In the years since his star-making turn as the Hot Priest in Fleabag, Andrew Scott has grown accustomed to being an object of infatuation. But in Netflix’s Ripley, starring the actor as Patricia Highsmith’s eponymous grifter, Scott is the one with an obsession—conveying a seductive single-mindedness that turns deadly for anyone with the misfortune of getting in his way.

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A new adaptation of Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels from Academy Award–winning screenwriter-filmmaker Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, The Irishman) will premiere on Netflix as an eight-part series in 2024. It arrives more than 20 years after The Talented Mr. Ripley and on the heels of Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn—a testament to the insidious pull of one of literature’s most infamous scammers. “Tom Ripley is a part of our consciousness,” Zaillian tells Vanity Fair. “Almost 70 years after Highsmith created him, contemporary figures are still being compared to him. He won’t go away.”

For those somehow unfamiliar with the various iterations of this tale: Scott’s Ripley is scraping by as a run-of-the-mill con artist in early-1960s New York when a wealthy man employs him to convince his vagabond son, Dickie Greenleaf (Emma’s Johnny Flynn), to return home from Italy. The allure of Dickie’s lifestyle—complete with his picture-perfect, albeit suspicious, girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning)—engulfs Ripley. He goes to extreme lengths to preserve his place next to Dickie, ones that eventually devolve into deceit, fraud, and murder.

“I feel like you’re required to love and advocate for your characters, and your job is to go, Why? What’s that? You don’t play the opinions, the previous attitudes that people might have about Tom Ripley,” Scott tells VF. “You have to throw all those out, try not to listen to them, and go, Okay, well, I have to have the courage to create our own version and my own understanding of the character.”

Zaillian, who writes, directs, and produces every episode, says that letting Ripley’s fraudulence play out over multiple installments, rather than in a single feature film, “allowed me to be more faithful to the story, tone, and subtleties of Highsmith’s work.” He adds, “[I] tried to approach my adaptation in a way I imagined she might herself.”

The choice to tell his version in lush black and white was also inspired by Zaillian’s own copy of the source material. “The edition of the Ripley book I had on my desk had an evocative black-and-white photograph on the cover,” he says. “As I was writing, I held that image in my mind. Black and white fits this story—and it’s gorgeous.”

Scott, who also serves as a producer on the series, admits that Ripley’s nefarious nature took a toll. “It was a heavy part to play. I found it mentally and physically really hard. That’s just the truth of it,” he says. In some ways, then, playing Adam in his latest film, All of Us Strangers, was a welcome respite from the darkness. “I suppose the journey to understanding this character was a less arduous one than trying to understand what Tom Ripley does,” Scott explains. “Certain things I can understand, but other things—it’s actually the blankness that’s sometimes hard to engage with.”

Production on the project, first announced back in 2019, commenced on location in Italy and New York during the pandemic and spanned several months. Scott describes Tom Ripley as “an absolutely enormous role”—one that he unknowingly planted the seeds for with 2013’s Locke, a Tom Hardy–starring indie in which Scott played an unseen supporting role. “He didn’t appear in it; he was a voice on the phone. But with just that, he created a thoroughly engaging character,” says Zaillian. “Then, of course, there was Fleabag. With those two roles—Donal and the Priest—I knew he had the range for Tom Ripley.”