Amor Towles on 'A Gentleman in Moscow', 'Table for Two' characters: 'A lot of what-iffing'

Best selling novelist Amor Towles is having a moment.

His novel “A Gentleman in Moscow,” about a Russian count sentenced to live out his life inside an elegant Moscow hotel, has been adapted into an eight-episode series starring Ewan McGregor. It premieres March 29 on Showtime and Paramount+, an episode weekly through May 17.

On April 2, Towles’ latest work, “Table for Two” — a collection of six short stories and one novella — hits stores. The novella picks up the story of Eve Ross, a character from Towles’ 2011 debut, “Rules of Civility.”

Towles invited the USA TODAY Network to his lakeside retreat in Garrison, where he spends weekends most of the year and where “A Gentleman in Moscow” was finished. He talked about creating characters, the authenticity of the film adaptation, the power of the short story as a novelist’s proving ground, and a scene in the new series that annoyed him slightly — but made his wife cry.  

How did Amor Towles create 'A Gentleman in Moscow'?

The way Towles explains it, when he first met Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, the title character in “A Gentleman in Moscow,” he was in the dark.

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“I don't know much about him when I start, other than there's going to be an aristocrat in a hotel," the writer said. "And then you start to say, 'I don't want him to be a dilettante, but he's got to be trained in manners.’”

Towles gave the count a considerable mustache. Asked how he spends his time, the count replies: “Dining, discussing. Reading, reflecting. The usual rigmarole.”

Towles created situations for the count to navigate, to test his reactions.

“It starts with something small, and then you do a lot of what-iffing,” Towles said.

What if the count isn’t just in a hotel? What if he’s under house arrest, albeit in Moscow’s opulent Hotel Metropol, in 1922? What if the count will be shot if he sets foot outside? How does the count react?

By staying inside, for one thing. For 32 years, as Lenin gives way to Stalin outside the confines of the Metropol, these “situations” keep walking through the hotel’s front door and finding the count.

Crafting a character, Towles said, is not unlike how strangers become friends. First impressions change when you have dinner with them, or when you're on a trip with them and something goes wrong and they have to deal with a problem.

"You see them in a whole new circumstance, and then you revise your opinion," he said.

The count's isolation — being forced to stay at home — made “A Gentleman in Moscow” a touchstone during COVID times, remarkable for a novel published four years before the pandemic and one its author intended to be universal and timeless. He heard from readers who connected with the trapped count.

“If you're successful in writing something that has the quality of timelessness, then what can happen is that the times find the narrative,” Towles said. “Different times will find the narrative in different ways.”

What are Amor Towles most popular books?

Towles, a former investment banker with degrees from Yale and Stanford, has found success with an impressive string of bestsellers that have sold more than 6 million copies collectively, and have been translated into 30 languages. They are:

• 2011’s “Rules of Civility,” which followed a 25-year-old woman as she navigates the Manhattan social scene of the 1930s
• 2016’s “A Gentleman in Moscow,” which follows 32 years in the life of Count Rostov, who keeps his purpose while losing everything
• 2021’s “The Lincoln Highway,” which follows three 18-year-olds and an 8-year-old on a 10-day odyssey from Nebraska to New York City in 1954.

"Usually, I'll spend a couple of years designing the book, where I'm just imagining it and filling notebooks," he said. "Then I'll outline it, and then I'll write it and rewrite it. The writing is probably only three to four years, but the thought process is more like eight."

'A Gentleman in Moscow' TV series format allows attention to detail

A "Rules of Civility" feature film has stalled. Christopher Storer, who created FX's "The Bear," has signed on to adapt and direct "The Lincoln Highway" for Warner Bros.

When the offers for film rights percolated for "A Gentleman in Moscow," Towles knew what he didn't want.

"We had interest to make it into a feature with terrific talent and I just said no," he said. "There's no way you're gonna be able to tell this 30-year story in two hours. You're going to end up deciding to focus on a couple of years or starting in the middle. We're in a period where the quality of long-form television has gotten so good, why wouldn't you turn to that medium?"

His contract gave him approval over the writer (Ben Vanstone of PBS’s “All Creatures Great and Small” is head writer and showrunner), the director (Sam Miller of TV’s “I May Destroy You”), lead actor (McGregor, "Obi-Wan Kenobi") and lead actress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, of “10 Cloverfield Lane,” and McGregor’s real-life wife.)

While Towles had early conversations with the creative team, he stepped back and let them do their thing.

When he visited the soundstage in Manchester, England, where the film was shot, he said he was stunned by the level of detail the designers had achieved, by their knowledge of his book and how its attention to detail inspired them to create a world, down to the last detail.

They had recreated vintage liquor bottles for the background of a bar scene. They had designed and commissioned fabrics for the upholstered chairs in the hotel.

