Julia May Jonas on Bringing Vladimir to Netflix—and What She Changed

Author, playwright, and now Netflix showrunner Julia May Jonas deftly shifts her approach to storytelling depending on her medium. Vladimir, Jonas’s 2022 debut novel, follows an unnamed—but very popular—English professor in her 50s, whose desire and ambition are reignited by the arrival of a hot new colleague named Vladimir, who’s just landed in town with his wife and 3-year-old daughter. For the first time in years, the book’s narrator is tempted to take advantage of her open-marriage arrangement with her husband, a fellow professor named John. As she grapples with lust and uncertainty (is Vladimir flirting back?!), John faces an investigation into his affairs with female students over the course of his academic career. In the new Netflix adaptation, streaming as of March 5, actors Rachel Weisz, Leo Woodall, and John Slattery bring these three main characters to life onscreen as they navigate their perception of events…versus the reality.

Although Jonas points out that there are now a number of mainstream narratives in film, television, and literature that center women in their 50s exploring their sexuality, Vladimir feels distinct because its narrator isn’t afraid to outline exactly what she’s thinking. (In the Netflix series, Weisz breaks the fourth wall, speaking directly to the audience as she vocalizes her character’s thoughts and desires.) Society still centers youthfulness, Jonas argues, and thus a niggling fear remains amongst many women: Who am I if—and when—I keep getting older? “When we think about female sexuality in a straight, socialized way, we tend to think about women who are in their 20s and 30s,” Jonas says. “And I think so much of our desire—if you’re a certain kind of woman, and I think there are many of them—comes from being desired in a very classic and typical way.” If your entry point to desire is in fact being desired, where does that leave women who might begin to feel invisible as they age? “[Vladimir] is about the fear of that happening,” Jonas says. “That all of a sudden they’re not able to recognize their own desire.”

Given her past experience running her own theater company, Nellie Tinder, it’s exciting to see Jonas adapt her own material for the screen, rather than hand it over to someone else. “I have a background of working in theater, not only as a playwright, but also as a director,” Jonas says. “I had my own theater company for a long time, and I produced. So [adapting Vladimir] felt very much like I was at home—at a very intense kind of home with a different setting and scenery—but in terms of being a showrunner? It didn’t really sink in. I felt like I was just trying to make the thing. That’s what I’ve always done.”

John Slattery and Julia May Jonas on the set of Vladimir.

It’s rare that an adaptation manages to feel simultaneously faithful to its source and yet significantly different. Vladimir somehow manages to straddle this line. “I was writing a novel, and that’s what I wanted it to be [at the time],” Jonas says of the book. “And then the adaptation was its own new project, in a way.”

In Vladimir the series, the main players remain the same: our protagonist; her philandering and charmingly manipulative husband, John; their daughter, Sidney; and, of course, the tantalizing Vladimir and his wife, Cynthia, a talented yet troubled memoirist in her own right. Yet the narrative scope of the Netflix series is wider, encompassing interactions with students and fellow teachers—bringing the simultaneously invigorating and infuriating experience of academia to life.

As a show, Vladimir leans heavily on the absurdist humor lurking in everyday interactions. “I think there are about 10,000 different versions of what an adaptation could look like,” Jonas says. “You could have made Vladimir nothing but whispering trees and people looking longingly out of windows. And that would also have been a kind of faithful adaptation. And so you start saying, ‘All right, well, we’re making an eight-episode, half-hour comedy…’ I feel there’s differences that come from the form and the process of development.”

Accordingly, the intense interiority of the protagonist’s thoughts on the page are channeled by the extensive use of voiceover—and the aforementioned fourth-wall breaking. As someone who read Jonas’s book, I was curious to see how the adaptation would tackle translating the voice of the novel, and particularly its narrative style (which is firmly situated within the protagonist’s head). In order to translate this element to the series, Weisz addresses the viewer directly, though it’s hard to say whether this technique pulls viewers out of the scene or deeper in. “We talked about trying to keep access to the narrator’s interiority, because that’s so much of what it feels like the book is about: her thoughts and her opinions and her kind of working through this desire,” Jonas says.

The effectiveness of this technique will come down to your personal taste and sense of humor. (Female-led television remains intent on attempting to recapture the irreverently deadpan humor of Fleabag, yet there remains only one Phoebe Waller-Bridge.) Either way, Vladimir is a wild ride—whether you’ve read it or you’re encountering these seductively flawed characters and their incendiary (pun intended) story for the first time on streaming. What’s changed between the book and the show? Arguably, very little. Let’s run through the few key tweaks.

Rachel Weisz in a scene from Vladimir.

