Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline's perspectives clash in exclusive Disclaimer clip

We’re all familiar with the concept of an unreliable narrator—that the perspective from which a story is told can’t entirely be trusted. Alfonso Cuarón‘s Apple TV+ series Disclaimer comes from multiple perspectives. “Part of the reason I was attracted to writing and directing Disclaimer is because the story is told in different voices,” Cuarón says in an Apple press release. “We have a voiceover that is telling the story in first person, second person, and third person. In the second person, the action is much more removed. In Spanish the second person is called accusativo which means accusative. It implies an accusation.”

The dueling narration comes into play in this exclusive Disclaimer clip, wherein the storylines of acclaimed journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) and widowed, retired teacher Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline) cross for the first time. Stephen had previously discovered a shocking manuscript in his late wife Nancy’s (Lesley Manville) belongings that exposes the interaction between Catherine and his son Jonathan (Louis Partridge). Catherine destroys the manuscript that was delivered to her, but Stephen has it published as The Perfect Stranger and begins delivering it to Catherine’s loved ones as an act of vengeance.  

Voiceover is crucial on multiple levels in the clip from Discliamer‘s third episode, which airs on October 18. In first-person narration, Stephen reflects that his revenge plot makes him feel closer to Nancy—as does, apparently, keeping her voice on their message machine. Unfortunately, his beloved wife’s voice gives way to his nemesis’ as Catherine offers emphatic if somewhat banal compliments for The Perfect Stranger. Of course, from her perspective, Catherine feels she’s doing “the right thing,” offering Stephen acknowledgment while also emphasizing that the book is a work of fiction. 

For her part, Blanchett was almost as stirred by the script for Disclaimer as Catherine is by The Perfect Stranger. “The only other time I’ve had this reaction to a script was when I read David Mamet’s Oleanna. I pushed the script away and thought, ‘I really don’t like this woman. I don’t know how to get in there.’ And then I thought, ‘No, it’s Alfonso, keep reading,'” she shared in a press statement. “I like to think I’m a very open and relatively non-judgmental person, that I don’t need to like a character, and I don’t form judgments. But as the story unfolded, I was very confronted as I found myself quickly forming judgments. I thought it would be a fascinating journey to be on, to tell a tale from so many points of view, but also to play a character who is such an enigma and who exists more in people’s judgments than she does in her own right. I thought that would be an amazing challenge.”