I’m sure you’re all hanging out for the upcoming Dirty John series, because the podcast about the wildly manipulative John Meehan was absolutely not enough to satiate your true crime needs. Well, Eric Bana – who plays John in the Bravo series – has revealed that the tv show will dip more into John’s past lives and loves.
[jwplayer pIK2Rg8m]
In an interview with Uproxx, Bana said that the series had the ability to look back into John’s history and former relationships, painting a better picture of the man who tried to pull the wool over the eyes of Debra Newell and her family.
Look, we had the luxury of really exploring the backstory, which people will get a sense of [in the first few episodes]. One thing that the podcast couldn’t do was explore the backstory in the same way, eight hours, rather than referring to it in a narrative sense.
Bana goes on to explain that the ability to have these flashbacks into John’s dark past makes the tv show much more menacing and unnerving than the podcast was.
We go and experience the flashbacks in first-person, so that was a good tool that we had that we really wanted to make the most of. So I think the show will be a lot more unsettling than the podcast.
He also confirmed that he was a huge fan of the podcast when it was first put out by the Los Angeles Times journalist Christopher Goffard, and found the most terrifying aspect of John Meehan’s portrayal was that we never really knew all that much about him.
“I think the big warning sign is people saying that they have family and friends, who just never, ever appear. There was a real mysteriousness to him when I listened to the podcast,” he said.
“It’s like he was there, but he wasn’t there. It just goes to the fear, that he wreaked all this havoc, but we didn’t really know him. We didn’t know much about him at all. And that’s what made it scary.”
Check out the sneak peek of Bana playing the menacing John Meehan below, and get the true-crime group chat on high alert for when the series finally drops on Netflix in Australia.
