MINDHUNTER: Anna Torv interview
With Netflix in the mind of serial killers

If you’re looking for a new show to watch next weekend, on October 13 Netflix released Mindhunter. Adapted from the book Mindhunter: Inside The FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by Mark Olshaker and John E Douglas, the series takes us back in time to 1977, but the real travel we are going to start is the one in the mind of serial killers. We are at the beginning of the FBI unit’s dedication to profiling “serial killers”, when the need to comprehend what motivates men to do such terrible acts was slowly taking shape. Without justifying it or diminishing it’s meaning.

Do you remember The Silence of the Lambs? Clarice and Hannibal Lecter? That connection that can occur between a cold-blooded killer and the agent questioning him? In Mindhunter you can find that, the thin line between fear and curiosity, licit and illicit, morally right and immoral. You would be won over by intense and cerebral dialogues and the 1970s atmosphere (accurately recreated through locations, vintage cars and wardrobes). And then there’s the relation between Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) so different from one another, to become the perfect partners. Forget the classic crime shows, full of action and gore, and get ready to give in to introspection. It's a travel through words that takes you into the folds of their brains (of both sides): yes, because by analyzing the evil we will end up questioning the good too. Add to the mix the fact that David Fincher (director of Fight Club, The Social Network and many others great movies, as well as the mind behind Netflix’s House of Cards) is one of the executive producers and you have all the elements to be drawn to this show.

In this predominantly male environment, the criminal profiler (as this role was referred to in those years) Wendy Carr, an incredibly strong woman, is ready to bring into line whoever tries to challenge her authority. Dr. Carr is played by Anna Torv, and we interviewed her for you:
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Former Olivia Dunham from “Fringe” is Dr. Carr in “Mindhunter”: the only woman in the main cast of David Fincher’s new series. Nevertheless, the director gave her a few lessons of feminism.

Even with the brown bobcut, Fringe fans recognized her at first sight. Mindhunter’s Dr. Wendy Carr, the new drama from David Fincher now streaming on Netflix, is Anna Torv who is best known for her role as FBI agent Olivia Dunham on sci-fi cult series Fringe (playing the lead alongside Joshua Jackson, former Pacey from Dawson’s Creek).

In the first ten episodes, directed by the American filmmaker and acclaimed by critics, the Australian actress, who returns after 4 years in an American project, plays a determined, smart and extremely confident woman, who assists detectives Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) in developing their study of serial killers’ psychology.

“I tested few times, and the last audition was with David Fincher. Two weeks later they called me to tell me that I got the part: I was thrilled!”
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Anna Torv talks to Dazed about working with David Fincher, learning about psychopaths and training herself not to please people.
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Anna Torv spoke with Esquire and TVLine on Mindhunter’s cat storyline.
Spoilers for a subplot in Mindhunter follow below.

“I think it’s open to interpretation,” Torv said when I asked her about the storyline last month. “At first I thought, ‘Okay, is this representing all the faceless people that get taken by these killers every day?” This little thing [the stray cat] that no-one cares about—I mean, we find out about people that have been murdered because they have families who tell the police, but there are homeless people and prostitutes and street kids that nobody is missing, and serial killers target.” So that’s the symbolic read. Along the same lines, I wondered if Wendy trying to reach out to this stray cat and ending up with a bug infestation was a cautionary tale mirroring Holden, who’s becoming increasingly corrupted by his efforts to bond with serial killers. (Why yes, I was a pretentious English major, why do you ask?)

But then there’s the more literal possibility, that this is foreshadowing a creepy plot development for Wendy in the future. “Is there a serial killer in Wendy’s building who’s slowly starting out, and testing his bloodlust on feral kittens?” Torv pondered. “I think there are a lot of ways it could go.”

Credit: Esquire

“I always take things a little too [introspectively], so when I first read it in the script I was like, ‘Oh my God, wow, this is actually interesting.’ I thought, ‘This little kitten is representative of all these faceless [victims] and we only notice the ones that are dead because they have families that are looking for them. And then here’s this little abandoned cat that no one is going to care about. And if that was a person, it’d be the same thing.’ That’s what I first thought when I read it, but that’s just because I’m crazy,” Torv adds with a hearty laugh. “I was making it so deep when probably she’s just, you know, feeding a cat.”

