From showrunnerMisha Green(Underground) and based on the novel of the same name byMatt Ruff, the 10-episode seriesLovecraft Countryis a bold and provocative look at racism and the Black experience in America. Following the journey of Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) as he travels with his childhood friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett) and his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) across 1950s Jim Crow America in search of his missing father Montrose (Michael Kenneth Williams), the pulp fiction aficionado finds dangers lurking at every turn.
During roundtables held as part of a virtual press junket for the new series, executive producer/writer Misha Green, along with co-stars Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett, talked about the racism inherent in the work ofH.P. Lovecraft, reclaiming the genre, having a playground of this scope to work in, knowing when to use metaphor and when to be in your face with the horror of it all, maintaining your vision throughout an eight month long shoot, colorism, sexism, and the hope for what audiences will take from watching the show.
Collider: How did it feel for you to personally be able to turn the work of H.P. Lovecraft into something that is so Black, so beautiful and so artistic?
MISHA GREEN: It’s great. What was great about Matt [Ruff]’s beautiful novel was that this idea of reclaiming a space that’s not meant for you. I’ve been a genre fan since I was five, literally readingGoosebumpsand stuff, so as a huge genre fan and horror fan, to be able to have the opportunity to do that, and to really reclaim and take into the future, and to not disregard the past, was great. I do think that Lovecraft is very influential to the horror genre, but I also didn’t want to ignore the fact that he’s a major racist. And so, to be able to add a new spin on it, and show us a way that we can take the past that’s sketchy and take it into the future, taking the good stuff and acknowledging the bad stuff, and acknowledging why that stuff is bad, was just an exciting prospect for me.
Is it possible to salvage anything from the work of an author like Lovecraft considering his racism?
JURNEE SMOLLETT: For me, it comes down to facing our history. There are dangers when the truth is distorted, when our history is overlooked, when we hold these thinkers and writers or founding fathers up on a pedestal and don’t tell the entirety of the story. It’s dangerous when you leave out important parts like that. Lovecraft was a master of terror, but if you go back now and read some of his writings with that understanding, it comes through. The racism and the bigotry comes through. And so, to me, as a lover of history, I think it’s important to preserve the whole story and tell the whole truth. It’s up to the individual, how they process that.
Misha, what was your process of coming toLovecraft Countryand adapting the book into this series?
GREEN: I was in the middle ofUndergroundSeason 2, and my head was so there and not here, at all. They were like, “This book is amazing, though. You need to take a look at it.” I looked at the cover and was like, “Oh, that’s an interesting cover. I’m intrigued.” I read the first chapter and I was like, “Sure, let’s go for it. More Black people? Done.” And then, onceUndergroundwasn’t coming back and it was clear to me thatLovecraft Countrywas going to be my next thing, it was about settling into it. I was like, “I know what I wanna do. I wanna reclaim the genre. I wanna do mystery, I wanna do sci-fi, I wanna do horror, and I wanna do all of those things. That’s the big epic thing, but it has to mean something. So, what is it?” What I found, at the end of the day, was that this is just family drama. This is about this family, their secrets, their shame, and how they push past and exorcise those things to come together and reclaim their power. It’s that layer underneath the metaphor of all of the genre stuff. And then, it became super easy to write it at that point, because it was just about going to therapy and excavating all my bullshit with my family.
What do you think most prepared you for doingLovecraft Countryand its mix of genres?
GREEN:Undergroundprepared me a lot.Undergroundwas a mixture of a heist thriller that happened to be slave times, so I feel like that really helped prepare me for this. I feel like my incredible love of the horror genre helped me prepare me for this. And then, at the same time, nothing could prepare me for this ‘cause we went on such an epic journey. Every episode is its own little thing and was so scopey. That’s what I pitched, but then we shot for eight months and I was like, “We’re still shooting this for eight months.” And then, you go into the post-production and you’re designing monsters. I just didn’t know. You can’t even know that there’s a playground like this to play in until you’re in it. Just being able to play on this level, nothing could have prepared me for that. It was just fun and exciting. Basically, anything you can imagine, you can make happen. It’s just the timespan to do it.
What went into making all of those touches authentic?
