Lila Raicek has been busy. Her play My Master Builder debuted last year at Wyndham’s Theater in London’s West End. It starred Kate Fleetwood, Elizabeth Debicki, and Ewan McGregor in his first play in over a decade. Meanwhile, Raicek has been adapting another play of hers (Vertebrae) into a TV series (Night Float) starring Nina Dobrev, while also developing a new play (Fire Season) for Broadway that Billy Crudup and Amanda Seyfried have been reading. But on a recent morning, the writer spoke to me from her home in New York about yet another project: her debut novel, The Plunge.
“When you’re writing a play, or a screenplay, you have the ability to dip into other characters’ perspectives, and you’re constantly flipping those perspectives, which keeps a story alive in a certain way,” Raicek said of why she chose to write The Plunge as a novel. With this story, “I really wanted to get under the skin of this character and into the psychological and emotional layers of her.” Writing a novel requires staying with a singular perspective, continued Raicek, and “even if she’s an unreliable narrator, it was a challenge I wanted to give myself.”
It’s also a personal story. Raicek began writing The Plunge in 2021, just a few years after calling off her wedding to Amazon exec Roy Price following revelations of sexual harassment claims by a TV producer against him. Raicek then decamped to New York and started down the path of rebuilding. “This book came out of a dark period in my own life when I was grappling with loss and really thinking about the process of starting over,” she explained. “I wanted to explore a character who has to almost go to an even darker place to find herself again.”
The novel’s protagonist, Liv, a Hollywood writer of about Raicek’s age, flees L.A. after her problematic fiancé is fired from his job then dies in a car accident mere weeks before their wedding. Back in Manhattan, Liv is drawn into a sordid love triangle against a backdrop of hedonism and glamour spanning Manhattan, the Hamptons, and Lake Como. Liv’s path to reinvention is messy, unruly, and nonlinear in a way that “I think hasn’t been explored very often,” continued Raicek, but one that has consumed her recent work. “To have an authentic, raw voice, you have to go to the thing that obsesses you.”
For anyone who has seen My Master Builder, the themes of desire, betrayal, and the mistakes of the past may seem familiar. In the play — which Raicek based on Ibsen’s The Master Builder — an old affair between a famous architect (McGregor) and his student (Debicki) is reignited when the architect’s wife (Fleetwood) arranges a dinner party the former student is invited to.
“I’ve been interested in exploring a world through an outsider perspective — somebody who’s lured into a world that they are not familiar with, and how do those very combustible elements end up playing out?” says Raicek. “As a female writer, it’s a really exciting time to mine the depth and messiness of female desire. I think it appears in my work whether I want it to or not.”
She wrote My Master Builder in a sudden creative burst after receiving the commission, and within six months it was going to the West End. “It was a wild dream,” recalled Raicek. “A rollercoaster of a process that I was lucky to have.” The play sold out for 13 weeks and was well reviewed.
“It is so exciting to have that dialog and conversation with an audience, and sit in the theater while they were gasping and crying and yelling at the stage,” continued Raicek. With a novel, the experience is almost entirely interior and quiet, she admits, “but I’m hoping that it will touch people and move people, and the characters will mirror the reader’s own experiences of pain and loss and incongruent desires and all the things that the novel is about.”
So will Raicek adapt The Plunge to screen or stage? “I’ve already been developing it for film with a very exciting star,” said Raicek, though she was tight-lipped on who. “It’ll be announced in due time,” but in the meantime she’s focused on translating her work to screen. In other words, Raicek isn’t slowing down anytime soon.
This story appeared in the April 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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