The actress later ran her theory by Mindhunter exec producer David Fincher, who quickly informed her, ‘Oh… no, that’s not it,’” she guffaws. Fincher then explained to her that the cryptic series of scenes were, at least in part, suggesting to the audience that perhaps “there was a kid in the building who’s going around killing cats. And it’s a birth of a new sociopath that we don’t quite know about. Because that’s how it starts — with [inflicting harm on] animals.”

Credit: TVLine

USA Today spoke with Anna Torv about Mindhunter and its parallels with Fringe along with what it’s like being mistaken for Carrie Coon.

Anna Torv is one of the FBI’s most wanted — on TV, anyway. 

The Australian actress won fans playing whip-smart agent Olivia Dunham on J.J. Abrams’ sci-fi cult series Fringe, which Fox canceled after five seasons in 2013. Now she’s back as a similarly intuitive psychologist, Dr. Wendy Carr, in Netflix’s Mindhunter(now streaming), who assists detectives Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) in developing the FBI’s system for criminal profiling in the late 1970s. 

Torv, 38, chats with USA TODAY about Wendy’s Season 1 arc and her unlikely doppelgänger, Fargo actress Carrie Coon.

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Check out our new Mindhunter section in the navigation bar to stay up to date with the lastest cast interviews and other promotional material!

Anna Torv talks about her role in “Mindhunter” with Cameron Williams in the October 23rd issue of The Monthly.

The notion of a serial killer doesn’t exist yet in the new Netflix series Mindhunter. The idea is floated for the first time when an FBI agent (Jonathan Groff) proposes that there may be “sequence killers”.

Set in America in the late 1970s, Mindhunter tells the true story of an understaffed FBI behavioral science unit (Groff, Holt McCallany and Anna Torv) that interviews serial killers and applies the knowledge to help solve ongoing cases. The series is executive produced by filmmaker David Fincher (who directs four episodes) and is adapted from the book Mind Hunter: Inside The FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by Mark Olshaker and John E Douglas.

This was a time when the FBI struggled to comprehend what motivated men such as David Berkowitz (Son of Sam) and Charles Manson. There was resistance to the idea of empathising with killers, and agents spent more time on the gun range than studying psychology. An FBI chief tells the team, “It’s not our job to commiserate with these people. It is our job to electrocute them.”

Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en, Panic Room and Gone Girl) is back in the same territory he explored with Zodiac, but this time the ’70s presents a crossroads. The aftershocks from the Kennedy assassinations and Watergate are still being felt. J Edgar Hoover, who built the FBI from scratch according to his strict vision, is recently deceased. And for Mindhunter’s investigators, men with no motive are a terrifying prospect. The bureau must adapt or be outsmarted by evil. There’s a chilling realisation that these killers aren’t the savages they anticipated; they are intelligent, articulate and manipulative. While the bureau stalls, people are dying and the wits of local police officers are being eroded by the horrors they witness.

Enter Wendy Carr, a psychologist loosely based on Dr Ann Wolbert Burgess, a trailblazer in the study of trauma and abuse on victims and perpetrators of crime. Played by Australian actress Anna Torv, she is one of few female characters in a male-dominated show, and her point of view is vital to the series, especially when most of the violence is against women. Think Clarice Starling entering an elevator full of her male peers in Silence of the Lambs.

When I spoke with Torv on the phone from Los Angeles, she was upbeat about her role as one of the small number of female characters with a pulse. “We’re in the late 1970s in the FBI and things are a little different but Wendy goes into a room and she doesn’t care – and I went with that,” Torv says. “You go in and fight your cause, not in an aggressive way but you fight for it.”
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Anna Torv and her co-stars talk Mindhunter in a new Variety Magazine article.

“Wendy’s got a very specific function, and it was nice to be able to pop out of that for a little while and see the person in there,” Torv says of her character, who was inspired by Dr. Ann Burgess, a forensic nurse and crime victim expert.

Even without seeing the crimes, there is a lot about “Mindhunter” that stayed with the cast long after they stopped shooting. “Those Kemper scenes were just so bloody brilliant,” says Torv. “I’ve never seen anything like that on television.”

You can read the full article HERE 
Credit: Variety