GREEN: I’m a huge history buff, so I just love to research, and I’m also slightly lazy. You can’t make up this stuff, like sundown towns. If I had made up a sun downtown town saying, “You can’t be in this town after dark,” and there are signs all over the U.S. that say, “Don’t let the sun set on you here,” horror fans would be like, “Okay, we get it. We’re gonna buy into it, so that we can see the movie.” That, to me, is what makes doing history so fun. It’s about unpacking things from our past that influence our current present, and then also just being able to go, “Okay, you’ve given it to me. It’s there. I just have to now bring it here and arrange it, with my sci-fi and the fucking crazy stuff that was happening, that I don’t have to make up.” That is when it brings an extra layer of depth to it, where I’m going, “Nope, that was real guys.” We like to pretend that those words don’t exist.
This show makes brilliant use of metaphor, and also seems to know just when to strip all of that away and have the audience sit in the uncomfortableness of it all. What was your process for finding that balance, and knowing when to use metaphor and when the metaphor wasn’t needed?
GREEN: It’s tough to say how I found the balance because I feel like it’s just intuition. You just move through it and go, “What feels truthful?” I feel like even the metaphor side of it feels truthful to me. The monsters feel truthful. So, where do you find it? One of the things I would say in the writers’ room is “Don’t magic to magic.” We’re not magic-ing to magic. We have a huge budget, so we could magic to magic. But for me, horror and the best horror that I love works when I understand the characters. Leti is exorcising something from herself. She’s trying to find that fire inside of herself, and these ghosts, their fire was taken from them. And so, in the exorcism, that’s what they’re all doing. They’re all finding their ways back from injured people to whole people. That is the metaphor. That is the thing you follow. Anything that’s outside of that, like seeing the ghosts jump around and dance, would be too much. That’s not what we’re here to see. We’re here to see the heart of what Leti’s going through, which is her exorcism with some cool ass ghosts around it.
Is it also important to peel away the metaphors and just make people sit in the uncomfortableness of it all?
JONATHAN MAJORS: Yes. I’m sitting next to a stack of books, one of which is the complete works of William Shakespeare, and on top of that is the poems of Wendell Berry, and I, myself, am a poet. Metaphor is one of the most universal ways of communicating a thought, I think. It allows for people from any walks of life to connect to one singular moment, one singular image, one singular idea. I think that’s quite useful in making art. To the converse of that, I think there are times that you should smack ‘em in the face and make ‘em feel it. It’s a delicate balance of when you can do that. One of the things that I’m very proud about, in the show, is that it doesn’t come off polemic or like propaganda. It’s actual pure entertainment. And through the metaphor, we lay in the ideas of racial justice. Well, the racial injustice is pretty on the nose, but legacy and family and inequality, and the oppressions and unfair harnesses that get put on certain groups of people because of that. Then, we have moments where we dig into it and hit you right in the face. I think that balance is quite important. You can say, “No, no, no, no, no, this is racism.” Episode 5 is one of the most mind-fucking social injustice episodes I’ve ever seen. You have Ruby in two different phases – she’s a white woman, and then she’s a black woman. She has the same brain and the same psychology, and she is having the debate for us. That’s not metaphorical, at all. That’s right in the face. In that case, the stark facts are used to the benefit of the story.
SMOLLETT: Misha has got a real gift for using the metaphor in ways, and then knowing when to pull it out. I think without it, it would just be too one-note and too obvious. Really, what she’s done withLovecraftis deconstruct the classic genre story and really reimagine it in a very radical way, but it’s not preachy, which I really respond to. She’s got this gift for maintaining varying degrees of tone. While, yes, it’s this big genre piece, at its core, it’s a family drama. It’s about family in search of family, family trying to protect their family, family fighting for family, family estranged from family. And then, there’s these secrets within it all that they’re holding and keeping from each other, which is a theme often explored in Lovecraft’s work. So, forLovecraft, she’s just done such a great job in knowing when to use it and when not.
Lovecraft Countrytackles race relations and injustices that parallel modern reality. What role would you say artists have in society to shed light and continue to bring these truths to the forefront?
