2023 Emmys: Rachel Weisz Stuns with the Emmy Season’s Best Performance in ‘Dead Ringers’

Last week, I bemoaned the tepid state of the 2023 Emmy limited or anthology series offerings.

That was before I’d seen Amazon Prime’s Dead Ringers. It is a complete Emmy season game changer, a wonderfully literate and brilliantly observed piece of art anchored by the very best performance that the very talented Rachel Weisz has ever given.

But before we jump into the series and its potential Emmy story, I’d like to spend a few minutes orienting you within my own head as I consumed Dead Ringers. Shouldn’t be that painful. I’ll need to take you back to Friday, July 16, 2004. I’d gotten The Call from my extremely pregnant wife. She experienced her first real contractions, and it was time to start timing them. We’d been ready for weeks. We’d bought everything we needed and many things we didn’t need. We’d been to classes. We’d created a birth plan. We packed enough luggage for a 5-day stay at The White Lotus: Maui.

We were filled with the joy, nerves, and excitement typically attributed to first time parents.

But here’s what they don’t tell you. That feeling doesn’t always last. It didn’t for us anyway.

Initial contractions lasted throughout the evening and into the next day, Saturday. We were told to stay home and sleep, but who could sleep through this? We were about to meet the little being inside — the one we’d come to know as “Nemo” since we didn’t know the gender pre-birth. Finally, we decided to head to the hospital as the contractions moved closer and closer. Upon examination in triage, though, my wife had unfortunately not physically “progressed” enough to be granted a room. They gave us the option of going home or of waiting to see what the next few hours brought.

Pause. A bit of advice for future parents: stay home as long as you can.

We opted to stay at the hospital and wait. We sat in triage for three or four hours into the night of a full moon. All around us, pregnant women were rolling in and were literally having babies in triage. My wife’s contractions became increasingly painful but still she wasn’t physically ready for the birth.

Then came the moment we’ll forever regret. The doctor advised using Pitocin to “help things along.” We’d understood through birthing classes what the drug was and what it did. When used in normal quantities. We agreed and were given the next available room. A nurse came in and administered the drug using what we thought would be a gradual drip. We later found out they administered the full dose at once, propelling my wife through several hours of intense, painful, and psychologically damaging labor pains.

Around midnight, a severe thunderstorm enveloped the hospital, lightning breaking through the sky illuminating everything around us. And my wife screamed in pain. Exhausted yet full of adrenaline, I actually began to believe she had, through our long day, learned to control the weather as her screams became perfectly timed with bolts crashing from the pitch black sky outside our tiny hospital window.

At last, it was time. She had “progressed” enough to start pushing. And you all know how that goes. Screaming. Sweating. Swearing. More screaming. Exhaustion. Finding that last bit of energy left where none exists so you can usher this tiny human out of your body. It still wasn’t working fast enough. Out came the instruments, namely forceps and a scalpel.

Through birthing classes, I’d heard the word “episiotomy” before, but I’d never considered it something that we’d actually experience. Yet, here we were. Despite all of my wife’s brilliant, courageous attempts, our child still didn’t want to see the light of day. So, out came the scalpel. During the birthing process, a nurse brought in a giant mirror that writ large my wife’s vagina with the intent of giving her a focal point for her pushing. It did not help that at all. All it really did was to give me an unavoidable front row seat to the episiotomy, something I would never forget. If you don’t know what that is, then go look it up. It was extremely unpleasant for both of us (obviously more so for her — I’m not a monster). But the images of blood and severed flesh were burned into my psyche for months following the birth. I hurt for her. Yes, she’d had an epidural, but I could feel the pain radiating from her like jagged scars of lightning.

Finally, sobbing from complete and total exhaustion, she gave birth to our son. We thought it was all over at that point. Again, we were wrong. He wasn’t breathing enough thanks to meconium in his lungs, put there thanks to the stress from the delivery process. His initial scores were very low, so they had to take him away from us. Throughout the entire birth class process, we’d been instructed over and over again about the critical importance of those first precious moments of bonding between mother and son. Yet, he was gone. It would be hours before we’d actually hold him. And then, once we finally met him, my wife needing to start the feeding process, which was of course traumatic and difficult — made more so by what we’d come to know as the “lactation nazis.”

Of course, everything worked out for us. We were lucky. The birthing process does not work out for everyone. But it left us scarred. Both of us. It would be three years before we’d successfully try again and fortunately experience a birth process that was far less traumatic. And our son is now wrapping up his freshman year at college. We couldn’t be more proud and happy with who both of our children have turned out to be.

But I shared this story to put you in the mindset of someone who did not experience “the joy” that is often associated with child birth. It’s key to understanding the tension and the dread and the fear embedded in Dead Ringers.

