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Jude Law and Jason Bateman were not well acquainted before working together on Black Rabbit. But once they started filming scenes together for Netflix’s gritty drama, they fell into a rhythm.
“It’s very hard to describe. It’s like you’re playing a sport, but you’re not trying to beat the other person, but you’re trying to raise their game,” Law told PEOPLE at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Black Rabbit premiered on Saturday, Sept. 6.
“And you are pushing the practice thinking, ‘If I go this far, am I allowed to do this? Are you allowed to do that?’ It was pretty clear, pretty quickly that we were on the same page,” Law, 52, continued while speaking at the PEOPLE/EW and Shutterstock studio at TIFF.
The eight-episode series features Law as Jake Friedken, an owner of a popular New York City restaurant and bar, Black Rabbit. Stretched financially while trying to take its success to the next level, Jake gets another headache when his troubled brother Vince (Bateman, 56) turns up after getting himself into some deadly serious trouble.
Courtesy of Netflix
The two actors “had very different approaches” to developing their characters, recalled Law. “I was writing up these essays, back story details. He was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, you can do all of that if you want. That’s not quite how I’d do it.’”
Law said he “didn’t have to” try to build a bond off set because the scripts were so well-written and everything was on the page. “We went out for dinner once before we started shooting and then we were straight in,” he shared.
Black Rabbit was a reunion of sorts for Law, who worked with co-creators and exec producers Zach Baylin and Kate Susman on his 2024 movie The Order, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. (Baylin co-wrote the film and Susman was an executive producer.)
Baylin and Susman were filming that movie with Law when they broached the subject of Black Rabbit.
“We were in production. It was very clear early on that their relationship was incredibly positive and the work that we were experiencing on The Order was collaborative and like-minded and we were enjoying ourselves, but we had high standards and I think we were all interested in pushing the potential of a story as far as it could go,” recalled Law.
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“And they were very generous. They shared with us this idea that they’d been nurturing. And it just, for me, struck a bunch of very familiar memories of New York at a certain time, a certain slice of New York life,” he added.
Susman said Law immediately saw the vision she and Baylin had. “It was exciting talking to Jude about the idea because we had lived in New York and there were a number of restaurants that we had spent time in and bars just as patrons going there,” she said.
“And so when we were talking about the idea with Jude, he immediately was like, ‘I know that place. I’ve been to that place. I’m familiar.’ So right from the get-go, it was clear that we were on the same page,” she said.
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Baylin said that during production of Black Rabbit, they were all often up late — much like the nightlife movers and shakers portrayed on the series.
“We were constantly collaborating and revising scenes,” he said. “So we would go to a bar after wrap and talk about what the next day’s shoot was. And a lot of times we were writing stuff that night together at a bar and then throw that in the next day. And then maybe, ‘We were drunk when we wrote that. We should go back to what we had before.’”
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Black Rabbit premieres on Netflix on Thursday, Sept. 18.
