Dispatch • Jason Bateman, Troy Kotsur, and the Creative Team of 'Black Rabbit' on Brothers and the Grit Beneath the Glamour

Jason Bateman has a theory about his appetite for pressure, the professional kind. “I pointed it towards work about 25 years ago,” he told the room at a recent Netflix FYSEE panel for Black Rabbit, referring to his habit of taking on directing, producing, and acting all at once. “I like as much responsibility as possible.” When Black Rabbit creators Zach Baylin and Kate Susman, along with Jude Law, came to him about the show, he wanted to take a similar hands-on approach to the one he took with his previous Netflix series Ozark, so that “basically all you need to do is just point the camera at the people.”

With Black Rabbit, the material gave him plenty to work with. The eight-episode limited series follows two brothers from Coney Island who build one of Manhattan’s hottest restaurants, then spend eight episodes discovering how much family loyalty can survive. Jake Friedken (Jude Law) runs the place: polished, charming, and more compromised than he wants to admit. His older brother Vince (Bateman) co-founded it and lost his share after years of addiction and bad decisions. When Vince resurfaces with a six-figure gambling debt to a mob boss named Joe Mancuso (Troy Kotsur), Jake gets pulled back in, and Black Rabbit reveals itself to be less a crime story than a tragedy about two brothers who can’t stop loving each other, even as they keep pulling each other under.

At Netflix’s FYSEE panel for Black Rabbit on May 16, moderated by Deadline executive editor Dominic Patten, Bateman joined Baylin, Susman, Kotsur, and production designer Alex DiGerlando, whose work, as Bateman made a point of saying, looks so convincing it hardly looks like work at all.

Baylin and Susman lived in New York for 20 years, eight of them in the West Village, essentially around the corner from the Spotted Pig, one of the restaurants that helped inspire the Black Rabbit. Baylin described it as the kind of place that felt like a nightclub without being pretentious, where anything could happen and often did. Restaurant culture, he suggested, attracts a particular pirate mentality: people who don’t want to work a traditional nine-to-five job. “We were really drawn to trying to write something about characters who are aspiring to really leave a mark on New York,” he said. Black Rabbit is about what it costs when they try.

The brothers chase that dream differently. Susman described Jake as someone whose ambition requires an audience, a man who presents himself as having everything together because the presentation matters almost as much as the reality. Vince wants success too, but doesn’t care as much about how he looks while chasing it. “Vince is a lot more a real person,” Susman said. “He knows who he is a little bit more than Jake does.” Jake wants to be seen succeeding. Vince simply wants to be whole. Baylin extended the idea with an image that captures the show’s view of New York: bars and restaurants look gorgeous at night, dimly lit and able to hide the mess. “New York is constantly being handed over to the next kid,” he said. “When it’s dimly lit, they look great. When the lights are on, there’s a lot of scars there.”

Making Jake and Vince hard to root for early on, Bateman said, took nerve. “It takes a while to sort of see, ‘Oh, these guys are doing the best they can based on the circumstances they grew up in,’” he added.

Kotsur’s Joe Mancuso commands a room without raising his voice, or using one at all. Mancuso is deaf and communicates through his son Junior, who translates and visibly chafes at serving as his mouthpiece. Kotsur got the role through a circuitous route. During the awards campaign for Apple TV’s CODA, he kept running into Baylin and Susman at events, and at one of them, they asked what kind of role he’d never played. He told them he wanted to play a bad guy.

About a year later, the script arrived with Mancuso written specifically for him. The historical grounding mattered to Kotsur: before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), mainstream economic life often shut out deaf communities, and some found their way into the black market and organized crime, histories that have rarely made it onto the screen. Playing a deaf mob boss didn’t simply put a twist on a familiar role, it surfaced a buried story.

Kotsur described Mancuso as a problem solver whose central currency is trust. “Trust is the most important thing for him,” he said. “Do I trust this person or not?” New York’s noise doesn’t register for Mancuso the way it does for everyone around him, and that, Kotsur suggested, becomes part of his advantage. The cops might be less inclined to suspect a deaf man. Mancuso knows that; he plays that card throughout.

On set, the three principals found their rhythm fast. Between takes, Kotsur and Bateman threw a Nerf football back and forth. “It really felt like we’d known each other for much longer than we actually had,” Kotsur said. Law brought a particular energy, high-wattage and almost restless. “I feel like he had that New York energy, maybe as a Londoner.” Kotsur, who grew up in Arizona and describes himself as Law's opposite in temperament, offered a drier assessment of himself. “I know that all this is bullshit,” he quipped.

Bateman spoke about the decision to give Mancuso no verbal presence: no big speeches, no scene-chewing. A character actor playing a bad guy usually has language as a primary weapon, and Mancuso has none. The choice showed courage on Baylin and Susman’s part, Bateman said, and what Kotsur did with it, “in not thinking that he might need to make up for that,” became the performance’s whole architecture.

That tension between damage and presentation also lives inside the restaurant itself, literally worked into its walls. DiGerlando described a mood board assembled from the Spotted Pig, West Village institutions like One if by Land, Two if by Sea and Freeman’s Alley, British gastropubs, and then the Keith Richards estate and Jimmy Page’s house, for the music-world feel that was always part of the Black Rabbit’s DNA. They had a direction. What they didn’t have was a location.

They almost missed the one they found. Already on the road to scout a Chinatown space that wasn’t quite right, the building’s owner mentioned he had one other place, in bad shape, probably not worth the trip. They went anyway. They found the Bridge Cafe, one of the oldest wooden structures still standing in New York, predating the Brooklyn Bridge by almost a century. Hurricane Sandy had gutted it. The walls bore etchings of the bridge under construction. In those etchings, a black rabbit appeared.

The team created the entire restaurant on a soundstage—three floors, two stacked and one adjacent—but drew the bones of the design from that ruined building. DiGerlando worked the brothers’ personalities into the set: crumbling plaster and exposed lath right next to expensive imported Austrian wallpaper. “Everywhere you look in that set, there’s both Vince and Jake represented,” he said. The building becomes the show’s central metaphor made physical: rough and refined at once, just like the brothers who created it. Its actual state of disrepair made it into the series too: a flashback early in the second episode shows Vince bringing Jake to the space before it became anything. “You’ve got to have a vision for this,” Vince tells him. They left it exactly as they found it.

The show’s ending emerged during production. Bateman described an earlier plan for Vince’s death, a sacrifice the writers had constructed for him. As filming continued, they realized the weapon built for that sacrifice could serve a different purpose, and the Bridge Cafe’s location near the Brooklyn Bridge, under its on-ramp, opened up another possibility. Vince’s death on the roof of that building, where he chooses to jump after calling the police and confessing, echoed a piece of backstory revealed earlier in the season: years before, a former employee had been paralyzed after a reckless roof-jump bet connected to Vince.

Bateman said Baylin and Susman’s willingness to let the story evolve as production continued proved one of its strengths. “Their ability to pivot and not be overly prescriptive and precious about what was already living in their head is really admirable,” he said.

That openness runs through Black Rabbit. The show follows two men shaped by the same wound, who spent their lives building a dream together, tearing it down, and trying to believe something beautiful could still come from what they’d broken. By the end, the Black Rabbit isn’t just a restaurant; it’s the brothers’ dream, their trap, and their ruin.

New York offers the perfect stage: a city that looks gorgeous in low light, rewards reinvention, and has a way of showing you exactly who you are in the harsh light of morning.

Black Rabbit is now streaming on Netflix.