Lost in Kingston
Get Millie Black screenwriter Marlon James joins stars Tamara Lawrance and Joe Dempsie to dissect this five-part crime noir about a former London cop who returns to her Jamaican homeland, revealing their emotional ties to the story and explaining how the series reassesses its setting.
It isn’t every Booker Prize winner who will admit to their work being inspired by television, but then Marlon James isn’t every novelist. DQ is sitting in a pub in Rotherhithe, south London, with the acclaimed Jamaican author whose 2014 opus A Brief History of Seven Killings won the award, and he is as happy to sing the praises of everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Detective to The Wire and Hill Street Blues as he is to acknowledge the challenge of his debut screenplay.
“I started to write stories that I realised work better in a script format,” he explains. “There was so much with this story that I wanted to tell using different media that you really have to see and hear it.”
“This story” is Get Millie Black, a five-part noir thriller for HBO and Channel 4 that, like A Brief History of Seven Killings, uses several voices to tell the story. The eponymous Millie (Tamara Lawrance) is a former London Metropolitan Police officer who returned to her birthplace of Kingston, the Jamaican capital, three years ago. Working in the missing persons unit alongside gifted, closeted partner Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jr), she is also broaching an uneasy reconciliation with Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen), her sister who transitioned some years earlier after a troubled childhood with their evangelical mother.
When a young boy vanishes and an evasive detective (Joe Dempsie) from the Met arrives to pursue his own parallel case, Millie’s investigation raises ghosts of centuries past. Indeed, post-colonial trauma abounds, whether personal or shared, with the latter smartly encapsulated in the allusions to people-trafficking as both a continuation and an inversion of the transatlantic slave trade.
“So much of Millie was what she actually sounded and looked like, what other people’s visions of her were,” says James, whose mother was one of Jamaica’s first female detectives. “One thing you learn about writing for the screen is sometimes to let characters be. You have to really trust subtext.”
After eye-catching turns in Time and Mr Loverman, Lawrance regarded her first major leading role as “a huge blessing and a huge gift.”
“It stopped being me watching somebody reading for the part,” James recalls of her audition. “I realised I wasn’t watching, I was eavesdropping.”
Lawrance’s mother moved from Jamaica to the UK as a teenager, so the actor related profoundly to Millie’s journey. “She’s spent most of her life in the UK, so there was a sort of dual heritage or identity there, which of a lot of children of immigrants or the diaspora understand. I resonated with her desire to establish a sense of home, with her decolonisation and her desire for repatriation. That’s a big inspiration to me, and I would love to spend significant time in Jamaica in my future.
“She’s also not a palatable character, which is really important, as often we see black characters in traditionally white spaces are not as irreverent as Millie. The themes this series addresses – colonial legacy, classism, homophobia, the transgender community – felt like a perfect synergy of all of my interests and concerns.”
Lawrance adds that the role helped her understand her mother “in quite subtle and interesting ways,” while block two director Annetta Laufer also found a personal connection to the story. “My grandmother came to the UK in the 1950s and represented a particular kind of Jamaican to me, very moral and very hard working,” she says. “When I went to Jamaica, I saw a lot of modern Jamaicans like her. I suddenly realied, that’s not Jamaica from the 50s. That is what it is to be Jamaican. That was a big eye-opener for me, and very emotional.”
Just like the cast, the crew was a mixture of British and Jamaican, with local location managers proving essential during sequences filmed in more sensitive areas. In fact, shooting in Jamaica – for longer than any international television production to date, no less – was crucial to the show’s authenticity and to counteract the clichés.
“I had all the same preconceptions a lot of people have,” admits Dempsie. “People sipping cocktails on a beach, going for a swim, being very calm, chilled and laid back. When I did get to reading the scripts, I’d never seen anything like this on television before. Marlon’s Kingston feels incredibly honest and authentic but there’s also a poetic, ethereal magic to it, and this is probably the performance I’m most proud of so far in my career.”
Even James, born and raised in Jamaica before moving to the US in 2007, came to reassess his homeland. “It’s always interesting running into British people who come to Jamaica based on the opinions of friends who live there, because they expect a certain Jamaica that doesn’t exist anymore. I used to mock that until I became that very person, but I quite liked this Jamaica, more than the one I left.”
Such a portrait of Kingston is a necessary corrective, with the biggest eye-opener being the depiction of Kingston’s trans community of “gully queens,” so called because they live in the capital’s open storm drains. While their existence is clearly marginal and dangerous, the sense of unquestioning support and love is stronger here than anywhere else in the show.
“Tanya Hamilton, our block one director, worked with our producer Yvonne Ibazebo and Jamaican charity Transwave to help us cast the Sunlight Ladies and also understand how to create a safe space for them,” says Laufer. “Many of them had never been in front of a camera before, so it was also about giving them the tools so that, by the time they came on set, it wasn’t overwhelming for them. Jamaica is still a very traditional Christian country in many ways, but the activism on the ground has really started to change perceptions of trans and gay people, which was great to see.”
This is borne out by the show’s reception in Jamaica, with Get Millie Black having already aired on HBO. Produced by Motive Pictures, it debuts in the UK on Channel 4 tomorrow.
“The most common thing I’ve heard is how authentically people there feel Jamaica is being represented, and very little about the fact there are gay characters or trans characters in the show,” says a delighted Laufer.
That said, filming in the gullies themselves posed unusual tests. “If it rained in the mountains, we’d have half an hour to get out of the gully,” she says. “Somebody was at the top and disseminating all this information. It was all very safe, but you couldn’t just go somewhere and go, ‘OK, let’s shoot.’”
For all its challenges, no one involved wants this to be the final chapter of Millie’s story. “If you’re a cop, your job is never done,” says James. “The show sets up some questions that, by the end, we haven’t fully answered, and I’ve always thought of novel writing as a form of detective work. You’re solving a mystery: why are your characters behaving the way they behave? We will hopefully get the chance to resolve those questions.”
tagged in: Channel 4, Get Millie Black, HBO, Joe Dempsie, Marlon James, Motive Pictures, Tamara Lawrance