Alex Winter Explains How He Brought Humanity to a Predator in ‘Primetime’

On Nov. 5, 2006, as a camera crew from NBC’s hit tabloid news show To Catch a Predator descended upon his house alongside a seven-man SWAT team, Texas District Attorney Bill Conradt committed suicide with a Browning .380 pistol. He’d been communicating online and via telephone with someone he thought was a 13-year-old boy but was actually an adult working for the vigilante group Perverted Justice. The incident sparked a major lawsuit, and led directly to NBC’s decision to forever pull the plug on To Catch a Predator. 

It also serves as the climax of the Lance Oppenheim movie Primetime, where Robert Pattinson embodies the role of To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen in such eerie fashion that a Best Actor Oscar nomination is almost a guarantee. 

Joining Pattinson in the movie is an unlikely team of actors, including onetime NBC head Jeff Zucker, former child star Jonathan Lipnicki, The Office‘s Creed Bratton, and indie-rock star Phoebe Bridgers, in her first acting role.

For the role of Bill Conradt, Oppenheim selected Alex Winter, who is best known for his portrayal of Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the Bill & Ted trilogy. Over the past 15 years, Winter has directed a series of acclaimed documentaries, including Downloaded, Deep Web: The Untold Story of Bitcoin, Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain, and The YouTube Effect. Many explore the devastating impact of social media and the internet as a whole on society, and Primetime takes place in a world just on the brink of many of these changes.

We caught up with Winter to talk about his sympathetic portrayal of Conradt, working with Oppenheim, his recent Broadway turn in Waiting for Godot alongside Keanu Reeves, and the moment he realized that Oppenheim had secretly been collaborating with Nathan Fielder on You Can See Everything over the past three years.

How did you first hear about Primetime?
My agent got a call from Francine Maisler, the casting director, saying that Lance was interested in talking to me about that role. And I knew of Lance through his documentary work quite well. Obviously he knew my acting stuff, but we knew each other from the doc space, which is tiny. There’s like six people in that space.

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So I was a huge fan of the script, and really interested in the character of Bill Conradt right from the jump. I was surprised at the depth of the part. It’s a small part, but there’s a lot there. And I was very fascinated by Bill Conradt.

What about him did you find so fascinating?
I wasn’t familiar with [To Catch a Predator]. It just wasn’t my world. It was on at a time when I wasn’t checked into that kind of TV. So I had missed the whole phenomenon. But the script was such a shrewd examination of media right at that nexus point before the internet happened, which, I’ve made a lot of movies about this exact thing. So topically, the way our culture deals with sexual abuse and predators is of interest to me, and something I’ve tackled with the Showbiz Kids doc and have my own personal history in that space.

And then Lance, whose work I loved, his documentaries have a kind of narrative style to them. He’s got a very particular style. So that’s why Bill Conradt was of interest to me, was because of what the movie and Lance was doing with [his story].

I felt like there was an opportunity to represent this cultural taboo creature in a more human way. And not to exonerate him, but just to present him as an actual human being, which is what is not often the case. And so I just did a lot of research into Bill and his work environment and his life. I talked to DAs and ADAs and other people in the region where he practiced. I’m a character actor by trade and by training, so I love to research and dig into backgrounds, and having a real person to investigate was helpful and interesting.

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As you learned more, did you begin to sympathize with him?
I mean, I come into these things with a sympathy for all sides. Because these are all people, and they’re people who need help, whether they’re survivors or predators, they both need help. Most of the time, neither of them are getting help. So I’d say I come into it with empathy and some degree of sympathy from the get-go — certainly empathy from the start, sympathy depending on the case. I’d say I have less sympathy for someone like Harvey Weinstein.

Of course.
But with Conradt, I did sympathize. It seemed like a very tragic case that involved coercion and a kind of grotesque throwing to the lions for the sake of ratings, a desperation for greater ratings, and very little nuance and examination of human beings involved.

