Rachel Weisz Burns Bright in Netflix’s Vladimir, a Portrait of Desire as Self-Reclamation
There is a moment early in Netflix’s new limited series Vladimir when Rachel Weisz turns to the camera and announces, with the quiet urgency of someone who has just realized something terrible, that she may never again have power over another human being.
“For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.”― Women in Love
D.H. Lawrence, the English novelist, heavily censored and vilified during his lifetime, quoted twice – or more – in the Netflix series, believed that desire was the deepest form of human intelligence, would have recognized it immediately—not as weakness, but as the first tremor of a woman coming back to life.
“the woman you meet at the beginning of the series is trying to hold on for dear life because the earth has shifted under her.”
The Woman Who Would Not Want Less
The series is based on Julia May Jonas’s critically acclaimed 2022 debut novel, which Jonas herself adapted as creator, showrunner, and executive producer. It follows an unnamed English professor, often referred to in reviews as “M,” played by Rachel Weisz (The Favourite, Dead Ringers, The Constant Gardener, The Mummy) with fierce, funny, and occasionally terrifying precision, whose world is coming apart at the seams.
Her husband, John, played by John Slattery (Mad Men), the department chair she has shared both a marriage with a “marital arrangement” and a campus with for thirty years, is facing a Title IX hearing over affairs he had with students more than a decade ago. He insists the relationships were consensual and that the women were of legal age. The institution disagrees.
Jonas said, “It’s that feeling of being so full of creative energy because you have this lust or obsession for someone… how fun it is to want something.”
The protagonist finds herself standing in the rubble of a life she helped build, bearing the social weight of choices she did not make, feeling herself fade from the center of her own story. As Weisz describes her character in an interview with Netflix, “the woman you meet at the beginning of the series is trying to hold on for dear life because the earth has shifted under her.”
Leo Woodall photo courtesy of Netflix
Into this rubble walks Vladimir. Leo Woodall (White Lotus) plays the handsome younger novelist who arrives on campus as a celebrated new hire, and he becomes the object onto whom the protagonist projects everything she is hungry to feel again — seen, vital, alive on the page. She has not written anything in fifteen years. His arrival changes that. Jonas said, “It’s that feeling of being so full of creative energy because you have this lust or obsession for someone… how fun it is to want something.” Woodall plays the role with studied inscrutability, leaving every charged glance and near-touch open to interpretation. “There are a lot of moments where you’re supposed to wonder what the intention was,” he says. “Was it flirting? Was it friendliness?”
Jonas has called it” a deliberate inversion of literary tradition, “a nod to novels that name themselves after the young women whom the man is obsessed with,”
That ambiguity is the engine of the series. Weisz’s character is an unreliable narrator, and the fourth-wall-breaking direct addresses to the camera are not confessions so much as performances — carefully curated versions of events she is delivering to an audience she wants on her side. As Weisz puts it, “You have direct access to what the character is thinking and then also what she wants you to think,” and those two things are rarely the same.
The show’s title is itself a provocation. Jonas has called it a deliberate inversion of literary tradition, “a nod to novels that name themselves after the young women whom the man is obsessed with,” only here, the gaze belongs to a middle-aged woman who refuses to disappear.
The affair is eventually consummated. What is remarkable is what the series does next. The protagonist does not collapse or repent. She runs into a burning building to retrieve the notes for her long-unfinished second novel, and she comes out the other side with her manuscript and her life intact, if considerably singed. John Slattery brings a lived-in weariness to the husband — a man who loves his wife and has wronged her, unable to reconcile both truths at once. Jessica Henwick plays Vladimir’s wife Cynthia with a complexity that cuts against the protagonist’s envious reading of her. Kayli Carter appears as a former student who joins the Title IX case, and Mallori Johnson plays the protagonist’s most gifted pupil.
In the end, Vladimir is less a story about obsession than about what happens when a woman decides she is not finished yet. Lawrence called that impulse holy. Netflix has made it into very compelling television.
Vladimir is now streaming on Netflix.
Meet the Cast of Vladimir
- Rachel Weisz (The Favourite, Dead Ringers, The Constant Gardener, The Mummy)
- Leo Woodall (One Day, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy)
- John Slattery (Mad Men, Spotlight, Nuremberg)
- Jessica Henwick (Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Silo)
- Ellen Robertson (Mickey 17, Black Mirror)
- Kayli Carter (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Mrs. America, Private Life)
- Miriam Silverman (Your Friends & Neighbors, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window)
- Mallori Johnson (Is God Is, Steal Away)
- Matt Walsh (Veep, The Perfect Date)
- Tattiawna Jones (Murderbot, Station Eleven)
- Louise Lambert (Chucky, Doc, Ginny & Georgia)
Watch Vladimir on Netflix.
Images courtesy of Netflix.
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