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Introducing Lila

One of the most prominent changes between the novel and the series is the introduction of Lila (Kayli Carter), the last student to have had an affair with John. While the last scene of the novel alludes to this young woman, she lacks definition as a fully fleshed-out character. Netflix, however, gives her a name and her own scenes, adding to the tension brewing on campus and off.

“We needed to have someone who we can take in and understand that she’s gone through this experience,” Jonas says. “[The need for Lila] was very present from the beginning.” Although the novel focuses solely on the unnamed professor protagonist’s experiences, adding Lila as a full supporting character heightens the stakes for all involved—and shows an opposing perspective on the story’s central events.

Kayli Carter as Lila in a scene from Vladimir.

Sidney’s Role and Relationships 

While Sidney remains a key character in the series, as she is in Jonas’s novel, the show focuses a bit more on her prowess as a lawyer rather than on her personal life. Yes, the adaptation includes many of Sidney’s main plot points from the book: She returns home from New York after an argument with her partner, Alexis; she has drunken sex with a stranger in the bathroom at a train station. But the reason for her fight with Alexis is shifted: The impetus for their rupture has to do with Sidney’s feelings around family planning, rather than—in the book—her streak of infidelity with a law intern at her nonprofit. Nor, in the Netflix show, does Sidney become pregnant with a stranger’s baby as she does in the novel. Instead, her screen time is centered on how her family sees her: evolving from her parents’s child to a seriously talented lawyer with her own separate, adult life.

Ellen Robertson and Rachel Weisz as Sidney and the protagonist in a scene from Vladimir.

Vladimir’s More Overt Flirtatiousness

In order to work onscreen, the fierce (and deadpan) interiority of the novel required transformation. For Jonas, this transformation involved creating more scenes—notably between our protagonist and Vladimir himself. Unlike the novel, in which every incident is filtered through the protagonist’s perception of her colleague’s intentions, the Netflix adaptation depicts these scenes literally (and adds in flashes of sexual fantasies to boot). And honestly? Given what we watch, who can fault our protagonist for wondering about Vladimir’s true feelings? His body language and playful dialogue sure seem to indicate his interest. An impromptu drop-in to the professor’s seminar, in which she discusses a love scene in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, has Vladimir picking up the slack from her students, reading between the lines to reveal a potentially steamy love scene. Watching the characters interact onscreen, audiences are drawn into the protagonist’s spiraling analysis of Vladimir’s every word and move.

Leo Woodall as Vladimir in a scene from Vladimir.

The Ending

For those of you perhaps hoping to see Slattery and Weisz transformed by makeup and special effects, following the fire at the protagonist’s cabin, I hate to disappoint you…The show ends, simply, with the cabin on fire.

In the novel, we discover the couple horrifically burned after the incident, recuperating in separate burn units and care facilities. The blow of their ordeal is softened as they recoup a massive insurance payout, which allows them to split their lives between an apartment in New York City and the university town upstate. They choose to remain a couple, but they temper the amount of time they spend side by side. Despite suffering permanent scarring—and the protagonist losing her novel in the fire—they’re able to put the book’s events behind them. The final pages focus on a young woman who knocks on their door, where the protagonist reminds her that she still has her whole life ahead of her.

The novel’s ending feels more realistic, while the series takes another approach: pure fantasy. In the hours before the fire, both John and Vladimir offer the protagonist their separate visions of possible futures. Not only does Vladimir forgive her for drugging him and tying him to a chair in her cabin, but he offers to continue their affair. Rather than make a decision on the spot, she heads to bed alone to mull it over. When the fire breaks out, John, Vladimir, and the protagonist all rush into the living room.

Rachel Weisz in a scene from Vladimir.

Panicking, the protagonist has a few moments to decide: Does she stay with the men and find an escape with them, or does she save her novel-in-progress from being engulfed in flames? Spoiler: She chooses her in-progress manuscript. A falling beam separates her from John and Vladimir, but she scoops up her work and makes it outside to deliver her final monologue to the camera—an ending that remains deliberately open-ended. Over “Truth Hurts” by Lizzo, Weisz coyly turns to the camera: “You don’t believe me?”

“The ending that existed in the book is almost like an epilogue, really,” Jonas says. “It felt like that was not going to work inside of the series. It didn’t. We talked a lot about…What can she take from this? Desire gave her [something] bigger than any of the actual events that happened.”

In both the novel and the series, desire acts as an accelerant for the protagonist’s dormant creativity and ambition. It only makes sense that, in the series, she chooses her work over being a character in some man’s story. Then again…maybe that’s only our perception.