'American Psycho' Hits Broadway

The bloody, pitch-black satire "American Psycho" is now a Broadway musical. We’ll dive in with the director and star of the show.

When Bret Easton Ellis brought out American Psycho in 1991– his glossy, bloody novel of a murderous young Wall Street serial killer– a lot of people just couldn’t take it. Maybe it was satire, social commentary. Maybe the killer Patrick Bateman was ripped and absurdly well-dressed. But American Psycho was so soaked in spattered blood and barbarity toward women that a lot of readers put it down. Now it’s on Broadway.  Up next On Point: the director and star and relevance now of American Psycho.
-Tom Ashbrook

Benjamin Walker, actor and stand-up comedian, playing Patrick Bateman in "American Psycho: The Musical." (@FindtheWalker)

Rupert Goold, director of the Broadway and London versions of "American Psycho: The Musical." (@rupertgoold)

Dwight Garner, book critic for the New York Times. (@DwightGarner)

In Hindsight, an ‘American Psycho’ Looks a Lot Like Us — “American Psycho” is, in its way, strangely moving. The novel is streaked with Bateman’s attempts to confess his crimes. He lusts for genuine contact. He tells one woman to go home because he thinks he might harm her. “I think,” he says, “I’m losing it.” Writing in Town and Country, Mr. Ellis said recently that if he had composed the novel in the past decade, Bateman might be “palling around with [Mark] Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder.” Swipe left, young ladies. (New York Times)

The Creative Team Behind Broadway’s American Psycho on Embracing the 80s and Dealing with a Lot of (Fake) Blood — "How does one convincingly portray a gratuitously bloody ax murder for the viewing pleasure of a live audience? Furthermore, how does one do it without splattering those sitting in the front row with a generous heaping of fake blood? In the Broadway musical adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, which opens on April 21, the famous scene in which a raincoat-clad Patrick Bateman (played by Benjamin Walker) ax-murders his rival, Paul Owen (played by Drew Moerlein), takes place behind a plastic scrim to protect the audience from errant spurts." (Vanity Fair)

'American Psycho' at 25: Bret Easton Ellis on Patrick Bateman's Legacy — "I created this guy who becomes this emblem for yuppie despair in the Reagan Eighties – a very specific time and place – and yet he's really infused with my own pain and what I was going through as a guy in his 20s, trying to fit into a society that he doesn't necessarily want to fit into but doesn't really know what the other options are. That was Patrick Bateman to me. It was trying to become a kind of ideal man because that seemed to be the only kind of a guy that was 'accepted.'" (Rolling Stone)