Colin Firth declined to contact Michael Peterson in preparing to play him on HBO Max's The Staircase

Deadline

“I didn’t communicate with Michael Peterson,” Firth tells Deadline of the 78-year-old ex-convict. “I felt the way the script was structured and just the whole approach of this was its own ecosystem, so to speak. These are created characters but we all know what the source is. We all know that these characters have names of living people, but it’s very carefully calibrated to tell the story in a certain way. I felt that I wanted to keep my inspiration, my motivation, and the sense of the source material, as much as possible contained within the script and the way it was written.” ALSO: The Staircase will examine the Owl Theory.