“Anya Taylor-Joy likes to joke that I manifested her”: Author Marissa Stapley’s novel is the summer’s hottest new TV show

The Apple TV adaptation of your book is on just about every summer watch list. Could you ever have imagined this? Actually, I always imagined Lucky as a show and even wrote a pilot, but my agents said the best plan would be to publish the novel first and then see what happens. Before the book was released, I optioned the TV rights to ABC and Hulu—then they turned it down, which was absolutely gutting. Usually when a show doesn’t get picked up, it just dies on the vine.

But, when network TV closes a door, Reese Witherspoon opens a window? Pretty much. Reese somehow got the rights from ABC. I will never forget the day she chose Lucky for her book club. It had its Canadian release in April of 2021, and it wasn’t a bestseller. My agent invited my editor and me to dinner, and my first thought was that they were going to give me bad news. When I arrived, there was a bottle of champagne on the table.

How has getting tapped by an Oscar winner changed your life? It’s changed everything. After Reese supported Lucky, it became a New York Times bestseller. There’s a notion that celebrity book clubs take advantage of authors, but with Reese I was able to negotiate directly with Apple about the rights and my role as producer.

“Producer” can mean so many things. What did you do? Early on, I spoke with the team about my vision. They ended up capturing the dynamics between my characters so well. Lucky is about a con artist on the run, but it’s also about her relationship with her father and with herself. When they asked me about casting, I wanted Anya Taylor-Joy. I had seen her in The Queen’s Gambit and knew she was the one. She likes to joke that I manifested her.

Did you visit the set? My family and I went last spring. They were filming a car flip, and the stunt coordinator was Chuck Norris’s son, which was so cool. It was amazing to look around and think, I created this world. But the greatest thing was seeing people employed because of something I made. One of the stuntmen said, “Hey, Marissa, my landlord thanks you.”

Let’s rewind a bit. Where did Lucky’s story come from? I was listening to the radio, and the hosts were speculating why a lotto ticket for hundreds of millions hadn’t been claimed. One of them said that, sometimes, when people are wanted for a crime, they can’t come forward. And that was it. I held on to that idea, hoping to do something with it someday.

What was your writing process? During the pandemic, my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I just couldn’t think about work. It was my mom who said, “With everything we’re dealing with, we can’t have your career come apart as well.” I wrote Lucky sitting by her bed at Sunnybrook. She read an early draft before she died. The faith my mom had in me was absolute. People tell me, “You must wish she were here to see your success.” But she already saw it. If she came back and heard about all this, she would say, “Well, yeah, of course.”

Have you earned some cool points with your kids? My kids, not so much, but their friends, definitely. I went to my son’s prom pre-party, and he was like, “Mom, people are going to want to talk to you about the show.” My kids’ friends say hi to me now. It’s funny because I wasn’t cool in high school.

In 2019, you wrote an op-ed saying commercial fiction was treated like the spray cheese of CanLit. When my first novel, Mating for Life, came out in 2014, I did think it was literary, and it was painful to be told by critics that it wasn’t. I remember a columnist from the Globe and Mail essentially saying that books like mine were ruining people’s taste. Arguments like that are usually gendered. I write stories about women that are received by women. I’m supposed to feel ashamed because they’re accessible?

Will Lucky get a swanky Hollywood premiere? There’s an event in LA that I’ll attend with my family, so those cool-mom points will be in effect. It’s so outside of my daily normal, where I write and hang out with my cats.

Do you know what you’re going to wear? It would be nice to wear a Canadian designer. I’m probably going to rent something, which is just so Canadian of me.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.