Behind the Scenes with Elin Hilderbrand

July 31, 2024

Netflix's upcoming series The Perfect Couple

Interview by Bruce A. Percelay


Nantucket has had its brushes with Hollywood fame over the years, but nothing could be truly termed a blockbuster hit. Elin Hilderbrand and Netflix’s adaptation of her bestselling book The Perfect Couple could change all of that. With a star-studded cast, including Nicole Kidman, Dakota Fanning, Liev Schreiber, and Eve Hewson, the upcoming series has all the potential to become a major television hit that would not only catapult Hilderbrand to a new level but also expose Nantucket to a national audience.


Eve Hewson, a rising star and the daughter of famed rock musician Bono, plays the bride in The Perfect Couple. She shared her thoughts about the film and Nantucket with N Magazine. Hilderbrand, who has authored 30 books relating to Nantucket, also sat down with N Magazine to discuss the Netflix series and the drama behind her years-long efforts to get her book from print to the television screen.


Give us some background as to how this project started.

The genesis of this project was bananas. I sold it to Fox in 2019 to a producer named Gail Berman who did Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Addams Family, the Elvis movie, among others. She is a very big deal and loves my books and picked up The Perfect Couple for her production company.


In 2019, Fox passed on the deal because they had a Lee Daniels project that was set on the Vineyard and felt it was too similar. Gail took the project to her own production company. She sat on it for over a year and referred me to a contact in Southeast Asia. They offered me a significant amount of money and wanted to do the series to be set in Bali with an Asian cast speaking English and planned to market it in places like South Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore. I simply couldn’t do that and said no.


There were numerous false starts from there, and finally, I connected with a woman named Susanne Bier, who has major credits to her name with productions that included Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. They called Nicole, who said she wanted to do it, but we did not have a male lead at that point. I suggested Liev Schreiber, which Nicole was excited about. They then got Dakota Fanning and Meghann Fahy, and it snowballed from there.


Did you have a say in the cast, or was this completely up to Netflix?

Ultimately, it is up to them, but they like to hear my suggestions because I am engaged in the streaming world. They asked my opinion about Liev Schreiber, as I was the one that suggested using him. As it turned out, he was the only person Nicole Kidman wanted to work with. So, do I have influence? I’m really not sure.


I know your books are not autobiographical, but is there anyone in this movie that you see yourself in?

There’s a little bit of me in Greer, who is the part that Nicole plays because she’s a novelist. There is a little bit of the writing life that I was able to incorporate with [my] career and it was Nicole’s role in the movie. It was super fun because I make fun of writer’s block and all this stuff, and Nicole has told me that she particularly loved this role.


Have you gotten to know Nicole Kidman and educate her about Nantucket?

She flew to Nantucket at the end of August, and we had dinner at the Galley. She said, “I love it here and I want to come back for Thanksgiving.” I suggested to her that Thanksgiving was not a good idea because the president was here and said she could come back for Christmas Stroll. She really thinks Nantucket is so storybook and so perfect and absolutely loves it.


You are a prolific writer. Is it your dream scenario where this series just continues with Netflix because there’s enough content for them to go for numerous seasons?

That is correct. Yes, I have plenty of content, and I would love it if The Perfect Couple went into a second series using one of my other books.

The movie was actually shot in Chatham, not Nantucket. Were they able to faithfully reproduce Nantucket, and why did they select the Cape?

When I went over to the set last May, I saw what the production entails. We are talking about enormous trucks that I don’t think would even fit on the boat. There were enormous cranes with huge lights and hundreds of people working on this production, which is why I understood why shooting on Nantucket was not practical.


Basically, they rented a waterfront house in Chatham, took out every stick of furniture, re-wallpapered and repainted it, as well as redecorating it. I don’t know how they got this done, but they also added two guest cottages in the backyard. When you walk into this house, it feels like you are on Nantucket. I then went in January to the last shoot at a reservoir in California. They had tents and a rehearsal dinner, and it was like going to a wedding on Nantucket with seafood towers, place settings, and hydrangeas. It looked like a wedding out of the pages of your magazine and was dead on. I could not believe how authentically Nantucket it looked with extras wearing Nantucket reds and all the details.


Was there any shooting on Nantucket?

Yes. They sent what is called a second unit who came in a van with cameras and shot all over downtown. They shot at Cisco and had a photographer come in his helicopter and filmed alongside the Endeavor to get the feeling of it being under full sail in the harbor. It was crazy for those on the Endeavor to all of a sudden have a helicopter filming right next to them.


Do you think that the series could have a meaningful impact on tourism in Nantucket?

Absolutely. I really hope people don’t get angry about it because it’s busy already. I mean, the only thing that makes me not worry about it is that Nantucket is self-regulating. So basically, what’s going to happen is the summer is as busy as it can be. And then it’s going to push out to the shoulder season. I see that already with my own readers who come. My readers are on Nantucket early June. And then they will come back in September. October midweek, and into November because that’s when they can afford it. And that’s when you know there’s room. So yeah, I think it will make an enormous difference. Because who doesn’t want to come to visit once they see it? I mean, everyone’s gonna be like, I want to go there.


How many followers do you have on the internet, either through Instagram or whatever other platforms?

I have 171,000 followers on Instagram and 156,000 on Facebook. I can tell you that 92 percent are female and 8 percent are male.


The success rate of movies on Nantucket has not been high, and I am just wondering what your thoughts are on that.

I understand what you’re saying, and the answer is Nantucket has never been done correctly. You need a large budget to shoot Nantucket properly, and my gut is that this show is finally going to do that. It’s nobody’s fault that Nantucket hasn’t been done correctly to this point, but it’s just impossible to access in a Hollywood way, and shooting on the Cape is the closest you can get to reality. They did a great job on this film, short of bringing the entire production to Nantucket, which would have resulted in everyone hating my guts. It’s just not feasible.

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