Sex, drugs and serial killers: inside Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis’s lurid TV thriller

One of the first things Ryan Murphy’s TV adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards will make you ask is: where the hell are these kids’ parents? The answer is simple. This is Los Angeles in 1981, and these fabulously benumbed kids aren’t being helicopter-parented. They’re going to parties, drinking whiskey, listening to Ultravox’s Vienna on repeat and doing copious amounts of cocaine. It’s a complete vision of Ellis’s dully hedonistic America.

The FX series follows a character named Bret Ellis – a thinly-coded version of the author – in senior year at an exclusive Los Angeles prep school whose controlled, Joan Didion-coded world begins to unravel with the arrival of enigmatic transfer student Robert Mallory. At the same time, in the post-Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer era, a serial killer known as The Trawler draws ever closer to Ellis and his increasingly paranoid circle of friends. Ellis (the real one) first released his autofictional story The Shards as a serialized podcast between 2020 and 2021 before expanding it into a novel in 2023.

Originally, the novel seemed destined to be adapted by Luca Guadagnino. Instead, in a twist of fate (and professional conflict), Guadagnino’s more measured style gave way to Murphy’s unashamed extravagance, as he came onboard in February 2025. On paper, Murphy and Ellis might seem like opposites, but in The Shards, they find everything they have in common. Both are “obsessed with moments in their youth of hidden identities”, said Brad Simpson, The Shards’ executive producer, and both came of age in the time of Aids. “That’s affected gay artists more than most people think.”

“This story is about a group of young, beautiful people who are about to embark on the world, and there is a killer that hunts them. There’s an obvious metaphor to Aids in the 1980s for that,” says Simpson, speaking on Zoom along with the cast a week before the show’s release.

For Murphy’s interpretation of The Shards, he assembled a combination of seasoned actors and the next wave of young Hollywood. The cast includes Kaia Gerber, returning to Murphy’s world after appearances in the American Horror Story franchise, as the reluctantly perfect Susan Reynolds. Igby Rigney, television’s future Evan Peters, plays Ellis. Meanwhile, the seven-time Tony award-winning producer Jordan Roth plays personal assistant Steven Reinhardt, a kind of Lynchian version of Andy Warhol who Murphy says he modeled around Roth. “He sent me a DM saying, ‘I have a part for you. Call me,’” says Roth.

Homer Gere steps into what feels like a role poised to launch a career overnight as Robert Mallory, the irritatingly self-assured object of Ellis’ obsession. “Gen Z wants to have new stars, they want fresh faces,” explains Simpson.

The cast hadn’t met before, but Gere and Gerber had certainly heard of one another. There was some air that Gere (son of Richard) and Gerber (daughter of Cindy Crawford) felt they had to clear. Their parents were one of the defining star couples of the 90s, so when they first met two weeks before filming: “I think one of the first things we said was, ‘Should we address it?’” says Gere. They ended up laughing about it, and got the inevitable conversation out of the way before they went to set. “So it’s not like we ended up talking about it every day.”

One of Murphy’s main casting criteria for selecting this cast was their aspirationalism: namely, would you want to go to a party, drink whiskey and do mounds of coke with them? Probably. But also, please don’t do that. While Love Story, Simpson and Murphy’s previous series, helped make smoking cool again. “We regretted that,” Simpson says, laughing. He hopes this one won’t inspire kids to “have drug-fueled parties and drive quickly on the PCH”.

Right now, a week out from the season premiere, life is much the same for the acting newcomers. “I’m just hanging out, seeing friends, reading books,” says Gere. Upon release, that will all be turned on its head. Entering Hollywood through one of its biggest doors, the cast are suddenly staring down the possibility of overnight fame. The closest glimpse of what’s to come is seeing themselves plastered across billboards all over Los Angeles. How do you prepare for something like this? “You can’t,” says Campbell, who’s kept the blond perm that he sports as character Thom Wright, whose jock archetype devolves throughout the season.

In The Shards, each of the characters is desperate to be seen, no more explicitly than Debbie Schaffer, a seethingly insecure teen played by Hayes Warner, primarily known as a musician somewhere in the vein of Avril Lavigne. Those feelings were easy to access, she says. “I was in the music industry, and it’s so oversaturated, and there’s so much desperation to get your music out there, like, how do you get people to listen and care and hear about it?”

The Shards clearly demands attention with its classic cocktail of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, though it leans heaviest towards the drugs. Throughout filming, the cast consumed a staggering amount of “terrible cigarettes and iced tea [standing in] for whiskey”, says Campbell, who only landed his first professional role three years ago on Broadway. Then there were the cocaine re-creation experiments, as the actors went through a series of milk and coconut powders. Out of everyone, Warner’s character had by far the most coke per capita. That first trial with coconut powder “was too sticky”, she says. Eventually, they traded it for milk powder, which Warner snorted in large quantities while reshooting her many coke-sniffing scenes. “The powder would begin to liquefy in my nose,” she says, grimacing.

The Shards is billed as an erotic thriller, though it’s a surprisingly chaste entry in the genre. In the era of Heated Rivalry, expectations have been heightened for graphic man-on-man sex, but The Shards instead thrives on tension and suspense. There’s nary a dick shot to be seen. No blowjobs and not even a measly handjob. There’s some aggressive making out, but that’s as far as it goes.

“I think it’s deeply erotic, and I think it’s deeply beautiful. I think there is a lot of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, but it’s done in a way that’s much more elevated than people are accustomed to these days,” says Campbell.

For the sexy scenes there are, Rigney says: “The intimacy coordinator gave us an ungodly amount of Listerine strips, and you have to watch what you eat for lunch,” although he was tempted to find out how good his fellow actors really were by “going the pickle, onion, tuna route”, he says. “But in the end, I just love them too much to do that.”

Rigney plays the leading role with keenly observed physical code-switching, veering between his real (gay) and fake (straight) selves. In Ellis’ straight romances, Rigney plays the rigidity of a straight teenage boy. In his homosexual encounters, his entire body shifts. He’s suddenly sylph-like and coy, eyebrow arched, smarmy, crotch forward. Rigney said it’s not something he had to be directed to do. “That was all natural, baby.”

As the next generation of actors, they’re desperately hoping for a second season. “Is the cash coming in?” Rigney pauses. “Well, what I will say is it’s amazing to have a stable job as an actor, regardless of what the income is.” He taps the wooden table next to him. “If we get a second season,” teases Simpson, “we promise there’ll be more sex.”