Actress Olivia Cooke has a knack for playing the social climber. In 2018, she embodied Becky Sharp in an adaptation of William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, wielding charm and wit to seduce her way into the upper class. Now, in Amazon Prime’s 2025 miniseries The Girlfriend, Cooke plays Cherry Laine, a similarly ambitious daughter of a London middle class family. But unlike Thackeray’s Becky (whose path to wealth was constrained by the rigid mores of marriage), Cherry has no such stiff societal barriers. Her hunger for status through marriage is a matter of choice, not necessity.

Directed by Robin Wright and Andrea Harkin, The Girlfriend is a psychological thriller that unfolds from two competing perspectives. From Cherry’s point of view, she is the persistent romantic who wins over Daniel Sanderson (Laurie Davidson), the well-meaning son of a wealthy business magnate. Their romance begins innocently enough when she shows him a property as his real estate agent. But the second lens — the one belonging to Daniel’s mother, Laura (played by Wright) — recasts Cherry as a sinister intruder.