When you’re a teenager, every emotion feels extreme and profound. In Mae Martin’s new series “Wayward,” this idea is literalized to thrilling effect.
Martin, who created and stars in the show, serves as showrunner alongside Ryan Scott. Martin spoke to TheWrap’s Joe McGovern about the Netflix series at TIFF on Sunday alongside co-stars Toni Collette, Sarah Gadon, Sydney Topliffe, Alyvia Alyn Lind and Brandon Jay McLaren.
“My teens were so visceral, and I remember forensically every moment of that period of my life, and I particularly remember feeling a keen sense of injustice at the world,” Martin said. “I wanted to explore how young people know who they are and they have a strong moral compass, and then we all, as we get older, have to suppress our critical thinking to participate in the world. So I wanted to make a thriller out of that and explore the troubled teen industry. I had a best friend who got sent there.”
“Wayward” uses the troubled teen industry — a string of private institutions and programs such as boot camps and boarding schools for struggling teenagers — as the backdrop for a thriller, with Martin playing small-town cop Alex Dempsey, who digs deeper into one of these facilities.
The eight-episode series, which releases in its entirety on Netflix on Sept. 25, will premiere its first two episodes at TIFF on Tuesday.
With this premise came a real tightrope act, one where Martin and their actors wanted to sell the seriousness of the situation while staying true to the nature of the teenage protagonists. This meant mixing a lot of laughs into the thrills.
“I think that’s just human nature,” Topliffe said. “I don’t think you are always super serious or incredibly funny all the time. I think that shows the complexity of these characters. I mean, it’s the reason you cry at a wedding and you laugh at a funeral. It’s that beautiful dichotomy of life.”
“Especially with teenage girls, I think you could be in a life-and-death situation and get the giggles,” Martin added. “I remember that kind of hysteria. So, it’s kind of if you took the girls from ‘Booksmart’ and put them in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’”
Joining Martin in the cast, Collette plays Evelyn Wade in the series. Evelyn is a key figure at the local troubled teen institution that becomes the subject of Alex’s investigation. Collette is no stranger to the thriller genre, picking up her only Oscar nomination for “The Sixth Sense” and starting a sort of second movement in her career with her tour-de-force performance in “Hereditary.” Collette reveled in the opportunity to play another complex character, adding that she wanted to “look like a serial killer without being one” through Evelyn’s Dahmeresque glasses.
“That’s one of the most delicious things about this character and the town: Nothing is as it seems. I just cherish playing characters that feel real and complex,” Collette said. “I know that this is about an experience of a troubled teens institute, and I think it’s such a condescending situation, and this woman does treat them with real respect, and really at the core, wants the best for everybody. But she herself has had a traumatized past and has so much that she suppresses in order to survive, like we all do, and it all just comes out the wrong way. But I think her intentions are excellent. It’s just all somewhat convoluted.”
