Sparking conversations

Prime Video’s long-anticipated adaptation of Naomi Alderman novel The Power is set in a world where girls are suddenly able to generate electricity at will. DQ speaks to the cast and production team about overcoming creative changes and Covid to create this globe-trotting spectacle.

Everything was in place. Tim Bricknell, producer on series including Taboo and The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, was embarking on his most ambitious project to date: Reed Morano’s adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s sprawling provocative and propulsive bestseller The Power, imagining a world in which teenage girls across the globe acquire the ability to generate and manipulate electricity.

Among them were Halle Bush’s Allie Montgomery, a rootless, abused foster child in the Deep South; Ria Zmitrowicz’s Roxy Monke, the independent, illegitimate daughter of Eddie Marsan’s north London crime boss; and Auli’I Cravalho’s Jos Cleary-Lopez, daughter of Leslie Mann’s progressive, fast-rising Seattle mayor Margot.

Cast and crew were about to fly to Vancouver to shoot the latter’s storyline, with other narratives to be filmed in the UK (notably the rise of Zrinka Cvitesic’s first lady of Carpathia, whose palace was recreated at Senate House) and South Africa (where Toheeb Jimoh’s Tunde Ojo and Heather Agyepong’s Ndudi find themselves at the heart of a media storm in Lagos). It was February 2020, and lockdown was three days away.

“The pandemic didn’t help,” smiles Bricknell, over three years later. “Doing all the different storylines justice, set in different parts of the world, in as few parts of the world as possible, was obviously a challenge because it was so much more difficult for everyone to do their work. It added a real level of difficulty, emotional and practical, and the whole thing went on so long that we had to recast a couple of roles because those actors were no longer available. On the positive side, it was never boring!”

Alderman’s novel was the subject of a bidding war when it was published back in 2016, but the interest of TV production companies came as no surprise to the author herself.

“I remember having terrible trouble with the first draft of the book until I worked out that it was supposed to be telly,” she says. “I’d been watching a lot of prestige TV, so there’s certainly The Sopranos and The West Wing in there, only I wanted to tell stories with that excitement and depth of character from female perspectives. I wrote the second draft almost as selected scenes from a television series, so it felt very natural when we started to have conversations about TV.”

For exec producer Jane Featherstone and the team at series producer Sister (Chernobyl), it was a no-brainer. “It’s an epic story with a very simple premise, which turns the world upside down and allows us to question everything we thought we knew. If I’d had this show when I was younger, it could have been transformative. I spent my entire youth walking through south London with a key in my hands [to use against a potential attacker]. To imagine that you might not have to do that one day is an incredibly powerful thing.”

Fellow exec producer Naomi de Pear was equally smitten. “It’s such a rollicking ride. There are so many opportunities to look at the way power performs itself, in our lives, in sex, in politics, in workplaces, but to do it in an entertaining way.”

When the head of Amazon Studios, Jen Salke, started crying as Alderman and Sister discussed the story, their broadcast partner was secured. “We connected on a real emotional level about what the show could do,” says Alderman. “Writing the book, I was pedalling a pushbike uphill. Amazon came along and gave me a Ferrari.”

Morano, Alderman, Sarah Quintrell and Clare Wilson (Bafta-nominated for Ellen and Rocks, respectively) led the initial writers room, which began with a straightforward question. “We asked everyone: what makes you most angry about the world – and how do we change that?” recalls de Pear. “It was funny and shocking that all the writers had a different approach to that question. Some British writers were politely going, ‘Actually, I’ve been quite lucky as a woman.’ Half-an-hour later, everyone had realised they’d been in all sorts of situations. An hour-long conversation finished two days later.”

Alderman encouraged the team to consider introducing new elements to the story, including a trans character (played by A Fantastic Woman and La Jauría’s Daniela Vega), bringing John Leguizamo’s Rob, husband of Margot and father of Jos, out of the shadows and giving the couple a teenage son to offer new perspective on his sister’s newfound abilities.

The transformation left even Alderman gobsmacked. “To look at this and go ‘this is better than the book’ was not an emotion that I expected to feel at any point. This series is like several other shows at once – a gangster story, a political thriller, an investigative story, a Southern Gothic story, a story about Eastern European corruption… The diversity in the cast and crew brings such specificity in their perspectives, such reality and groundedness.”