"The team who put this project together were operating at that level, where they were committed to having as much authenticity as possible to the smallest detail on set, with the notion that even when it's barely seen by the viewer, that it will be taken in, will add to the richness of the visual experience, but will also give the actors a stronger sense that they are in that place at that time."

A Zoom call with Ewan McGregor

While he left the writing to showrunner Vanstone, Towles did have a conversation with McGregor, who now becomes the face of the count to the wider world. McGregor took over the role when Kenneth Branagh stepped away from the project.

On a Zoom call, McGregor asked Towles about what wasn’t in the book.

They spoke about the history of the Metropol, how the Bolsheviks realized they needed a fine hotel to impress ambassadors and businessmen. He told McGregor that while many aristocrats fled post-Revolutionary Russia and others died or were imprisoned, a significant population — perhaps as much as one-third, Towles said — stayed in Russia and lived in diminished circumstances.

“Most importantly, we discussed the count’s journey to rediscover purpose,” Towles said.

Towles said Vanstone's script has heart and that McGregor's performance brings emotional relatability to the count.

"He can be vulnerable, he can be witty, he can be charming, he can be sophisticated. He can express sorrow. The count does all those things, and (McGregor) can do it very fluidly and naturally. It's really quite impressive," Towles said.

Winstead plays the film star Anna Urbanova, a role that is larger — and enters the story earlier — than in the novel.

"Seeing them interact is so delicious," Towles said. "It opens with count being humbled. And she has her own humbling. Seeing their personalities converge and their circumstances converge, watching them perform, it is really dynamic."

The scene in the Showtime TV series that 'frustrated' Amor Towles

Writing a novel is a solitary pursuit, Towles said, but filmmaking is the opposite. Having his novel adapted meant “embracing the fact that the material isn't going to be exactly the way you wrote it.”

“I'm very happy with the outcome, but of course, there are times where I'm like, ‘Oh, why did they change that?’”

One such time came while watching with his wife, Maggie, during a scene Vanstone wrote between the count and his childhood friend, Mishka.

“They're having a serious, heartfelt conversation, and I was thinking, ‘Oh, that's not the way I wrote it. It wasn't like that.' And I was a little frustrated by it and I turned to say something to my wife, and she's crying like, 'Oh, it's so beautiful.' And I'm like, 'Oh, great, I didn't write that, honey.' And she goes, 'I know.'

"So Ben did fine,” he said with a laugh.

'Table for Two' short stories collection out April 2

Towles also has a new collection of stories, "Table for Two," which finds him returning to a form that helped him develop his voice as a young writer: the short story.

The short stories he wrote in high school outside Boston, at Yale and at graduate school at Stanford were a proving ground, he said, "to master elements of craft, to master setting, dialogue, plot, the poetic sentence, the beginning, the end, how to write a thematic passage."

"One of the most important aspects of all of that is bringing your characters to life. You're writing different stories set in different places about different people — and you're getting to the point where creating a person from scratch becomes second nature."

The six short stories have ties to New York and involve: a Russian peasant named Pushkin who enjoys standing in line; a would-be novelist whose partnership makes for an adventure; a man whose chance encounter at LaGuardia Airport leads to a dramatic night; a woman who suspects her husband of infidelity and has her fears realized, but not in the way one might think; a story of a curse at Carnegie Hall; and "The DiDomenico Fragment," a Towles story that began life on Audible.com, about a work of art that is handed down, bit by bit.

In each, Towles varies the narrator's perspective. In two, the story is told by an omniscient, if judgmental, storyteller. In others, by firsthand witnesses of a story that happened to someone else; in the last, it's told in the first-person.

The second half of "Table for Two" is a novella set in Los Angeles and marks a departure — and a return, of sorts — for the writer.

Typically, when he publishes a book, he's through with the characters. Not so for Eve Ross, from "Rules of Civility."

A tough, independent woman who leaves New York by train to put a relationship and a tragic accident behind her, Eve tells friends and family she's heading home to Indiana, but she doesn't get off the train till it reaches Los Angeles. The final glimpse of her is in a Hollywood gossip magazine, arm-in-arm with the actress Olivia de Havilland.

"When 'Rules of Civility' was done, I had no desire to write about (the other main characters) Katie or Tinker further. I felt like everything that I should tell you about them is in that book, that if I were to start telling you other things about them, it would be a disservice to that book. But Eve was the one where I was like, 'Man, what is she doing?'"

After the novel was published, Towles began to what-if again. He wrote six glimpses of Eve in Hollywood, each from a different perspective, a different narrator. But she continued to occupy his thoughts — "like I didn't really do justice to her" — until the short story collection came up. He returned to Eve, and extended her story, appending an L.A. noir caper to what he had written and, he said, finally doing justice to the character who had bedeviled him.

A book tour will find him in Atlanta, Nashville and Miami, then Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco. (His only New York stop is April 24, 2024 at 6 p.m. at Barnes & Noble Union Square. See tour dates at https://www.amortowles.com/events.)

The tour will pause the what-iffing.

For a moment.