MAJORS: We’re in the midst of a lot of shit in America. In our country, we’re under two pandemics – racial injustice and inequality and systematic racism, and now COVID-19. What I believe is that the artists are essential workers. It is essential that we work. It is our job to uphold the culture, and to continue to reveal, to ourselves, that which is cancerous within our culture, in order to change it and educate each other, and incite the forces through our work, to purge the illness that is running rampant in the political and social body that we all share. WithLovecraft, I couldn’t be more humbled and more honored to participate in that because I believe it’s what we’re doing, at such a very high level. It’s such a pure, honest, human story, and that is a very novel thing, to be a part of a team and a part of a story that is holding up Black people, fully. There are things you will not like about Atticus, and there are things that you will love about him, and that can be said for every character in the piece. That is a beautiful thing. We look at what’s happening today, with the parallels, andLovecraftis almost serving as a corrective. It says, “A six foot black man is not a threat. In fact, he can be a hero. Watch this. He is not just this one thing. He has a brain, he has a heart, he has a spirit, he has emotions, he has a family, he has a legacy that he’s moving forward. It’s not just this one thing.”
Jurnee, when you do something this intense, how do you maintain your vision for your character throughout the eight month shoot?
SMOLLETT: I have various ways to stay disciplined in my process. There are different rituals that I use for different projects. With this project, once we got in a groove, everything was so fast-paced that it forces you to keep your muscles in shape. It becomes muscle memory. You know the character, inside and out, so well that you just get up and do. Meisner says the foundation of acting is the reality of doing, so you do by doing. You just do it. And I just understood Leti so well. There were moments where, on a molecular level, I could feel it. It’s so hard to explain, but I could feel, honestly, my ancestors coursing through my veins at moments. The project was so heavy that, for me, it was important to approach it in a very spiritual way. The text felt very sacred to me. There were rituals that I had, by myself, but also with the cast. On the pilot, Courtney [B. Vance] started a ritual. Before each take, he would fist bump me and Jonathan, and the first bump was an unspoken way of just saying, “Team us. We’re in it. The set is crazy. There’s crazy shit happening around us. But we’re in it.” So that ritual lasted the entire shoot, with Jonathan and I. And it grew from that to me, Jonathan and Michael [K. Williams]. And then, when we were in scenes with other actors, like Aunjanue [Ellis], it was me, Michael, Jonathan and Aunjanue, for each take. It didn’t matter where we were starting, we would just fist bump. It was this very beautiful and simple way of just grounding us and centering us.
Jonathan, Atticus is immediately willing to believe in magic, and his thought is how he can use it, himself. Is that something you could identify with?
MAJORS: I’m not pushing back, but I don’t think Atticus immediately believes in magic. I think Atticus always believed in magic and fantasy. I think he needed to. And for me, I’ve always believed in that. I’ve always believed in the ancestors and angels, and if there’s angels, there’s the other thing, too. I’ve always believed in keeping one’s self spiritually afloat, and to thrive, spiritually, experience so many fantastical things and the fantastical realm is a place that you may dwell in. When I work, I try to dwell in that place. That said, if I were to be given immediate magical function and make something happen with magic, I would probably put some spell or send some monster out to clean up the psyche. I would put dreams in people’s heads. That sounds so bad, but maybe I would. I’d put dreams in people’s heads of foresight. I would let them see what would happen in the next couple of years, if they go this way or if they go that way. I would leave it up to them to decide what’s going on, but I would give them a full four-year HD play-by-play, like that, so they could get it. That’s what I would do in the moment.
Jurnee, how do you feel being fair-skinned influences Leti’s relationship within her own family and within the story and setting in general?
SMOLLETT: That’s a good question. Colorism is real. It’s the unspoken that is explored. In that time and in that era, the layers were deep, man. We’re still dealing with it on certain levels. As you see so beautifully explored with Ruby, what this melanin, or lack thereof, means is all an illusion that human beings have created. This caste system that we’ve created is an illusion. In my opinion, God don’t see us differently. We’re all flesh and blood. We’re all human beings. And yet we, as human beings, have created this really oppressive system that ranks people. And so, in approaching Leti, what was important to explore, for me, is how she’s fighting both the patriarchy and white supremacy. She’s Black, and she’s female. It’s the same systemic racism that she’s fighting against as well. What was so exciting, and Misha and I talked about this a lot, is that what she does with Ruby’s character is just masterful, to explore the mind trip that this illusion has done to us and how we have internalized our own oppression with it.
There’s a bit of sexism at play with these different men often trying to protect Leti, but she’s clearly a capable woman who’s often the first to jump into the action. What’s your read on that whole dynamic?
