“Primetime”, interview with actors Skyler Gisondo, Merritt Wever and Bokeem Woodbine

In competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival 2026, Primetime is the narrative feature debut of documentary director Lance Oppenheim, a fever-dream thriller inspired by the true story of Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator, with Robert Pattinson transformed into a gonzo version of the star journalist. Skyler Gisondo, Merritt Wever and Bokeem Woodbine are part of the film’s supporting cast, playing people caught up inside Hansen’s operation as it turns justice into entertainment. In conversation, the three actors reflect on the moral weight of the material and on how closely the show’s 2006 world of hidden cameras and manufactured spectacle anticipated the one we live in now.

Truth and fiction begin to dissolve

Asked how it felt, professionally and morally, to take part in a project where the line between reporter and performer keeps dissolving, Wever says the material itself put her at ease: “I wasn’t worried about it morally, because I’d read the article that it was based on, I’d read the script. I knew the kind of respect and care that Alex Winters, who plays Bill Conrad, was bringing to his role. There’s a line that gets repeated by Rob’s character very close to the end of the film, and I think if you make it through the film, watch what happened, experience the circus and watch Skyler’s performance, and hear that line repeated over and over, you understand where this film intends to land emotionally by the end”. Woodbine describes the film as an intersection of spectacle and compassion, crediting Oppenheim with pushing past the original show’s premise: “Lance takes it to another level. He goes deeper underneath the surface and manages to extract the truth in all the myriad of characters, because there are so many different personalities and energies in the project, so many different lenses with which we view this one kind of ugly subject. I was just grateful to have been able to try to bring some light to a slice of that pie, and I had no issue or qualms moralitywise, because I’m anti-predator, so that suited my role”. Gisondo, who plays Dan, describes him as the operation’s outsider, someone whose arc mirrors his own approach to the part: “Dan goes on this real journey where he comes into the operation just in awe of Chris and what he has, his own TV show, the cameras, and then he kind of grows disillusioned with the thing over the course of it. So I try to just be present, day to day, scene to scene, and reserve my own personal feelings, and just kind of always live through Dan”.

A time capsule for what came next

Asked how much the film speaks to a present in which media has, in a way, replaced justice, Wever points to the collision of institutions at its center: “One of the things this film has going for it is that it shows an alchemy between what happens when news, entertainment and law enforcement suddenly get tangled together, and when one of those entities suddenly starts to call the shots and run the show”. She recalls being old enough to remember the original show firsthand, and only realizing on set that the film was, for her, a period piece: “I didn’t realize, in a way, that I was part of making a period piece. I thought it was contemporary, and then I realized, oh no, it’s been twenty years. People keep asking us what we think about this, and I’m curious to hear what the younger generation thinks of this, who weren’t there for the show, so it’s not baked into their cultural or psychological experience”. For Wever, the timing matters too: the show predates a world where everyone carries the internet, and a camera, at all times: “Now you leave your house and you assume that anybody could pull out their phone and record you. And the other thing that’s happened is that people don’t just record each other, they record themselves now. […] It’s become this normalized drive to put anything about yourself on view for people”. That shift, she adds, has turned being on camera into something closer to a compulsion: “It’s interesting how being on camera is a new addiction, and people are self-possessed, as a self-possessed person, I can say this , because they think about how everything is going to look. Before, we would look in the mirror before we go out at night, but now it’s how you look at yourself on a video constantly”. Gisondo closes by recalling one of Chris Hansen’s own lines in the film, echoing what Wever had just said: “There used to be, you’d get dragged into the town square if you were a wrongdoer, a criminal or something. Now there’s a television in every house, and you’re on it, and so am I”. For him, the film has become something its makers couldn’t have planned for: “I think Merritt said it so well. It’s now a time capsule for a show that ended up serving as a blueprint for a really interesting time in our relationship to criminality and the prosecution of criminality as entertainment, as spectacle. I don’t think we realized at the time that the show was on the way that it would kind of reverberate for the next twenty years”.

 

Plot