When Rosalind Eleazar got married last year on a Greek island, she asked her agents not to contact her about work. But the day after the wedding (which took place in a mini amphitheatre – “we are so extra”) she was “exceptionally hungover” when she got a call about a job: the lead in Netflix’s new Harlan Coben adaptation, Missing You. Eleazar immediately bought the book and, to the mild annoyance of her new husband, the Italian producer and director Gabriele Lo Giudice (“he wasn’t best pleased”), spent her honeymoon reading it. “Those final five pages – are you kidding me?” She shakes her head, wide-eyed. “I did not in my wildest dreams imagine that was where it was going.”
It is a fairly typical reaction to a Coben story. Over the last few years, the mystery US author has turned his bestselling novels into an enormously successful televisual universe: this year’s Fool Me Once is Netflix’s most watched show of 2024, with 107.5m views. Eleazar is aware, though, that critics can be sniffy about the glossy and endlessly twisty adaptations. “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinions,” she says. “But a) there’s something for everyone; and b) let it live in the space that it’s trying to live in. It doesn’t need to be compared to Succession.”
