Affairs of the heart
Mr Loverman star Lennie James joins writer Nathaniel Price and director Hong Khaou to take DQ inside this BBC adaptation of Bernardine Evaristo’s novel about a married Antiguan man facing up to his future following a lifelong affair with his best friend.
Lennie James has been sent two copies of Bernardine Evaristo’s acclaimed novel Mr Loverman. The first time it arrived, the actor was invited to give a quote that could adorn the cover. The second time was to gauge his interest in playing the lead in a future TV adaptation.
Now the future is here. In the BBC series of the same name, James plays Barrington Jedidiah Walker, or Barry to his mates – a 74-year-old, Antiguan-born, exuberant Hackney personality who is renowned for his dapper taste and fondness for retro suits. But while Carmel (Sharon D Clarke), his wife of 50 years, senses that Barry has been cheating on her with other women, she doesn’t know that Barry has actually been leading a secret, passionate affair with his best friend and soulmate, Morris (Arion Bakare).
More nuanced and complex than simply the story of an unhappy marriage, Mr Loverman is equally funny, life-affirming and dramatic as Barry faces big choices that will leave his whole family facing questions about their own future. It also builds on Evaristo’s original groundbreaking exploration of Britain’s older Caribbean community.
“I have a memory of saying to my representation, ‘Let’s keep an eye on this one, because it’s something that I would love to do should it come my way,’” James tells DQ. “I do think it’s culturally important. I do think it’s a unique love story. And I do think it’s one that hasn’t been told in this particular way, because although there is this queer love story at the beginning, this story is much more than Barrington coming out.
“It is absolutely driven by his choice to not do that and when to do that, and if he will do that. But much more than that, it’s about the consequences of the fact that he hasn’t done it. There are consequences to the decisions that he’s made and as much as he loves his children, his grandchild and his friends, there is a self-preservation that is going on in the midst of his choices that have real, genuine and profound and lasting effects on the people that he loves.”
The eight-part series marks the first major project from writer Nathaniel Price (The Outlaws, Noughts & Crosses), who has adapted Evaristo’s novel for producer Fable Pictures and distributor Sony Pictures Television.
“It’s been fantastic. It has been nice being the other side and producing and being party to the big decisions, from casting to costumes and stuff like that,” he says. “It’s just testament to the crew that we had on the shoot, which can be highly stressful, but for me at least it was a great experience.”
He describes Mr Loverman as “quite a faithful adaptation” of the source material, though one of his first tasks was to open up the perspectives of the story and bring in more family members while keeping Barry at the centre. “But his journey is a fascinating and hopefully a fun one,” Price says.
James is known for leading roles in The Walking Dead, Save Me and Line of Duty, but as complicated as those characters were, playing Barry presented the actor with a “very different” challenge.
“As with other cast members and crew, it wasn’t plain sailing. It was hard work. It was tricky at times, but the important thing is that everyone was pulling in the right direction,” he says. “What we’ve got to put out there is something that is a real testament to the work we did. I, for one, am very, very proud.”
Part of that pride in Mr Loverman is due to the cultural significance of the series and Evaristo’s story, with Barry an older Caribbean gentleman coming to terms with his sexuality later in life and facing the ramifications that will have among his family and friends.
“Sadly, there’s a history of portrayal of particularly black characters as quite simplistic,” Price explains. “Either they’re really good [characters] and they’ve been subjugated in some way, or they’re really bad and they’re the villains of the piece. What I loved [about Mr Loverman] was the complexity of the characters and the nuance, emotionally and morally.
“Barry is such a fascinating, engaging and compelling character. It’s not just that he’s in love with his best friend. There’s love for his wife, his love for his daughters, love for his whole family. So how can one man just uproot that? I’ve never really seen this on TV. I’ve never seen a story that puts a gay black love story for this age range at the heart and centre. So I thought, if we get the opportunity to put this on TV, it’s really important that we that we go with it.”
To play a character described as a man with a certain swagger, James went through quite a transformation to play Barry. That includes being aged up to play someone in their 70s – a look that is inspired by Hollywood great Errol Flynn – and the hours in the make-up chair that came with it.
“My wife would phrase it as I was working ‘actress hours,’ because usually I go in to do a gig and I’m maybe 10, 15 minutes in the make-up chair. This time around, particularly when I was Barry at 75, it was close to two hours to get it on and close to an hour to get it off,” the actor reveals. “Dominique [Wallaker, hair and make-up supervisor] did a fantastic job and it just aided me so much.
“There was a lot of components to putting Barry together. It was his age, but I didn’t want to be playing ‘old,’ so it is about posture and his accent, his voice and the speed of his talk, and what he could do physically and what he couldn’t do physically.”
