Imagine that you just got married to a man or woman who seems like the love of your life. As a couple you both get along swimmingly, hardly ever argue, and enjoy each other’s company every single day. Then, one afternoon, you come home after work to discover that he or she is gone, along with all of your money from your bank account. Your wall safe is completely empty, and every single asset to your name has vanished or been erased. To top it all off, the person who stole your funds — who was supposed to be in love with you — also has highly incriminating evidence that can bring you and your family down.
This, in a nutshell, is Imposters.
Starring Inbar Lavi as Maddie, Imposters follows a group of con artists always looking for the next wealthy target to drain. An emotional connection with the “mark” is essentially the means to an end, and for the most part, Maddie and her team don’t seem to suffer any ill effects because of the cons. It’s simply on to the next victim.
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Global News caught up with the cast of Imposters at the Television Critics Association winter session to find out more about this sexy, dark drama.
It’s sexy, all right
In the first episode alone, there are two (almost) sex scenes, and unquestionably this young cast is spicing up the sexy meter. What better way to con your victim than with sex appeal and attractiveness? According to the cast, it’s the perfect weapon to get the person to forget about all the “bad” things and focus on the bliss, which then makes it easier to abscond with someone’s entire portfolio.
“I think everyone’s looking for completeness in life,” says series star (and one of Maddie’s victims) Rob Heaps. “I think love often seems like the answer to that. When you find someone that you’re attracted to and seems to be attracted to you, it happens, and you feel like that fixes everything. It takes over everything that’s wrong in your life. And when it doesn’t work out, you’re left with the same problems as before.”
Lavi has her work cut out for her as Maddie
An incredibly complex character, Maddie takes on multiple, completely different personas in order to con her targets. This involves adopting accents, mannerisms and little things like inflection. (Same goes for the other members of her con team, Max and Sally.) Obviously Lavi found it to be a challenge, but she took it on with relish.
“The hardest thing for me was to really find Maddie, and I don’t think that I’ve found her yet,” said Lavi. “Maddie is the core of it all. She’s the backbone, and she’s what all the branches of the different characters come from, so I wanted to make sure that I got her grounded and secure. And throughout the season, I was really nervous because I wasn’t getting her, and I realized that it’s OK because she doesn’t know who she is either quite yet, and that’s a big question that goes throughout the season.”
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As for pulling off the physical aspects of Maddie, Lavi had an easier time, considering her diverse background.
“Well, I got very, very, very lucky when I met the wonderful creators and writers. I somehow managed to convince them that I could pull this off,” she said, laughing. “And I grew up in Israel. My dad is Polish. My mom is Moroccan, and I grew up around all kinds of different languages, and I love playing with it, and I love picking up new melodies.”
Imposters differs from the other con shows on TV
Rather than a “con of the week” format, Imposters plays the long game, with the con story we’re introduced to in Episode 1 running the whole length of the first season. Then throughout the season, the viewer will discover more about what happens to the people Maddie, Max and Sally conned. In a fun twist, the targets, now destitute, heartbroken and desperate, band together to bring down the con team. Imposters is actually a huge con in itself; there’s a great chance the audience may feel duped once or twice as Season 1 progresses.
“It’s about the characters, the comedy and the rhythm-and-pop to the dialogue,” said executive producer Adam Brooks. “We always wanted to be surprised by the characters, and so it’s not just the cons are happening within the story. We wanted to con the audience whenever possible, in terms of the pleasure of not getting it right and then thinking backwards. So it’s a show full of twists and turns, as I’m sure many of these other shows are, but we decided just to keep that out of our heads.”
It’s possible to have sympathy for the con artists, too
Sure, the con artists are committing cruel crimes to their victims, but surely only a broken person could do this to someone else, right? And that’s another layer to Imposters: what’s happening inside Maddie and the other con artists? What has happened in their lives to drive them to this sort of existence?
“One of the things that Maddie is brilliant at, as great con artists are, is seeing that thing that the other person needs and being that thing that the other person has wanted,” said executive producer Paul Adelstein. “And she is those different things for all the people she has scammed. Now, one of the things that we’re examining, too, over the course of the season — I think Inbar touched on it — is that doesn’t necessarily mean in her own life that she knows who she is, what she wants, who she would fit with. And when she meets somebody that she may have actual real feelings with, that’s very confusing because fiction is much different … creating a fiction is different than actually having a human connection with somebody because you have to be vulnerable.”
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“The rug can shift under the audience’s feet every now and then, and that’s a really fun thing to do,” he continued. “For instance, in the pilot, you think, well, this is a bad person. This is a criminal, and then you find yourself being sympathetic to Maddie.”
Lavi agrees, and says everyone — not just the con victims — is deceived on this show.
“Everyone on this show gets hurt. Everyone is deceived,” she said. “Everyone is a little bit conniving, and I hope that people can take some kind of message from it: ‘That’s OK. It happens. Clean yourself off. Get back out there. There’s always hope. You might still find someone who won’t hurt you. You might.’ That’s what I would want people to take from it, at least.”
The ultimate question of the show is: How well can you really know anybody?
Central to the show’s premise is the idea of identity, and our inability to truly know anyone, even our wives, husbands, kids and parents. Cynical and depressing, sure, but Imposters has a subtle vein of humour running throughout the show. So while some scenes can be heavy or emotionally wrenching, there is thankfully some clever dialogue and lightness to alleviate some of the seriousness. That’s not to say it won’t have you skimming through your spouse’s phone for incriminating evidence.
“This was an opportunity for us to talk about things — identity, for instance, with, let’s say, social media — where people are inventing themselves over and over again in a new way,” said Adelstein. “People have always done that. They can go from city to city, but now you can just do it right from your phone. And I think this was an opportunity to engage in that very idea, but kind of in a sideways way.”
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‘Imposters’ premieres on Tues., Feb. 7 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on W Network.
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