Olivier Nominated Lindsey Ferrentino Just Won’t Stop Writing, And Thank Goodness

One thing is for certain, when The Hollywood Reporter calls you one of Netflix’s “go-to writers,” things are going pretty well. Lindsey Ferrentino has been writing works seen across the New York stage for years now, and she’s just getting started. 

Between The Artist, The Queen of Versailles, multiple film projects, Ferrentino has now been nominated for her first Olivier Award for The Fear of 13 which recently had a critically acclaimed run at the Donmar Warehouse in London starring Academy Award winner Adrien Brody. 

I caught up with Ferrentino recently to chat about balancing multiple projects, gushing over Adrien Brody, and what she might wear this Sunday to the awards. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

‍Theatrely: Before we even dive in, you currently have so much in development right now! How do you keep track of all the multiple projects?

Ferrentino: It's a great question. I don't know — I just sort of do it! You just have to do it, you know? And I have really amazing assistants on a few of the projects so that's been incredibly helpful. I find, I can multitask on multiple projects so long as I'm not doing multiple first drafts at the same time, that gets really confusing. But once the world is sort of built, it's easier to kind of pop in and out of rewrites. 

Many congratulations on The Fear of 13. Tell me how this play came to be?

The play came to be because I watched a documentary, also titled The Fear of 13, on Netflix during COVID. I knew nothing about it and knew really an embarrassing little about death row in America and was just so struck by Nick Yarris as both what he had experienced and also his ability to tell his own story. He spent 22 years wrongfully incarcerated on death row with his only company being the books in the prison library. He just has this really theatrical way of being able to tell his story, and it's really incredible. It's just him allowing his words to do the work on a stool, telling his life to camera. So it felt to me like a one-man show. I pursued the rights thinking I was going to write a one-man show, and then in the writing of it, it became a much bigger piece. But yeah, it started by just me sort of naively thinking I could just put the documentary on stage and call it a day! 

How did it land at the Donmar in London

I'm doing another show in the UK called The Artist and the director of that was friends with Tim Sheader, who had just taken over at the Donmar and he had set us up just to get to know each other. We connected on our love of true stories so I sent him the play. And then many, many months meant by and I followed up once more and he read it overnight and then called the next day and said he wanted to do it, which just never happens. You always do long development with theater readings and workshops; you just never get a call like that.

The audiences who attend the Donmar are very intelligent. What did you want the audience to take away when they went to see this play? 

Um... That's such a big question. I feel like I never try to have the audience leave with one particular message or thought. What I loved about the documentary and what I've loved about getting to know Nick as a person was how it personalized and humanized the death row experience and made it feel like something that is not so distant from my own life and sort of brought to light this blind spot in my own politics and in my heart as far as like something that's such a huge part of our country and our criminal legal system; it felt like such a universal story. So I think to just have the audience spend that much time with someone on death row, which is not an experience most people get to have.

And I'm curious, how did the British audiences respond to such an American tale? 

So that was a big question for me because obviously the UK does not have the death penalty anymore, but it wasn't that long ago that they did. The play is a story about a man getting caught up in a system that's stacked against him, which is a very universal experience and fear. And it is also about falling in love and having your heart broken and coming of age. It isn't just an American story, but it isn't just a sort of miscarriage of justice in the American prison system. It's really about this individual person. 

Perhaps at some point we will see the play over here in the States?

I can't say too much, but yes, there will be a future life of the play. 

So this Sunday is the big day! Are you excited? 

I've never been! I don't think I've ever been to an award show so I'm very thrilled and excited. And all of my friends and family have been, you know, getting my panic texts about what I'm going to wear. But yeah, I'm very honored to be going; it's crazy always to get nominated for anything, but particularly crazy to get nominated for this in a different country. 

Talk to me about collaborating with Adrien Brody. 

This was Adrien's first professional play as an adult, so it was an incredible experience for me because we were really, I feel like in it together from the beginning and he's an actor that is deeply reverential to the text and very word perfect specific, which is interesting because this was a play that hadn't been workshopped that much and I barely heard it aloud when he agreed to do it. It meant that, and also because the two of us were the two Americans in London, we were just thrown into this collaboration in a very deep way together. I love writing for actors and tailoring roles specifically to actors. And so he and I really went through the script over and over again, side by side, word by word, to make sure everything was in his voice, understood by him. I started to write the role of Nick to sound more like Adrien himself. There was a part of the play that I felt should be really personal to Adrien, and I actually let him have a pass at writing that little speech. So I've been very lucky to have very close relationships with actors, but I don't think I've ever worked quite as closely as I did with him. I can't say enough good things about him.

I want to jump over to The Queen of Versailles for a moment. What are you most excited for when it comes to Broadway this fall?

Well, it's my Broadway debut! So obviously, personally, I am just excited to be able to say I've had a show on Broadway — any American writer's dream. But I'm really excited just to see all the elements come together. Everyone's been working so hard on this show for so long. And Kristen is a once in a generation talent. It's incredible to watch the audience who is so hungry and ravenous for her. Seeing her at the height of her powers; it's beautiful work. I'm just really proud of everybody on the team and just want the whole thing to kind of come together finally. 

I want to touch on something that you mentioned earlier about your deep connection to artists when you write. If you could manifest an actor for a future project, who is someone right now in Hollywood, on Broadway, etc. that you would really love to collaborate with at some point? 

My immediate answer is always Adrien. I just wanna write more things for him because he's so good. Oh goodness, that's such a good question. I have been listening to a lot of, just because she'd been everywhere lately, a lot of interviews with Millie Bobby Brown. I feel like there's a very interesting discrepancy between how she is in real life versus how I've seen her portrayed on screen. And she's so good, she was so good from such a young age. I feel like, I'd love to write her something, yeah!