Courteney Cox's 'Evil Genius' Brings Pizza Bomber Case to TIFF

Courteney Cox's true-crime thriller "Evil Genius" had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, bringing the notorious United States pizza bomber case to the big screen.

The film stars Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette and "Stranger Things" actor David Harbour. It is Cox's first feature as a director in 12 years, following her 2014 black comedy "Just Before I Go." The screenplay draws on the 2018 Netflix documentary series "Evil Genius: The True Story of America's Most Diabolical Bank Heist."

At the centre of the story is a bizarre 2003 plot in which pizza delivery man Brian Wells robbed a PNC Bank near Erie, Pennsylvania, with a homemade bomb locked around his neck. The device exploded after his arrest, killing him.

Arquette portrays Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, a woman with bipolar disorder who was later convicted of the robbery. Prosecutors alleged that she orchestrated the heist to raise money to hire a hit man to kill her estranged father amid an inheritance dispute. Harbour plays Bill Rothstein, her former fiancé and accomplice. It was Rothstein's call to police — reporting the body of Diehl-Armstrong's boyfriend, James Roden, in his freezer and implicating her in the killing — that broke the case open.

Speaking on the red carpet, Cox said the unusual relationship between Diehl-Armstrong and Rothstein drew her to the project. "There's a dysfunctional love story that's really the catalyst for this heist," she said. She added that the story contained both humorous and tragic moments, and that she wanted to tell it with a tone that was not identifiable with any specific genre.

Arquette said she focused on understanding what drove Diehl-Armstrong, who died in prison in 2017. "Oftentimes, people who are bad guys, they don't really see themselves as that," she said. "They have their reasons why that person's their enemy, or that person let them down, or they should have that thing, or how the world screwed them over." She described grasping those underpinnings as the most important part of her work.