His preparation also included exploring how the love affair between Barry and Morris would be depicted physically, and how they might touch or become intimate with each other at a time when their relationship would have been illegal, and bringing those actions with them as they aged. “So they’re physically different with each other in their 40s and they certainly are in their 70s,” James says. “There was never a point where it was just freewheeling. There was always something to consider. There was always something to take on board. There was always something to navigate with him, which I don’t know for other actors, but for me, that’s an absolute gift.”
James and the cast also worked with voice coach Joel Trill to ensure their accent was specifically Antiguan.
“When we were coming up with our voices, it was important that the timbre of the voices change as they get older. But also what was really important was that we all sounded like we came from the same place,” James says. “Myself, Arion and Sharon and the ladies from the church, we not only all come from Antigua, we all come from the same part of Antigua. We all come from the same village in Antigua. So we can fuck up the accent, but we’ve all got to fuck up the accent in the same way.
“Once we made decisions like that, the rest of it was just about practical. Does it help create Barry? If it doesn’t, it’s useless. And if it does, then let’s hold on to it and rinse and repeat.”
James also shared his thoughts about the show’s approach to accent with series director Hong Khaou, who took charge of all eight episodes. The first two launch on BBC One on Monday October 14, with the whole series available on iPlayer that same day.
“Lenny was very adamant when he said, ‘Either everybody has a ‘Caribbean’ accent or we have them always with an Antiguan accent. But we’ve got to make sure from page one that’s what we want to do,’ and he really wanted to fight for the idea,” Khaou recalls. “I was happy to go along with that, so we made sure we brought in an Antiguan adviser, a dialect coach, to make sure that they hit their accent correctly.
“That was the thing that I had to keep an eye on, alongside our dialect coach. The rest was in Nathaniel’s capable hands.”
Like Price, Khaou felt he hadn’t seen this story before and felt the themes of family, love and being true to yourself hadn’t been explored in mainstream television, particularly relating to a Caribbean family.
“Reading the book, I love the fact that it felt like a family saga, and in that there was this bombshell,” he says. “That was what I was fighting for. You just don’t see two 70-year-old men in that way.”
But he never wanted Mr Loverman to be “drowned in over-seriousness,” and instead celebrated points in the script that brought moments of tenderness or “big humour.” In particular, he likens it to Netflix series Beef, which he says similarly grounds everything in truth and emotion – an approach that then allowed him to push the boundaries when it was needed.
“The story does go to some really big points and certain episodes can get really funny in a bigger way,” he notes. “But my thing was that I would ground everything. I didn’t want to trivialise this love story.”
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Through the series, flashbacks to Barry and Morris’s younger selves in Antigua are signposted with the subtle use of music and sound so that these moments naturally blend into the present-day action, while Khaou and DOP Remi Adefarasin developed a cinematic style that would lift the series visually.
“Along the way, things will happen, the budget will be this or that, but we were conscious to try and bring a language that made the show exciting,” he says. “For example, at the end of episode one, we move from present day Carmel in the car and it pans to young Barry. That’s the kind of language that I wanted to use to try to elevate the show a bit.”
But filming every episode proved to be an “intense” experience for the director, who was known for films including Lilting and Monsoon before he switched to television.
“I’ve never done anything that much, but it was good at the same time,” he says. “I just felt the crew was so good. I had such a good team and we all seemed to gel and get on. Maybe I went in really idealistically, like, ‘Yeah, I’m sure it’ll be fine.’ But it was quite intense. It is very consuming in a way that left no room for anything else.”
Yet it was only thanks to his prior experience working in television that he had the confidence to push forward with some of his ideas for the show, safe in the knowledge he also had the confidence of producer Fable Pictures.
“The first time I did TV, which was Baptiste, that was quite a shock to the system. And I’m so glad I did that, and Alice & Jack, because I feel like you really grow muscle every time you do it,” he says. “I could only do Mr Loverman in the way I did because of those experiences. Genuinely, TV is so, so odd – there’s a lot of money in TV but the schedule is insane. It moves so much faster and quicker than film in a way that I feel like you’re reacting a lot. Even if you do all the prep, sometimes things just go in a certain way that you just have to react in that moment.”
Yet that experience would pay off on the set of Mr Loverman. “I remember certain points in other shows where it was really hard and tough. This one was also hard and tough, but I felt like with the experience of those shows, I was quite confident and secure on this one. Fable really trusted my ideas.”
If there’s a highlight for the director, it’s episode seven, which he says is the reason he wanted to make Mr Loverman in the first place as it charts a reunion between Barry and Morris.
“I don’t want to say too much, but I feel very proud,” he ends. “Sometimes you go into it and think, ‘This is the best way to do it,’ but you don’t know until you see it. Then when you do, you think, ‘That was really nice.’”
tagged in: Antigua, Arion Bakare, Bernardine Evaristo, Hong Khaou, Mr Loverman, Nathaniel Price, Sharon D Clarke