So it was, I felt, an interesting opportunity to portray someone who certainly had very bad flaws, and was operating in a way that was potentially very harmful, but was at the bottom of it all, a human being. And it’s something that I’ve gotten into with my docs quite a bit. So I dealt with it in the Silk Road case and I’ve dealt with it with other documentaries where they’re dealing with characters that are, like most human beings, not black or white.

In the scene where Conradt is on the phone with someone he believes to be a child, it really seems like he’s in agony over his own desires, and he knows he’s doing something awful. He’s a tortured person.
Yeah. Lance’s documentaries, he calls them “docufantasias.” So there’s a dreamlike, fantasy quality to the world he’s representing, and the portrayal of Chris Hansen. Certainly, the way I came at Conradt, I wasn’t trying to be Bill Conradt; it wasn’t a biography of Bill. So there’s other stuff going on in the character I’m playing that isn’t related to him and specifically trying to litigate his story.

But I do feel the character was tormented. This guy had deep loneliness and inner torment. But as you said, obviously a compulsion, which I was interested in interrogating a little bit. And again, it’s not a piece of activism, it’s acting. So I didn’t do it to plant a flag in the sand or to have a message, but it was gratifying to be able to investigate this person in that way.

I think Lance had a twofold interest in me — specifically, one, related to how the public perceives me. When you cut through the computer and you find me on the other end, it could be a real jump scare, which we both knew we were leaning into. “Oh, shit, it’s that guy? What the fuck?” You could hear in the screening that we saw, there was an audible gasp in the theater when I appeared. And that’s exactly what Lance wanted.

But he also knew my own history with abuse, and he knows I do a lot of stuff outside of my work with group therapy and helping kids in the abuse space. So he knew that I had a pretty deep understanding of the predator-survivor relationship and what that is.

Lance made so many interesting casting choices in this movie with you, Phoebe Bridgers, Creed Bratton, Jeff Zucker, Jonathan Lipnicki. Few people would have predicted them.
That’s right. And what I love about Lance is that he’s not being meta for meta’s sake. He’s going after people to get really deep performances out of them. I mean, Creed is amazing in the film, I think. He’s so good, and it’s such a powerful scene. It is really like a scene out of Lance’s docs, though. It’s like a scene out of Ren Faire.

And so it was helpful to me going into this, because Lance was using the same crew that he’s used on all his docs. He has a very specific creative team. So it was a fairly big movie, but it was shot in a nimble way. And because I knew Lance’s docs, I knew how to plug Bill Conradt into that world in terms of the creating.

As the authorities and To Catch a Predator production team are approaching Bill’s house, it starts to feel like a horror movie. You know something awful is about to happen.
Yeah. I could tell while we were shooting that sequence what the vibe of it was going to be. And obviously we shot a lot more than is in the movie. But I think they used the perfect amount. So the stuff that’s gone of mine, I was actually happy to see gone. But yeah, his approach was very specific, and the thing about him is he knows what he wants, so it was fun to work on in that way. 

But to your point, it flips the monster, because in a way that whole sequence is set up like, “Oh, it’s a horror movie and they’re going to get Hannibal Lecter,” like a scene out of Silence of the Lambs with all the cops descending on that house. But of course, the monster ends up being Chris Hansen.

It’s amazing that the film kind of makes the audience feel bad for a wannabe child molester. 
Yeah. Honestly, that was important to me, and it’s something I discussed with Lance. I wanted people to sympathize with Bill. Again, it doesn’t mean that you exonerate him, but I felt like if I could have some small part in creating a little bit of a tweak within the cultural understanding of these people, especially in the sort of post-Epstein world we’re in now, where it’s become so caricatured and politicized. At the end of the day, really, they are just people and they really do need help. And so I really did want people to sympathize with Bill. I mean, I won’t lie there.

Bill needed professional help before he hurt a child. He didn’t need an NBC camera team swooping into his house.
Yeah, exactly. He needed some help and he probably would’ve survived had he had it, and everyone would’ve been better off and it wouldn’t have been like we were unleashing a monster on the world. But we have a long way to go culturally before we’re there, I think. And some people said to me, some of my friends, “Is it odd for you as a survivor playing a predator?” It’s not, because I’m an actor and I’m playing a character. I’m not doing therapy through my acting work. I do therapy with a therapist.

