Andrew Scott plays a swindler named Tom Ripley whose life takes a turn for the worse when a wealthy industrialist hires him to convince his son to return home in Netflix’s Ripley trailer, dropped by the streamer on Monday.

The eight-episode thriller series, also featuring Johnny Flynn and Dakota Fanning, is based on Patricia Highsmith’s bestselling Tom Ripley novel series.

The two-minute-20-second-long trailer shows Ripley conning his way through 1960s Italy while being on a mission to find Dickie Greenleaf (Flynn) who went missing all of a sudden. It begins with a police officer asking Dickie’s girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Fanning) to describe Scott’s Ripley who has been living with her and Dickie in their house in Italy. However, Ripley’s secret identity soon starts to slip, much to his disadvantage, and he disappears when a corpse is discovered on the Via Appia Antica.

Fanning’s Marge is the first person to suspect Ripley having an ulterior motive behind his smile. “He's a liar. It's his profession,” she says in the trailer, which incorporates visually stunning black-and-white scenes. Monochrome shots of an Italian church before moving on to show a man approaching Ripley and telling him that he is a “hard man to find” are especially striking.

Ripley, written and directed by Steven Zaillian, will arrive on Netflix on April 4. Zaillian is known for writing Schindler’s List (1993), Gangs of New York (2002), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009) and The Irishman (2019).

Scott is well known for his role as Hot Priest in the second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Prime Video comedy-drama series Fleabag (2016-19) and as the antagonist Moriarty in the BBC series Sherlock (2010). The actor recently starred alongside Paul Mescals in All Of Us Strangers, which won the British Independent Film Award for Best British Independent Film.