INDIANAPOLIS — A murder mystery, psychological thriller limited series is one of the must-see TV shows of the summer.
"Lady in the Lake" stars Oscar winner Natalie Portman ("Black Swan," "Jackie") as Maddie Schwartz, a Jewish housewife who leaves her husband and wants to reinvent herself as an investigative journalist. At the same time, Emmy nominee Moses Ingram ("The Queen's Gambit," "Obi-Wan Kenobi") portrays Cleo Sherwood, a mother struggling to provide for her family.
Schwartz quickly becomes obsessed with solving two separate killings: an 11-year-old girl and then Sherwood.
"(The show is about) their quest and their entangled web of swapping lives in a lot of ways," said Josiah Cross ("A Thousand and One," "Masters of the Air"), who plays Reggie, who works for a criminal empire and is consistently torn on making the right choices. "What does empathy really look like? As the old saying (goes), is the grass really greener? I feel like both of our protagonists take us on a quest of what that really mean."
After moving out of her family home, Portman's character forms a secretive, passionate relationship with a detective, played by Y'lan Noel ("Insecure," "The First Purge").
"It's one of the things that drew me to the project, to be completely honest. I revere Natalie and her work, both on-camera and off-camera," Noel said on working with Portman. "One of the qualities I appreciated the most in Maddie, who (Portman) plays, is her relentlessness — the fact that she wouldn't stop regardless of what the consequences would be, and that mirrors his internal struggle to resist authority as well."
And as audiences see Ingram's character struggle as a Black woman in Baltimore in the 1960s, she must also deal with her unemployed husband, played by Byron Bowers ("Honey Boy," "The Chi")
"(Ingram) being from (Baltimore) born and raised, was probably one of the greatest things for me to experience with her," Bowers said on working with Ingram. "She was a great sparring partner. We have some beautiful, beautiful scenes together where we can just improvise and go off on our own tangent as husband and wife."
Al'ma Harel ("Honey Boy," "Bombay Beach") serves as showrunner, executive producer, director and writer for "Lady in the Lake," which is based on the 2019 novel of the same name by Laura Lipmann — who based her book on two real-life murders that happened while she was growing up in Maryland and received vastly different media coverage based on the second victim's race.
New episodes of "Lady in the Lake" are released Fridays on Apple TV+ through Aug. 23.