Andrew Scott Says ‘Ripley’s Murders Reveal He’s Not the “Natural Born Killer” People Think He Is: “He’s Never Murdered Anyone”

Netflix‘s Ripley shows us how a petty grifter like Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) goes from stealing mail from elderly Manhattanites to taking on the identity of a wealthy shipbuilder’s son in the most luxurious rooms in Europe. Sure, a simple case of misunderstanding gives Tom the opportunity to go to Europe, all expenses paid, in the first place. However, Tom Ripley seizes his own destiny by boldly reinventing himself and, uh, murdering people when it becomes necessary to do so.

**Spoilers for the first five episodes of Ripley, now streaming on Netflix**

Yes, Tom Ripley eventually becomes a killer. In Ripley Episode 3, “III SOMMERSO,” Tom decides to kill Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) with a blunt blow to the head while the two have a tense tete-a-tete in a small boat off the coast of San Remo. Dickie was on the verge of cutting Tom off and forcing him back to the States, where the FBI had already been closing in on his various acts of mail fraud. While it’s easy enough to kill Dickie, getting rid of his body is far more difficult, sparking a sequence that puts both Tom Ripley and actor Andrew Scott through the wringer.

“I think it’s a sequence that really solidifies the tone of the show, which I think is really, really wonderful in the sense that we get to really spend time with seeing this character think, you know?” Scott told Decider. “He thinks like no other literary hero. I think he thinks in a very particular way and I think that’s really pleasurable for an audience.”

However, things go slightly differently for Tom after his second kill in Ripley Episode 5 “V LUCIO.” Dickie Greenleaf’s friend Freddie Miles (Eliot Sumner) confronts Tom about taking on Dickie’s identity (and wealth) and threatens to report him to the police. Tom reacts by once again bludgeoning a foe, this time with an ashtray, to death. Once again, Tom is left with the “heavy lifting,” in Scott’s words, of getting rid of the body.

“They were different [scenes], I suppose, in the sense that Tom is a little bit, it’s not the first time he’s done something like this,” Scott said, confirming not only that Dickie was Ripley’s first ever kill, but that he’s not as out of his depth getting rid of Freddie’s body.

Nevertheless, mistakes are made disposing of Freddie Miles’s corpse, and Andrew Scott told Decider that he loved that Ripley didn’t shy away from showing its titular character’s missteps.

“The thing that I love, primarily about those sequences, is the mistakes that he makes or the fact that he has to take time to think about it. That we really see that this isn’t some natural born killer,” Scott said. “You know, I think sometimes Tom Ripley has a kind of reputation as somebody who’s just, like, excellent at doing that kind of stuff. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

“When we meet him at the beginning of the story, he’s never murdered anyone and has no intention of it. And that happens for a very extraordinary — mysterious even to him, I would say — reason and he isn’t… I don’t know, he isn’t used to it anymore than any one of us would be used to it.”

So if you find yourself going into Ripley expecting the story to be that of a seasoned killer, deranged sociopath, or extraordinarily evil character, Andrew Scott disagrees! What makes the Patricia Highsmith character so tantalizing to this day is the fact that he seems ordinary because part of him…is ordinary.