Hilary Swank apologizes for being late for the interview as she and the publicist for the FX series “Trust” took a wrong turn down a hotel corridor. It’s an understandable mistake, especially when you factor in that it has been a few years since the Oscar-winning actress has been part of any kind of promotional press for a project.

“I took care of my dad who had a lung transplant, which is the hardest thing you can undergo. My dad is doing great now, but it was three really tough years. So, I took three years off and so 2017 is my year of getting back into work,” Swank says. “I did two movies and one TV show in a year.”

The films were “Logan Lucky” and “55 Steps,” while the TV production is “Trust,” a series inspired by true events that examines the trials of one of America’s wealthiest and unhappiest families, the Gettys. The series mixes equal parts family history, dynastic saga and an examination of the corrosive power of money at the heart of every family, rich or poor.

The series begins in 1973 with the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III (Harris Dickinson), an heir to the Getty oil fortune, by the Italian mafia in Rome. His captors banked on a multi-million-dollar ransom. What they discovered was Getty was not prepared to pay a dime without a lengthy negotiation process. Continue reading Hilary Swank had Trust in returning to work

“Money. Sex. Violence. Kidnapping.”

Donald Sutherland, looking meditative over breakfast at an upscale diner here in late January, was contemplating a question: Why were people suddenly fascinated by the Getty family and what happened to them in 1973? How, he added, “did this family who had so much success also have so much failure?”

Mr. Sutherland plays the billionaire J. Paul Getty in the new FX series “Trust,” which debuts on March 25. Like Ridley Scott’s recent movie, “All the Money in the World,” the first season of the show — three different season-long stories about the Gettys are planned — deals with the 1973 kidnapping of the patriarch’s teenage grandson, John Paul Getty III, and the concatenation of family tensions around money and power that frames the event.

“There is an ecosystem around it which is as extraordinary as the kidnapping itself,” said Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “127 Hours”), who directed the first three episodes and is an executive producer on the show alongside the producer Christian Colson and the writer Simon Beaufoy. “An amazingly compelling world emerged out of the research.”
Continue reading The Trust Equation: Wealth and Power Equals Misery