Sharon Stone stars in HBO murder-mystery series

MANILA, Philippines — Director Steven Soderbergh’s experimental new miniseries, Mosaic, on HBO is a murder mystery in six parts, set in a snowy small town in Utah, a remote wilderness playground of the super-rich.

Mosaic begins at the ending. A woman has been found murdered, and a somber detective, Nate Henry (Devin Ratray), lays out the case against her former live-in handyman and one-time romantic interest, Joel Hurley (Garrett Hedlund), who just so happens to be the detective’s good friend.

Then the action shifts four years into the past, when Joel first meets Olivia Lake (Sharon Stone) working as a bartender at one of her charity fundraisers. An aspiring artist, Joel failed to find success in New York, and so had moved out to Utah to work odd jobs and hopefully attract a patron and mentor, which he finds in Olivia.

Olivia, a renowned children’s book author and illustrator, is looking for something, too. With her one literary success 25 years behind her, she lives alone and beyond her means on an estate she can no longer afford to maintain.

Olivia is a study in artistic frustration, loneliness and vulnerability. She distracts herself from her sorrows by spending her days chasing handsome young men and her nights torturing herself with self-reproach.

For Stone, Olivia Lake represents quite a departure. Famous for playing confident, aggressive women like her iconic turn as Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct, here she is nearly unrecognizable. Olivia Lake is filled with insecurities, doubts and at times, self-loathing. Desperately alone, desperately vulnerable, just desperate. As a woman approaching her twilight years, she seeks out the company of younger men almost as an affirmation. She is still desirable, she is still vibrant and interesting, there is more to her than the shallow socialite, building a monument to herself in the guise of charity.

• Stone: “That’s what was so wonderful, I think, to play a character that was more of a real life, real intimate, raw character. I think people are complex. I don’t think that people are just good and don’t have bad feelings. You might love someone and still think, god, I’d like to stab them in the eye. And then in the next minute you think, I just can’t live without them. You know, I think we have flashes of feeling and emotion. The quality of your character is what you do with all of your emotions.”

Olivia is easy prey for fortune hunter Eric Neill (Frederick Weller). A con artist for hire following in the footsteps of his convict father whom he gave up in exchange for his own freedom after a previous failed job, Eric skillfully blends lies with truth, dissembling with so much apparent candor, it’s difficult to ever know whether he’s being genuine or not.

His talent becomes his curse as he finds himself quite unexpectedly developing real feelings for Olivia. His dilemma, then, is obvious. To reveal the truth about his intentional insinuation into her life, or to continue the deception?

• Weller: “It’s great to have a character who moves from cold-bloodedness to love, to have that awakening. And the fact that it has this tragic consequence, I think it’s an amazing twist. And that arc has this incredible climax, with the scene with Sharon Stone. It’s an astonishing performance, that scene. And it really couldn’t have been done with any other director, because the way Steven (Soderbergh) shoots, you don’t have to worry about finding your mark or finding the light or any of that. There was nobody else in the room. He doesn’t have a vast crew. We’re in this cabin, it’s just Steven with a camera on his shoulder, and Sharon and me.

Garrett Hedlund as Joel Hurley with Jennifer Ferrin as Petra Neill

Here’s what the other cast members have to say about their characters:

• Jennifer Ferrin who plays Petra Neill: “There’s this wounded child in her. Abandoned by her father, the con artist who went to jail, raised by a very critical, condescending mother. And then also feeling a bit of abandonment by her brother. There’s a trust factor.

“I think that she’s searching for the piece that will give her the greatest feeling of wholeness. I don’t even know if she’s entirely aware of that. She’s someone who’s not deeply in touch with her emotions, she keeps them stuffed down and guarded. But when left alone and realizing that she might be utterly alone in this, she looks for purpose. And that purpose might be in correcting her wrong, where she was perhaps guilty of something. At the end, I think she’s surprised by her choice.”

• Ratray who plays Nate Henry: “I looked at Nate as the moral compass of the story. The one who did not have ulterior motives, but was simply trying to find the truth. And to have to bend that, to have to bend his own moral code, break the compass a little bit to get the truth, was a serious decision in the writing. He had to break his own rules to get further.

“Nate is a spiritual, God-fearing, good person, or at least he thinks he is. He pretty much lives that life. As far as good people go, he’s pretty clean. He’s not a fragile flower, but he’s a delicate dandelion.”

Writer Ed Solomon conducted interviews with the cast while working on the script, drawing from the actors’ real lives to inform the character portraits in the series.

• Hedlund who plays Joel Hurley: “It became a collaborative thing in terms of his investigative skills of getting to know you as a person. I’m from Minnesota, my character’s from Minnesota. Certain inner conflict or turmoil that I was going through at that point leaked into the character which made it interesting for all of us.”

• Ratray: “It’s incredible how he has structured this where it is not determining the outcome of the film, it’s just controlling what you see, what the person’s perspective is. It is a matter of what you want to see. He’s put out the whole buffet, it’s what you choose to pick from the table.”

Soderbergh employed this philosophy in the filming as well. Each actor was told they were the star, this was their story, the others were just living in their world.

• Ratray: “I was the star of my own movie. It was great! I was the lead, and everyone else was these little characters in my life. That was really nice of them to do such small parts in my movie. Paul Reubens is doing a little cameo in my movie. Sharon Stone’s doing a cameo!”

Viewers can stream Mosaic on HBO Go. There will also be a marathon telecast of the series on Feb. 10 and 11 on HBO Signature.