Based both on the 1988 film of the same name by David Cronenberg and on the novel “Twins” by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, Dead Ringers stars Rachel Weisz as identical twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle. In the series’s first two episode, they pursue funding for their dream of an advanced birth and research center. Beverly, probably super-ego or ego of the pair, is the nurturer, the primary physician who shepherds women through their best possible birthing experience while unable to carry a child of her own to full term. In one early sequence, Beverly suffers yet another miscarriage while in the bathroom. She reaches into the bloody toilet bowl and fishes out the abandoned fetus, gently stroking it with a mixture of clinical detachment and exhaustion.

Elliot, the definite id of the pair, is the mad scientist of the clinic. Most comfortable in her secret lab, she continuously grows embryos to implant in her troubled sister. She also pushes, and eventually shatters, the boundaries of legal embryo gestation. She’s also the fun one. The one who says “fuck” nearly as much as she snorts a heady cocktail of crushed pills. She rarely hides her own feelings, expressing every emotion or doubt or frustration or anger in a toxic barrage of honest vitriol. She’s the “free thinker” of the twins and is popular with investors for her fearless approach to medical advancements.

Naturally, Beverly and Elliot clash many times throughout the course of the series, but they always remain in each other’s orbit, seemingly unable to live without the other.

Dead Ringers smashes head-first into the legality, the morality, and the profitability of the modern female healthcare industry. It so rapidly moves between controversial topics with expert, sometimes subtle, dialogue choices that you almost miss them. In the same vein that Mike White’s The White Lotus comically satirized the ridiculously wealthy, Dead Ringers tackles the rarified air of the venture capitalists. In the absolutely, blisteringly brilliant second episode, Beverly and Elliot attend a retreat at the home of Rebecca (the marvelous Jennifer Ehle), an exceedingly wealthy woman looking for an innovative cash grab. What excited me most about Dead Ringers was the breath of fresh air I felt while it navigated the healthcare / gynecological industry with the same aplomb that it applies the increasingly emotionally fragile relationship between Beverly and Elliot. It feels like a gulp of fresh, cool water after crawling for days in the desert. This presentation of controversial ideas and against-the-grain takes just engages me in ways very few television series do.

And Rachel Weisz without a doubt completely and totally nails this dual performance. Gone are the days of Lindsay Lohan (definitely Hayley Mills for the older crowd) in The Parent Trap. Modern technology and Weisz’s enviable instincts realize Beverly and Elliot as two distinctly different, yet completely identical, women. Elliot’s openness, her tigress on the hunt body movements, underscore her intoxicating persona. She’s the one that absorbs all the light in a room. Conversely, Weisz’s Beverly shrinks from the light. She’s timid, reserved, and afraid of her own thoughts. She’s also given to love and expressions of affection more readily than Elliot. Weisz defines each character through movement, simple gestures that immediately orient us. It’s a high wire act of a performance, and it’s flawless.

Emmy-wise, Weisz is obviously the strongest bet here. It’s the kind of unavoidable performance that simply cannot be ignored. Personally, I’ve not experienced as visceral of a reaction to a series since Five Days at Memorial. This is not a by-the-numbers attempt at television entertainment. This is a complex, complicated limited series with real things to say. With characters you will hate. With scenes you won’t want to see but are never gratuitous.

Will the Television Academy embrace the part or the whole?

Reviews have been good with a few notable detractors completely missing the point, calling it “boring” or “shallow.” It’s anything but. Trust me on that. Should Amazon get this in front of the Academy, buzz alone could carry it into the top five. Certainly, director and writing nominations would be in play. A celebration of Weisz could indeed lift all into contention, particularly Jennifer Ehle’s very memorable performance. It’s so odd to think that birth trauma from Dead Ringers could hold it back from being embraced by the Television Academy when, a few years ago, The Boys received a nomination for drama series. Guess trauma is more acceptable when it’s hilariously over the top. Lace it with real human emotion and experiences, and we shy away. No, thank you. I’d rather not remember that, we say.

Neither my wife nor I remain haunted by our first birthing experience today. But occasionally, we do recall it and shudder with revulsion and disappointment that the experience wasn’t what we’d dreamt it to be. Do any real life experiences match our idealized dreams? Likely not. The memories — a mixture of unpleasant, life-changing, joyful, terrifying — remain, and they certainly reappeared during Dead Ringers. In a way, it gave me an “in” into the story, a way to experience and understand the emotional beats of the series without having ways to experience them directly myself.

Given the chance, Dead Ringers will engage you, enrage you, and entrance you with its oddities.

It’s wonderful. Do not miss it.