SMOLLETT: To be Black and female, there are two systems that you’re fighting against – the patriarchy and white supremacy – and one of them cannot exist without the other. The patriarchy benefits from white supremacy, and white supremacy benefits from the patriarchy. Because Leti has traveled and she’s a wanderer, and she reads so much, one of the beautiful things about science fiction is that it expands your imagination and it makes you a dreamer. You can see things outside of your current reality. It’s a very bold and audacious thing to dream and to have an expanded imagination. It’s, unfortunately, what society was, in 1955, and she rejects the feminine, as it was defined in 1955, as this passive, meek thing. Misha and I also thought that it was important to explore and inspect her contradictions. No one’s all tough or all strong, or all anything, every moment of their life. And so, when is she vulnerable? What actually terrifies her? What are her biggest fears? What are her secrets? She desperately wants to be reborn and shed her old self, and yet she also suffers from this feeling of displacement. I think about what James Baldwin talks about, with the great shock that comes to Black Americans, when you realize your birthplace, your identity, and this country you owe your identity to, does not contain any place for you. She’s grasping, just trying to find a space for her herself, pioneering into an all white neighborhood. And I can relate in so many ways. I know what it’s like to feel unwelcome in an all white neighborhood. A dead fish was put on my family’s lawn when I was a kid on the day of the Million Man March. These things are very familiar to me. And so, I love that she doesn’t apologize for who she is, in all of who she is.
What personal inspiration did you take in playing Leti?
SMOLLETT: My grandmother was one of the biggest influences, for me, in approaching Leti. She was this woman in the ‘50s, from Galveston, Texas. She was the first Black Miss Galveston beauty queen, and she raised four children, as a single mom. Every single day, she’d go to work cleaning white folks’ homes, and they would mistreat her and neglect her and underpay her, but she would go to work, every single day, with her dress pressed and her hair and make-up done because she would not allow them to rob her of her dignity. To me, that’s a very radical act, in an era when the erasure of Black folks was so prevalent. That’s one of the reasons why Leti picks up her camera. She wants to document us, our everyday life. She’s hungry to feel, to see, to be seen, and to not be erased. And so, it was important to just inspect her contradictions. Outwardly, she’s very confident and very buoyant, but it’s not always that way with anyone. What is she actually hiding? What is she over-compensating for? Those were the questions that Misha and I really wanted to inspect.
Jonathan, Atticus is a Black nerd. What do you think his reaction would be to things likeBlack Panther,Get Out, or even this show? What do you think he would feel about this moment?
MAJORS: I think he would be on cloud nine. If he could have seen it before the war, I wonder what he would have done. I wonder if he would have gone off to the war, or if he would have just continued to live his life, already having seen himself, taking in and taking on that adventure, rather than escaping reality and becoming a soldier. He’d just sit in a movie theater and take in a different reality.
Jurnee, in the season, Leti reveals things about herself and her sexual history to Atticus. Do you feel that subverts society’s assumptions about Black women?
SMOLLETT: Absolutely. In inspecting her contradictions, Leti says, “I am myself. I’m very self-possessed.” Mythology would think of her as the virgin goddess who owns her sexuality and makes her own choices. Why do we think, because she owns her sexuality, that means she’s sexually promiscuous? Why does one equate to the other? It’s our own ignorance, as a society, the way that female sexuality is owned by everyone but her. It’s to be taken in society, instead of being hers to be shared however she chooses to share it. She don’t wear pantyhose, she’s comfortable in the way she struts, and she’s got some full hips and no problem pressing them up against the guy when she’s dancing. That doesn’t mean she’s actually going to bed with him, which was fascinating to me. Honestly, I had a lot in common with her. Growing up, I was incredibly free in my sexuality and my sexual being, but I was a virgin until I got married. I had done love scenes with people. I had kissed people on screen, and actually hadn’t had sex. But as a society, we have real perverted beliefs about the female body, and particularly the way we’ve over-sexualized the Black female body. It’s something that I’m very aware of. I don’t have a solution for it, but it was interesting to explore within Leti.
Misha, this story mirrors the story of Black people in America, which is not a pretty story. What are some of the good things that you want the audience to take away from this series?
GREEN: I want them to take away that you can be joyful, even in the parts that are hard. I think that was important to see and understand. Yes, it can be hard and it’s an uphill battle, but that battle can be won if we stick together and we can continue to reclaim our legacy, and what we were given and born with. That, I would love them to take away from the series. And enjoy the fucking monsters, too.
Lovecraft Countryairs on Sunday nights on HBO, and is available to stream at HBO Max.Click herefor our recap of the season premiere andherefor our breakdown of that stunning opening sequence.
