When speaking about the new series about a high-school teacher having an affair with her student, the Claire Wilson depicter explains why it is important to explore the difficult subject matter.
- Nov 12, 2020
AceShowbiz - Kate Mara hopes her new show "A Teacher" makes viewers "uncomfortable."
The new FX on Hulu series sees the 37-year-old actress play Claire Wilson, a married English teacher who grooms and manipulates one of her high school students.
"Love, Simon" actor Nick Robinson, 25, stars opposite Mara as the teen victim, Eric Walker, and she tells The Wrap the programme was designed to explore the difficult subject matter from a new angle.
"Some people are definitely going to feel uncomfortable watching the show. It wasn't something that we made thinking that it would be a super-easy watch," she says. "Comfortable is not the word we were going for."
"I don't think you normally see the story told from this perspective or this point of view. It was one of the reasons why I was excited to tell it," adds Mara. "I think it's because it isn't something that people necessarily want to talk about. The fact that it's a female doing the abuse and being the groomer and all of these things I think is also something that is rarely discussed."
She goes on to insist it's "important" the show explores the taboo narrative from the viewpoint of the teacher and student, to highlight the "silly" stereotype of it being "cool" for a boy to have that illegal relationship with a teacher.
"I think it is a unique thing to explore it, and it was something that we wanted to be very clear about from the beginning, that we were not saying that it was right, that we were always saying this was wrong," muses the "House of Cards" actress.
"It's not a story that we were looking to tell to make people feel cozy," she notes of "A Teacher", which is adapted from Hannah Fidell's 2013 film of the same name. "It's an important story to tell in order to begin the conversation about how common this type of sexual assault has become. So that was more of the goal."
