“This isn’t a hit piece in any direction”: Merritt Wever on Primetime

For those outside the US, the dawn-of-reality TV show To Catch a Predator may be completely unknown, although David Osit’s 2025 documentary Predators will have brought some viewers up to speed. It still might not have fully prepared them for the unsettling experience of watching Primetime. Here, the controversial early 2000s series is given the fiction treatment by another documentary filmmaker, Lance Oppenheim (Ren Faire, Spermworld), who makes his narrative feature debut. The outcome is…like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Finally putting the nail in the already almost closed coffin of his Twilight heartthrob era, an unrecognisable Robert Pattinson inhabits the role of the show’s host, Chris Hansen, alongside Merritt Wever as the ambitious producer by his side. We sat down with Wever to discuss playing a woman whose moral compass is questionable from the outset, Pattinson’s penchant for extreme physical transformations and Oppenheim’s distinctive, almost voyeuristic documentary style, which lends the movie its raw immediacy.

Sarah Bradbury

Primetime is released nationwide on 30^th October 2026.

Watch the trailer for Primetime here: