Some of the shit that he pulled…if you put it in a drama, people would watch it and go, ‘You’re having me on. And the other one was, to use the vernacular of the time, a bit more of a square.”Ĭoncentrating on Knippenberg’s perspective meant omitting some of Sobhraj’s most outrageous exploits, which Warlow conceded are “absolutely staggering. “One…was the kind of man that one thinks of when one thinks of the international man of mystery-very handsome, very well-dressed. “What I was really interested in were these two really diametrically opposed types of men have the most devastating effect on each other’s lives,” Warlow recently told Vanity Fair. Rather than detailing all of Sobhraj’s heinous crimes for his limited series The Serpent, out on Netflix April 2 (with Tahar Rahim in the title role), Warlow-who knows about serial killers, having created Ripper Street, about Jack the Ripper-focused on the unlikely hero instrumental in bringing the master manipulator down: Herman Knippenberg (Billy Howle), a Dutch functionary with a master’s degree in advanced international studies. He then traveled using their passports, so it wasn’t always apparent that his victims were missing. Dubbed “the Serpent” by the press after he became the subject of an Interpol manhunt in 1976, Sobhraj preyed upon unsuspecting hippies, drug smugglers, and other travelers in India, Nepal, and Thailand-spiking their drinks, stealing their valuables, and brutally murdering them. At the height of his infamy in the 1970s, the suave Vietnamese-Indian Frenchman lured at least a dozen trusting young tourists to their deaths in southeast Asia.

Ripley on steroids-he was determined not to glamorize his subject. When British writer Richard Warlow set out to dramatize the story of swindler and serial killer Charles Sobhraj-think The Talented Mr.

The serpent netflix