35 years after Elliot and Beverly Mantle went to bizarre and bloody lengths in the gynecology field, the twin terrorizers will return. Rachel Weisz is playing the identical Mantle sisters in Dead Ringers, a six-episode drama based on the creepy David Cronenberg film.
Boasting an impressive resume of directors, the Amazon Studios show follows the Mantles, twin doctors who share drugs, lovers, and a mission to challenge antiquated health practices and change how women give birth. Here’s everything we know so far about the movie-to-TV remake.
When is the Dead Ringers release date?
Dead Ringers is set to premiere on April 21, 2023 on Prime Video.
Dead Ringers was given a straight-to-series adaptation order in August 2020, and filming began around a year later in New York City. The show’s debut has likely lagged due to pandemic-imposed production obstacles.
Is there a Dead Ringers trailer?
So far we’ve only seen a 30-second teaser set to a chilly version of Blondie’s poppy new wave anthem “Heart of Glass,” in which we see Rachel Weisz (times two!) in scarlet, flowing garbs reminiscent of the red robe donned by Jeremy Irons in the original Cronenberg film.
We’ll likely get a full-length trailer closer to Dead Ringers’ release date.
Who is in the Dead Ringers cast?
Other than Weisz, who also serves as an executive producer, Dead Ringers features:
- Britne Oldford (The Umbrella Academy) as Genevieve
- Emily Meade (The Leftovers) as Susan
- Poppy Liu (Hacks) as Greta
- Michael Chernus (Severance) as Tom
- Jennifer Ehle (Saint Maud) as Rebecca
What is the plot of Dead Ringers?
It is unclear how faithful the TV series will be to the film. For now, the only obvious changes are that Weisz is playing gender-flipped versions of the original characters, and that the story is set in New York City instead of Toronto.
The 1988 Dead Ringers followed gynecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle (Jeremy Irons), identical twins who operate a successful fertility clinic. Elliot beds the women who come to the clinic, then passes them on to Beverly while the women remain disturbingly unaware of the substitution and subsequent nonconsensual sex.
The twins’ lives are disrupted when actress Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold) steals Beverly’s heart and introduces him to prescription drug abuse. Signature Cronenberg grotesquerie begins to unfold as Beverly slips deeper into his addiction and begins to have paranoid delusions about mutant women with abnormal genitalia, prompting him to commission horrifying and bizarre surgical devices to operate on them.
Will Dead Ringers (2023) take the same confounding turns, plummeting the Mantle twins into a dangerous and disgusting spiral? Cronenberg fans have just a few more weeks to wait before they get their answer. Maybe there’s a hint in the tentative episode titles, which are named after the fruits representing the stages of a baby’s growth in utero: apple seeds, limes, avocados, pomegranates, and grapefruits.
All six episodes of Dead Ringers will air on Prime Video on April 21, 2023.
