Special Guest
Writer Matthew Barry reveals the inspirations behind his BBC thriller The Guest, discusses the toxic friendship at the heart of the story and explains why he wants his work to be “unashamedly commercial.”
With his four-part BBC thriller The Guest, creator and writer Matthew Barry has channelled 1990s thrillers such as The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Single White Female and Pacific Heights to tell the story of a toxic friendship that swirls between manipulation and mystery.
Gabrielle Creevy (In My Skin) stars as Ria, who has never thought about what she wants in life. But when she is employed as a cleaner by confident and successful business owner Fran (Keeping Faith’s Eve Myles), Ria is encouraged to take control of her life, resulting in the two women forming an intense bond.
When Fran’s advice leads to tragic events, their lives become increasingly intertwined by shared secrets and dangerous plots. But who is playing who?
Produced by Quay Street Productions and launching on BBC One, BBC iPlayer and BBC Wales tonight, The Guest delivers on Barry’s intentions to create a “proper old-school, 90s-esque thriller” with numerous cliffhangers and hooks. From the outset, he particularly wanted viewers to become drawn into the world of the show and its characters, just as Ria becomes increasingly intoxicated by Fran.
“Coming at a thriller from character rather than plot was always at the forefront of my mind,” he tells DQ. “Even though we do go to big places, especially in that first episode, it should be believable that Ria has put herself in that situation rather than, ‘Well, let’s work out what the plot is and back-fill character.’
“Tonally, these 90s thrillers also had a cheekiness to them. There was a bit of a wink and a nod. It’s not Scandi noir, it’s not dark and gritty and depressing. It’s literally colourful. Those were the ingredients we had in the mix from the beginning.”
Class and social mobility are also themes in the series, and Barry was inspired by The Talented Mr Ripley – the film based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel of the same name about a con man who takes on the identity of his school friend – when it came to juxtaposing Ria’s lower-class background with the luxury and excess enjoyed by Fran.
“As a cleaner, it’s something that [Ria] experiences every day, pretty much, because she cleans other people’s houses. But Fran is the only person that tells her, ‘Oh, it’s not ‘look but don’t touch, it’s touch and take,’” Barry says. “My favourite scene from that first episode is where Fran is saying that people play by different rules.
“That was the inspiration for this character going into another character’s world in a very Ripley-esque way, which is another film I’m obsessed with, and also having a bit of ‘who’s playing who?’ I didn’t want Ria just to be the naive, working-class girl who’s wide-eyed and wowed by Fran in her world. Ria’s a bit dangerous too.”
It was also essential that Fran didn’t come across as a one-dimensional villain, with episode four providing more insight into who she is, what she’s doing and how she ended up there. “That was really important to me and to Eve – to understand where the character was coming from and why,” Barry says.
On set, Creevy and Myles were encouraged to “play it for real,” in order to make the characters and the situations they find themselves in as believable and relatable as possible. That process began with Barry’s scripts and dialogue, ensuring that Ria and Fran would not do anything seemingly out of character, despite the sometimes heightened tension in the series.
“It is a fun, propulsive thriller, so you have to go to those places,” says Barry, who reveals he was also inspired by the compelling nature of reality series The Traitors. “I wanted the hooks of each episode to be as [propulsive] as possible so that the audience just went, ‘We’ll watch another one.’ For a while we turned away from that, and it was like, ‘Let’s do a really slow burn.’ Then watching The Traitors, I was like, ‘Wow, they know how to do a cliffhanger. What’s the equivalent in our show?’”
That element of the series was further enhanced by the performances, with Barry noting Myles’ ability to “turn on a look.” “She can be absolutely fucking terrifying,” he laughs. “I just love the unpredictability of Eve’s performance. You don’t know which way she’s going to go at any moment, and that keeps us as an audience – and Ria – on our toes.”
The Guest marks Barry’s latest partnership with Quay Street following Men Up, a single drama about the first clinical trials for Viagra that debuted on the BBC in December 2023. His other credits include Death in Paradise, EastEnders and Industry.
The Welshman now calls West Hollywood his home, having moved to the US in 2017. He had initially gone out to LA to take a few meetings but after selling a project, he landed a spot in the writers room on Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, where he worked for three years. The pandemic-triggered rise of video conferencing has since allowed him to keep in touch with the UK industry, helping him to build a career on both sides of the Atlantic.
With experience of being part of a US writers room, Barry admits that what shocked him most about how US series are developed was “there’s not much writing,” he says. “It’s a lot of sitting in a room – and pitching story is a completely different skill to writing.
“What you’ll find in American writers rooms is there are a lot of writers who aren’t very good writers. It doesn’t matter, because they’re incredible pitchers. That was a skill that for the first six months was crazy, and then you get into the rhythm and you learn all of the tricks of a writers room.”
Pitching a series to a US network is also a wildly different experience from doing so in the UK. “If you pitch a show in America, you pitch verbally. You’ll go into the room and you’ll talk for 25 minutes, saying, ‘This is the show, these are the characters, this is the pilot, this is the series,’ and then they’ll say yes or no very quickly,” he explains. “In the UK, what tends to happen is, ‘Well, we’ve got a page or two. We’ll send it to the BBC or ITV’ or whoever. Three months go past. ‘Let’s nudge them.’ So it’s just a longer process, but in America, where it takes a really long time is closing the deal. I sold a show over there three or four months ago and the deal has still not closed, and that’s normal.”
Perhaps where Barry’s American experience infiltrates The Guest is in his ambition for the show to be “unashamedly commercial” and draw as many viewers as possible. “This is a thriller. I don’t want to be niche. I like the idea of writing for a big, broad audience. In America, that’s applauded more,” he says. “At the same time as wanting to say something about class disparity, I do want this to be on BBC One at nine o’clock, and a lot of people to watch.”
As an executive producer on the series, which is distributed internationally by ITV Studios, Barry was also involved across production and post-production, overseeing every edit and every cut – just as writers in the US will produce the episodes of a show they write.
That happens a lot less in the UK, he says. “I remember being on set the first day on Sabrina on my episode, $8m-an-episode budget, a really big show, 200-300 people on set. The director turns around and says, ‘Are you happy?’ after the first take, and I turn around to look at, like, who he’s talking to, and he’s talking to me. I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, great.’ Having that experience and being able to bring that to the UK has been very helpful on the executive producer side.”
The challenge of making The Guest began with the scripts, as Barry sought to create a plot that wouldn’t fall apart if “one Jenga piece” was pulled out. By its very nature, a thriller also involves lots of people who aren’t telling the truth, so the writer also created a spreadsheet detailing what a character was saying and what they really meant.
“Tracking all of that can be tricky,” he says. Then there was the task of “nailing the landing” and ensuring The Guest has a “nice, satisfying ending, rather than ‘they had a twin’ or whatever,” he says.
Some scenes in the series were filmed during a day of international rugby in Wales, with characters being placed in the middle of crowds after the production obtained permission to fly drones overhead.
“With anything I write, I hope people enjoy it,” Barry says. “I hope people have a good time. I hope people have different theories about what’s going on – and I hope all of them are wrong. But also, just to identify with the character and go on a proper journey with them. The world’s so shit at the moment. It’s an hour of good escapism.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
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Big Little Lies: A group of mothers in a wealthy seaside town cling to their friendships as a murder investigation reveals betrayals, hidden traumas and the dark realities behind their perfect lives.
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tagged in: BBC, ITV Studios, Matthew Barry, Quay Street Productions, The Guest