Casting was an unsurprisingly lengthy process for a series that Bricknell estimates has 394 speaking parts. Of the young leads, Zmitrowicz and Jimoh came quickly, he says. “Even before meeting Ria, she was the first person I thought we should cast and Toheeb was the first actor we ever met for Tunde, so we then spent a lot of time thinking, ‘It can’t be that easy.’ Allie, though, took a long, long time and in the end we put out an open call.”

Did Bush, cast while still at high school, feel the pressure of her first-ever job being a lead in such a huge show? “It’s like a whole elephant on your shoulders,” she says, laughing. “But I had the support of the directors, the writers, everybody.”

Agyepong nods. “At one point I felt quite overwhelmed. This show is really important. It was 2020 and there was a huge youth protest in Nigeria. For me, it was about identifying what I want and what Ndudi wants, and not thinking about anything else. Then the rest will speak for itself.”

Back in April 2021, DQ attended a virtual set visit over Zoom, with the Cleary-Lopez storyline having been moved from its intended base of Vancouver to a modernist house near Reading, Berkshire. Cast members were separated by Perspex screens, the fear of being Patient Zero and shutting down production palpable. Much has changed since then: Covid is in retreat, Mann has been replaced by Toni Collette (Unbelievable), and Raelle Tucker (True Blood) has taken over from Morano as showrunner.

“This show has been a challenge in the making,” says Featherstone. “Following the finish of Covid, we decided we needed to make some changes and brought back the team who were available to do that. We moved from London to Vancouver and completed the story there, so we were lucky enough to be able to do that with Amazon’s support. I don’t think we’d have all kept going if we hadn’t believed in it so much.”

For Tucker, it was something close to destiny. “I was about halfway through the book back in 2016, and I called my agents. I said, ‘This is a show I need to make – tell me there’s a way that I can get on board.’ Obviously it didn’t happen at that stage, but I kept saying to them, ‘Where is my Game of Thrones? Where is my female-driven, feminist, massive, epic, ambitious thing?’ I felt ready after 20 years writing television, but there just aren’t a lot of shows like this. Years later, I got a call from Amazon, and normally I would have told them I had my own shows to develop. But as soon as they said it was The Power, there was no question.”

With her initial apprehension about “stepping on anything” eased by the warm welcome she received, Tucker set about finessing the structure of the series as it stood. “There were six or seven main characters across the entire world whose stories don’t automatically intersect, so one of the things I was brought in to do was build that connectivity: figuring out why they speak to each other and what they have in common. I wanted a gravitational pull between them, whether it’s a physical connection of one watching another over YouTube, or an emotional one where they’re going through similar experiences, and for the audience to be hungry for those meetings to happen.”

Tucker also wanted to focus on the possibilities of wish-fulfilment, bringing out the optimism of the narrative. “It’s not just about what is broken, it’s about what it would feel like to no longer be afraid – and to have fun! I wanted to see a female politician who was like, ‘Fuck high heels!’ I wanted to see somebody do something goofy, like charge their phone, lighter moments to interweave with the important political, spiritual and emotional themes.”

The Covid-enforced delays have, if anything, made an already pertinent story even more relevant, especially with the rollback of abortion rights in America.

“We’re in a backlash against the backlash now,” says Featherstone. “Two years ago, we were feeling positive post MeToo, thinking this show is going to speak to what’s already out there, but there’s still a long way to go. We keep fighting.”

“We need the show to come out right now because it’s going to spark conversations,” adds Bush. “We can’t put these subjects in the dark again because they’re uncomfortable to talk about. We can’t. It’s just outraging. It’s 2023 and we need to talk about it.”

And those conversations are just beginning: with only a third of the book adapted so far, Alderman reveals that “conversations have taken place” about another season, while Featherstone explains that the first nine episodes – which launch on Prime Video on March 31 – bring the show’s world to the brink of revolution. “You’re feeling like this could go anywhere…”

tagged in: Clare Wilson, Halle Bush, Heather Agyepong, Jane Featherstone, Naomi Alderman, Naomi de Pear, Prime Video, Raelle Tucker, Sarah Quintrell, Sister, The Power, Tim Bricknell