Ariana DeBose and Bobby Cannavale Talk Bringing ‘Scarpetta’ to the Screen

Ariana DeBose and Bobby Cannavale star as Lucy Farinelli-Watson and Detective Pete Marino in Scarpetta, which weaves together two of Patricia Cornwell’s novels: Postmortem and Autopsy. All eight episodes are now streaming, exclusively on Prime Video.

Scarpetta brings Patricia Cornwell’s iconic literary character to life in a gripping series starring Nicole Kidman as “Dr. Kay Scarpetta.” With skilled hands and an unnerving eye, this unrelenting medical examiner is determined to serve as the voice of the victims, unmask a serial killer, and prove that her career-making case from 28 years prior isn’t also her undoing. Set against the backdrop of modern forensic investigation, the series delves beyond the crime scene to explore the psychological complexities of both perpetrators and investigators, creating a multi-layered thriller that examines the toll of pursuing justice at all costs.

Postmortem, Cornwell’s debut, came out in 1990. Since then, we’ve seen significant growth in how female leads are written for television. “I think she would have been really quite hungry to see beautiful Black women, women who look like her, on screen. But I also think she’s super emotionally layered when you first meet her. In the first episode, you get to the understanding that she’s going through a grief process, and I think we’ve seen that dramatized beautifully in many different ways,” DeBose explained of Lucy. “She’s singular, though, because I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a grief process dramatized via A.I., and that is the part of the conversation that I think we need to be having around Lucy, but not necessarily about the character, about whether or not this is actually good practice for us as a society.”

Meanwhile, the younger version of Pete is portrayed by Cannavale’s real-life son, Jake Cannavale. “It’s a unique way of looking at these characters because we get to see them in real time as they’re developing when they first meet and as they are now, and the consequences of all the years in between,” he shared. “Now, as actors, sure, Jake would say to me, ‘How do you think he got to this place with her? How did they get to trust each other so much, because it feels like she doesn’t trust me at all in the beginning?’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s a great opportunity for you to keep trying to earn her trust, right? I mean, that’s an active thing you can play.’ And so, those kinds of questions, I really welcome them from Jake, because while Jake has got the chops to play any part, I think, sometimes, particularly in an episodic like this, we don’t want to kind of let the cat out of the bag with our interior lives, right? We want people to keep tuning in.”