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[Editor’s note: The following interview contains light spoilers for “Disclaimer.”]
Alfonso Cuarón‘s new foray into the world of television with the AppleTV+ thriller, “Disclaimer,” based on the novel of the same name by Renee Knight, delves into many of the questions that have peppered his work — ideas about family, both biological and chosen, masculinity, and secrets that can threaten a life carefully constructed.
Knight’s novel has plenty of those themes to work with and the medium gives Cuaron’s already-expansive world-building even more breathing room. The series stars Cate Blanchett as Catherine Ravenscroft, a famous journalist and documentarian, who unexpectedly receives a copy of a new novel, which she soon discovers features a barely-masked version of her as the main character. Along the way, the novel reveals a secret she’s long kept hidden from her family and the world at large.
The series is deliciously twisty and gorgeously rendered, and putting Blanchett toe to toe with Kevin Klein’s antagonist Stephen is a thrilling, unexpected pairing. As the series goes through its seven chapters, the nature of the pair’s relationship to one another is slowly revealed, but one surface level element immediately unites them: They both have cats.
Catherine’s glamorous home is introduced in the first episode after she and her husband (Sacha Baron Cohen) come home from an event honoring Catherine to have a nightcap before discovering the book that will unravel her life. Making sure to be seen is their gorgeous gray cat, meowing for attention as they drink their wine.
Stephen, on the other hand, is emptying out the closet of his deceased wife (Lesley Manville) to donate items to charity. In the process, he discovers photos that his wife kept from an Italian vacation the family, which included their now-deceased son Jonathan (Louis Partridge), had taken many years ago. But before he shuffles through the photos, he lets in their orange tabby, meowing at the glass door, for feeding time.
Now, noticing this doesn’t just make you a crazy cat lady (on the record, I am), because as the series continues, the presence of both cats in Catherine and Stephen’s respective lives and the focused attention paid to what the cats are doing or how they are acting is too prominent to simply write off as the addition of cute house pets for mere fun.
Cuarón’s reasoning for making cats such a focal point in the series is twofold. Aside from them being incredible, he told IndieWire, he also sees cats as another way to play with ideas of narrative, something that “Disclaimer” aggressively explores.
“They are completely impassive about all the human drama. All of this is happening, and they don’t care. They’re just there. It’s us who put all this weight in caring and creating the dramas. Cats don’t have those dramas either. Yes, they fight with other cats, but it is not like this whole thing of holding things inside and they don’t build up narratives,” he told IndieWire during a recent interview.
Cuarón believes we’ve become addicted to creating narratives — in the ways we filter our lived realities through them — even when they can be completely unreliable. “There’s another aspect of narrative that is a tool for manipulation that has always existed. Now we’re living in a world, thanks to telephones and social media, in which narratives, they are completely exploding,” he said. “We find ourselves in a world that is of conflicting narratives. And some of them are completely contradictory and completely unreliable. Narrative cancels contemplation because, in a contemplation, you have to keep narratives apart. Just try to be and that’s what a cat is doing — the opposite to everything that is happening.”
That idea of just being or being in the moment weaves itself throughout the series — many of the characters of “Disclaimer” are harboring old memories or grudges that have festered into something completely rotten — changing them in the process. Having cats peppered throughout the series shows how they just live their lives moment to moment: eating food, meowing for attention, cuddling an owner who clearly seems distressed.
But it’s also something that Cuarón said brings a lot to the aesthetic of the series. Cats add an element that can’t be controlled, which adds something unexpected to his direction. “I tend to be very controlling with my work and prepare a lot. What a cat gives you is that thing that nobody can control. If Cate is going to be cooking fish, just throw a cat in there. The cat is just going to try and eat that fish,” he said. “You cannot control the whole thing of just staying there or not staying there. So it helps to create a unique moment. Through rehearsals, there’s something that is not a truthful moment. You put a cat in, everything becomes truthful.”
While IndieWire didn’t find out if Cuarón owns cats himself, the idea of telling and learning the truth is central to what story he’s trying to tell with “Disclaimer,” as the audience has to parse through fact and fiction to discover whose perspective — whose story — is ultimately true.
And those adorable feline friends? They sell it.
“Disclaimer” is available on Apple TV+. Episodes 3 and 4 will be released Friday, October 18, and the final three episodes will be released weekly through the finale on November 8.