But from my perspective, it will help survivors if we humanize predators. That’s the biggest problem I have with shows like To Catch a Predator, which I caught up on once I was doing research for this film. I was like, “Oh, well, this isn’t really helping either.” It’s not really helping the survivors and it’s certainly not helping the predators. It’s not really providing any kind of service other than pure, low-hanging fruit, vigilante justice for TV ratings. That’s all it is.

I’m sure you see this movie as a piece with Deep Web, Downloaded, The YouTube Effect, and a lot of your other work. They all fit together.
And Showbiz Kids. That’s kind of a biographical story told through other people, all of whom had experienced severe trauma within their work as child actors. So it’s an interesting nexus point for me. The internet, the exploitation of people via media, how society responds to media, and also the birth of the discourse that gave rise to online communities and the discourse online, all of that is in this movie, which is so rich.

Yeah. You’ve often explored the early days of new technologies like Napster and YouTube, and how they grew and changed in terrible ways nobody would have expected.
I think that the early days of the open net and even the early days of the web were pretty great. There was a freewheeling, democratized nature to them before they were really co-opted by big corporate interests and oligarchs, and also weaponized so that you had this hyper-angry discourse. I mean, that’s what The YouTube Effect is about. It’s where the internet ended up and how it was weaponized.

There was so much great promise in the early days of the web. We were told it would democratize information, and give people all over the world a top-class education in history, language, culture, philosophy. Everyone would have the greatest works of art at their fingertips. It didn’t play out like that at all.
I mean, it did break a lot of barriers down. It did create ways for people all over the world who didn’t have access to information and knowledge to get access to information and knowledge. Of course, what we’re seeing now with the land rush into AI is — and we saw it happen with music, we’ve seen it happen with movies — the theft of people’s works. Now you have all of the authors, all of the journalists, all of the text in the world is just being fed into these LLMs and then sold off by other people without helping the people who actually created this stuff. So I think we’ve landed at the worst of the worst of the worst of where this all could have ended up.

During the making of Primetime, did you have any idea that Lance was working on You Can See Everything with Nathan Fielder, or was that totally secret?
It was very secret. In fact, I was with Lance and the [Primetime] gang at the Venice Film Festival. We came out of the premiere, which was really, really great, and a great entry for Lance into the world as a narrative filmmaker. It was so great to be there with him for that.

But we were all hanging out at the party that night quite late, and he said, “I’ve literally got to stay up all night and get on a plane and go to Telluride in three hours.” And then they told me what they had done. They were like, “You got to keep it quiet, because it’s a secret.”

I saw the movie early. I saw it at the premiere in L.A. And I was blown away by it. The combination of Lance and Nathan Fielder’s sensibilities is really dynamite. And there’s a lot of Lance in that. I mean, obviously, Nathan is at the center of it, and he’s an amazing talent, but there’s a lot of Lance, [cinematographer] David [Bolen], and that sort of aesthetic in that project.

There’s already talk of a Best Picture nomination, which would be incredible for a documentary.
It’d be incredible, and it would be gratifying to see, because people, and Lance would say this, there’s been a growing evolution of the doc form for years, going back to Kiarostami’s [1990 film] Close-Up, the work that Robert Greene does in the doc space, we call it docufiction, a kind of cumbersome term, but it’s not the first docufiction film by any stretch. It’s already gratifying to see it reaching these kinds of popular heights where people all over the world are seeing it.

I also am really happy about it because I feel like it’s a really good way to tell the story of the negative effects of tech oligarchy. It’s a very effective delivery system for that story. And I think it’s interesting to watch [Alex] Gibney’s Musk come out at the same time. They’re both great movies, right? Gibney’s amazing. He’s the best at what he does in the world. But I think it’s easier for the public to grasp this thing through the Lance and Nathan project. It’s entertaining, it’s very human, but it really tells you the story of the negative impacts of tech oligarchy in a very effective way.

