Netflix ‘The Watcher’: Ryan Murphy proud to cast older women in series

Netflix’s The Watcher has garnered a lot of popularity ever since it released on the streaming website.

To talk about the series, showrunner, Ryan Murphy sat down with the female cast members, which included Naomi Watts, Jennifer Coolidge, Margo Martindale, Mia Farrow and Nova Dumezweni.

During the conversation, Murphy admitted that he took pride in the fact that he accomplished what few (if any) Hollywood projects try to do these days: casting women over 40.

“The interesting thing about this project for me is… two things, one, that I love that this project has all of the roles, these amazing, juicy roles for women over 40,” Murphy began. “People are always writing articles about how there are no roles for women over 40. That’s not true … I specifically try and do my part.”

The women all agreed at this point. “I try. But I love the scenes that you women all have together.”

Murphy went ahead and said that the second reason why this project was interesting to him was because all the female cast members were his first choice and they all said yes, “without reading anything”.

“I thank you for that. I have worked with many of you before and for some it was the first time. I love you all,” Murphy added.

The group of women seated were pleased with Murphy’s comments.

The Watcher is Murphy’s second No. 1 series debut in four weeks after Dahmer, Netflix’s biggest series debut on record, which has now accumulated 824.15m total hours, per The Deadline.

The Watcher was created by Murphy with Ian Brennan, and executive produced the limited series alongside Alexis Martin Woodall, Eric Kovtun, Bryan Unkeless, Eric Newman, Paris Barclay, Watts, Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost and Scoop Wasserstein.