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Vladimir arrives on Netflix 30 years after Bill Clinton’s impeachment, nearly a decade into #MeToo, and right smack dab in the middle of an Epstein files bombshell.
The reimagining of Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous 1955 novel Lolita, which already sits atop Netflix’s streaming charts, doesn’t shy away from asking the difficult questions: How do women who were conditioned in a predatory culture exert their desires? Or even worse, how do they stay relevant in a society that fetishizes youth?
For Vladimir protagonist M (Rachel Weisz, 55), the answer is to literally become the female version of those in power. Or simply, to stop identifying as a sex object and embrace being an older predator instead of naïve prey.
Much like the lead character Humbert Humbert in Lolita, M is a 50-something literature professor who is riveted by her obsession with a younger person in her orbit. In this case, it’s not a 12-year-old stepchild but rather a married colleague: The White Lotus’ Leo Woodall, 29, as the titular Vladimir Vladinski.
As both literature professors put pens to pages as part of their own foreplay, M is enduring another carnal emergency. Her husband John (Mad Men’s John Slattery), a fellow professor, has been having his own affairs with undergrads (“Do they still call them coeds?” he asks at one point). Now, he’s been found out by the university administration, and a code-of-ethics trial looms.
M is caught between her own midlife crisis and John’s decades of misdeeds. She seemingly couldn’t care less (she and John did have an open marriage, after all). And while M’s college students are flummoxed by her lack of empathy for John’s alleged victims, M merely nods as though the women John was with were experiencing a rite of passage.
The series’ executive producer, Bad Sisters creator Sharon Horgan, tells the Daily Beast that Vladimir is “about an obsession that takes hold during a moment of profound personal upheaval, and how obsession can distort our ability to see clearly.”
“The protagonist is being hit from all sides: aging and what that does to her both personally and professionally, the fallout from her husband’s actions, and a growing distance from her daughter,” she adds. “In that chaos, Vladimir becomes a kind of beacon. We all recognize the impulse to use obsession as an escape, and here it drives the character to make deeply questionable choices.”
Those choices include M becoming consumed with fantasies of consummating her crush on Vladimir to the point of mental paralysis. But that frustration fuels her creativity.
M’s only way to cope is by breaking her two-decade-long writer’s block and detailing the sordid details of their imagined affair in a new novel. Little does M know that Vladimir is doing the same thing, just from his perspective of being an ingenue who has a passionate, tender romance with his mentor.
In a sense, they are each writing their own taboo “love stories” like Lolita.
“Lolita is a story about a character who is blinded by their obsession,” Horgan says. “Our protagonist, M, is her own kind of literary heroine, and she is desperate to bring about a catharsis to her story.”
Vladimir is based on playwright Julia May Jonas’ 2022 debut novel. Its opening line says it all from M’s perspective: “When I was a child, I loved old men. Old men are composed of desire.”
And as for John’s now-controversial entanglements: “At one point we would have called these affairs consensual, for they were... Now, however, young women have apparently lost all agency in romantic entanglements. Now my husband was abusing his power, never mind that power is the reason they desired him in the first place.”
The screen adaptation of Vladimir hitting Netflix in the midst of Jeffrey Epstein’s international sex trafficking of underage girls, with many high-profile academic leaders as clients, is inevitably in conversation with the real-life horrors of abuse. Epstein’s private plane, after all, was deemed the “Lolita Express,” and clients wrote excerpts of the Nabokov novel on trafficked women’s bodies, as documented in the files.
Vladimir even alludes to certain images of girls posed on Epstein’s lap when the John character (although not at all as egregious as Epstein’s cohorts) reveals that has Polaroids with various students positioned across his thighs. It’s art imitating life imitating art.
Vladimir’s production designer Sharon Lomofsky tells the Daily Beast that Lolita “was on everyone’s mind” during the shoot. “All the great novels were, in some ways, about helpless women who were enthralled by power. ‘Your prince is coming,’ that sort of thing. I think now we are reaching a world where it’s unacceptable and we’re no longer willing to, as women, continue to accept this.”
Even author and showrunner Jonas previously told Publishers Weekly that in the early 2000s, it was still a “cool and sexy thing to date your professor,” citing the inspiration for the John character.
She added to Frieze that she thinks of John as “charismatic” (and Slattery certainly is in the role).
“I’m supposed to be repulsed by this type of person, but if I saw them fall in the street, I would feel devastated with sympathy,” Jonas said. “At the same time, they could make me feel worse about myself and anyone else if they criticized me in some way. It’s a type of man that affects you at a certain stage of your life–my father and teachers and all of these people that I really looked up to. That’s the trick with them, that there are oftentimes reasons to look up to them. Some of them could have acted better, though–certainly, some are morally correct and some absolutely transgressed.”
M herself admits to having wanted to have affairs with past teachers, both male and female. She continues to see nothing wrong with John dipping into the student body in more ways than one. Yet just like with Julia Roberts’ masculine-dressing character in 2025’s After the Hunt, M’s power is found in emulating the older men around her.
There is further implication that M is even ignoring her own more complicated former experiences that may or may not be categorized as assault today. “The idea that she is enabling the situation and [questioning whether] the girls were complicit, saying that girls like power and all that, it’s part of the subtext of the series,” production designer Lomofsky adds. “There are no good people in the story, really.”
It seems to be even more accurate to real life for those embroiled in the Epstein scandal.
Lomofsky continued, “I was listening to Melinda Gates, and she was incredibly sad that this happened, and that her husband was there” on Epstein’s island, Lomofsky continues. “She was like, ‘These are interesting times and the world needs to change, but is it going to change?’ I don’t know because we still haven’t gotten to who is really at the top of it all, who is at the top of the Epstein power. They’re all still in power, and we’re not investigating them at all.”
Horgan has a more holistic approach to what the series is trying to say during this pivotal time in history.
“While the circumstances may feel timely in the age of #MeToo, M’s behavior is fundamentally human and classic, though taken to an extreme,” Horgan says. “What feels especially contemporary is the way the series presents multiple, often conflicting perspectives on feminism and sexual agency colliding with one another. Which is something we see constantly in real life, but far less often portrayed onscreen.”
