' short story is even darker than the series, which Ames and Turner told Peacock Blog was their choice. They wanted the series to be less nihilistic and more hopeful.
"When we first read the short story, it is very dark,” Ames confirmed. "And look, there are elements of that we really liked. However, it is only from the husband's perspective."
Ames said they kept the shrinking of Lindy and several plot points, like the bird and cat attacks from the story. But from there, they went their own way with the majority of the series. "It was this great premise and scaffolding that gave us a really long runway to invent and create, to a certain extent, whatever we wanted. It was very exciting."
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In fact, Ames said she loved playing with the darker and lighter actions of the characters. "I do love that Lindy burns down the dollhouse,” she laughed. "And I do love that when she's at her lowest of lows and has hit rock bottom...she is sitting on the edge of the sink and she has turned on the garbage disposal. It’s so dark! But I also think we really wanted to make sure that it was kind of delightful and ridiculous and a little more optimistic."
Turner continued, “Also, we were so in love with those movies from the '80s and '90s — this reminded us immediately of The War of the Roses, Big, and Groundhog Day. Those ideas [where] it's a 'big buy,' [where] you buy in that Tom Hanks can be a big kid."
“[This] really gives you that heartwarming story in the back end,” Turner said about where their Littlejohns end up after all the turmoil of shrinking and unshrinking. "You don't really expect it to be that emotional, and that's the kind of story we wanted to tell."
The Miniature Wife is streaming now on Peacock.
