Dark-and-creepy tale gets a fresh twist

If you’re building a dark and creepy tale, you really need a creepy, dark building.
The British prefer mansions, manor houses and castles; Americans prefer apartment houses that cater to the rich and fretful.
“There’s just something really sort of compelling about the idea of an apartment building,” said Emily Fox, showrunner of “The Watchful Eye,’ which debuts at 9 and 10 p.m. Monday (Jan. 30) on Freeform. “And the fact that it does contain so many stories and that all these people are so close … It’s our version of a castle.”
This could be “Only Murders in the Building” without the laughs, but Fox points to other inspirations – the apartment building in “Rosemary’s Baby” or the mansion in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca.” And then there’s what makes “Watchful Eye” stand apart: Unlike “a classic, Hitchcockian thriller, there is a very empowered female at the center,” Mariel Molino (shown here) said.
She stars as Elena, starting work as a nanny. Viewers expect her to be a young innocent, someone like Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby” or Joan Fontaine in “Rebecca.” They get something more.
Elena isn’t really from Boston, as she claims. Like the rich people, she has secrets and schemes.
“I was really interested in the duplicity of her character, and the … two sides of her that she has to juggle,” Molino said. “She’s a girl from Queens, and sometimes she taps more into her accent when she’s at home.” Among the wealthy, her words become “a little more enunciated.”
That might be tricky for some people, but Molino is used to it. She studied acting in New York, but for five years did Spanish-language shows in her native Mexico, at first as Mariel Chantal. That changed last year, when she co-starred in ABC’s “Promised Land,” playing the land-owner’s younger daughter,
“The different languages, at least for me, sometimes trigger different things emotionally,” she said. Spanish is “my mother language, and so that definitely brings up certain emotions and feelings.”
Now she wanted a very different background. “I was able to work with a dialect coach and kind of pinpoint an exact place in New York that we wanted her to be from …. And what does it look like to be a Latina in that?”
Or what does it look like to be from there … but pretending to be from somewhere else … and surrounded by people who have their own secrets? That’s the start of a dive into gothic mystery.