To switch gears, you did Waiting for Godot on Broadway with Keanu Reeves about a year ago. How do you look back on that now?
It was amazing. I mean, forgetting the play for a second, to work with Keanu in a non-Bill and Ted project as grownups where we are in our lives, and [director] Jamie Lloyd, who I’m a huge fan of… We went to Jamie with the project because we’re fans. And then to go back to Broadway, not having been on Broadway since 1981. I spent my whole youth on Broadway and Off-Broadway.

And speaking candidly, in respect to Primetime, [Broadway is] where the abuse happened, and it was a very loaded time for me. It was a mixed bag of the greatest time in my life and a very horrific time in my life, but it was years and years and years. I spent a lot of my youth and all of high school in two Broadway shows, eight shows a week, summers, winters, the whole time. So it was a real trip to go back to being in a dressing room. 

It was honestly one of the greatest experiences of my life doing it. I would go back. I’m doing another piece of theater. We’re doing an Arthur Miller play, Incident at Vichy, in New York in May that I’m going to act in and I’m co-producing. [Godot] did kind of reawaken that in me, and really I’m happy to be doing more theater again.

Do you think it bonded you and Keanu even closer as friends?
We’re pretty damn good friends already. We’re kind of like brothers. So the depth of trust that we have enabled us to do the show. I think we were both really happy to see that it didn’t strain our relationship because it could have. Because it was fucking hard, and it’s scary. We were really well prepared, and we really had confidence in the concept that Jamie had, and the other actors with Brandon [Dirden] and Michael [Patrick Thornton], and we had confidence in the way we decided to play these two characters. But it’s a lot of pressure and it’s Broadway.

Opening night, we sat behind the screen that comes up before, and we looked at each other and we were like, “I think I’m appropriately terrified. How about you?” He goes, “Oh, yeah, I’m shitting myself.” I’m like, “OK, good. Because there’d be something wrong with us if we weren’t.” So the stakes were very high and there was a lot of pressure. And I would say the bond that we had carried us through the show. I mean, I’ve known the guy for so long. We were already so trauma-bonded already just from making the Bill and Ted movies, which are so hard and always such a trial by fire.

It’s pretty amazing you guys are so close. What usually happens when two people are strongly associated with each other, real resentments creep in and it pulls them apart.
Yeah, except… I’m not unaware that it’s what I’m most known for, but it’s not what I think of as myself at all. Put it all together, it’s like nine months of my life out of being on this planet for 61 years.

So I do so many other things, and Keanu does so many other things, that it’s not like we’re Abbott and Costello, like that’s all we do. I think if it’s all we did, yes, we’d probably never talk to each other at all off camera. But because we do them so rarely, we hang out. I think that’s where Keanu and I got the idea of doing something that wasn’t Bill and Ted was like, we hang out, and yet we’ve never done anything as who we actually are. We’ve always just done Bill and Ted. So let’s try to do that.

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What are you working on now?
I’m actually working on another feature. And I made this movie, Adulthood, that’s out now. It’s about to hit streaming, but it’s on pay-per-view now with Josh Gad and Kaya Scodelario. It was a lot of fun. I’m working on the Incident at Vichy play, which is quite a bit of work. And I’m about to put another movie together that I’m going to shoot next year.

Cool. I’m really looking forward to the Oscars next year. It’s easy to imagine Lance up at that podium for Best Picture. It would be such a moment of triumph.
It would be a moment of triumph for him, for the doc space, for the fight against tech oligarchy. But also, I’ve got to say in complete honesty, he is such a good person, and he and his creative team are so wide-eyed and passionate and uncynical and humble. I sound like the old schmuck, but it really couldn’t happen to a nicer person. So I really do hope it happens for him in that way. But honestly, he’s had already an overload of abundance so far. I think that whole crew are deer in the headlights right now. So they kind of can’t lose at this point.