Go Behind the Scenes of 'The Perfect Couple' with Ishaan Khatter
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If Shooter Dival, the friend of the Winbury family in the new whodunnit The Perfect Couple, seems to have found himself exactly where he shouldn’t be—namely on Nantucket for a wedding when a guest ends up dead and nearly everyone’s a suspect—then Ishaan Khatter, the actor who plays him, had almost the opposite experience. “I was lucky,” Khatter tells T&C, “to be in the right place at the right time.”
Khatter is talking about landing the role in Netflix’s starry adaptation of the Elin Hilderbrand novel, streaming now, which marks the Indian star’s first time working on an American production. He’s part of a cast that includes Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Meghann Fahy, Sam Nivola, Eve Hewson, and more, and spent four months in the U.S., mostly on Cape Cod, filming the series. And if his character is a bit of a rogue, Khatter doesn’t really mind.
“Nobody’s a clean slate, and that makes Shooter so compelling,” he says. “The series is unpredictable, and there’s much to be discovered. It feels like walking a tightrope playing this guy, he’s a bit of an outsider in the grand scheme of things and that made it intriguing for me and kept me on my toes, as I hope it does for the audience also.”
Here, Khatter opens his camera roll to share a behind-the-scenes look at The Perfect Couple, and the moments that didn’t make it on screen.
"I’m in costume in my trailer on one of the early days of shooting. When I have a moment to myself in costume, I think a lot about who this guy is. Costumes are such a great entryway into the character; they help a lot to figure it all out."
"Something that I was often deemed bonkers for was going swimming on Cape Cod in March and April. Everybody thought I was crazy, but I have a love for ice baths and I thought it was a great opportunity to make use of the freezing water. There was a sequence Eve and I filmed in one episode where we take a little dip, so we were the only ones subjected to the cold water. It was fun, if icy. This is us with Susanne [Bier] just after."
"We didn’t often discuss work when we hung out off set, but when we were at work, everyone was super focused. This photo is from right before we started filming, when we were just getting to know one another. We were hanging out at the Chatham Squire; we’d play pool or go bowling, doing whatever we could do to get to know one another and form a bond. Meghann Fahy is wearing a beanie and hoodie because it was still cold—also, she is from Massachusetts, so she knew her way around better than the rest of us."
"During filming, I was reading The Old Man and the Sea. This is the garden of the house I was living in, and it was a perfect day with nice weather; I started the day reading in the grass before I went to work."
"We went to Provincetown on one of our days off. We all decided to take a day out there and went whale watching, which was a fun experience, and then the lot of us stumbled into a bar. This photo of Sam Nivola, Jack Reynor, and Billy Howle was taken in between copious amounts of food, drink, and laughter when we were winding down after a week of work. I’d also like to note how many Indian people I saw in Provincetown; it was probably the only time I was surprised. Being on the Cape in the spring, it was sparsely populated. We were living in Chatham, and most of the excitement there seemed to come from our film crew moving in, so Provincetown was surprising because I do remember a lot of people from India being there."
"We were filming on Cape Cod for four months, and all of us had to find ways to keep ourselves busy. You’d have full days—there are a lot of characters and stories on the show—but you’d also have days off. One of the things that kept me afloat was having the company of the cast... there is an inherent loneliness to being an actor, there are lonely workouts and meals, but we would also get to hang out with each other. This was a day when Sam Nivola and I got a workout in together. I think he resented me for making him train more than he would have liked, but it was one of the perks of working with such a friendly, talented cast."
"This game of pool looks serious because I was a novice, so I was really focused on learning. The boys made a pool player of me by the end of shooting, though. We all got to know each other through a sense of competition. Jack is probably the best among us."
"Unfortunately, this has to remain out of context… The look was for a scene we shot—I’m sure not if it made the final cut—where there were Halloween-type costumes involved. I wore a straw hat and we were really having fun with it."
"This picture was taken in London, where we were shooting right after the end of the SAG strike. The dog belongs to our first assistant director, and this is Signe Sejlund, our costume designer and Susanne’s partner in crime. They’ve been colleagues forever, and she was one of the first people each of us met when we joined the show."
"When we had a weekend off from work, Sam and I found a lake nearby to go fishing together. We did catch quite a few fish, but released them all back into the water."
"This to me is a particularly poignant and telling image that was taken on the last day of shooting the series: Our director, Susanne Bier, walking into the distance after finishing the final shot. It’s a picture I took before leaving the set of The Perfect Couple for the last time."
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