Wild things
Following the award-winning success of Mood, Nicôle Lecky reflects on creating Wild Cherry – a story about secrets and lies in a world of extreme privilege – and the challenges of stepping up as showrunner
For her debut series Mood, Nicôle Lecky created, wrote, executive produced and starred in a music and dance-fuelled story based on her own stage play, Superhoe. She played Sasha, a wannabe singer and rapper who discovers the exciting world of social media influencing and is drawn into the dark and dangerous sex work industry.
Now with her follow-up drama Wild Cherry, Lecky’s taking a back seat – on screen, at least.
Here, she’s again the creator, writer and executive producer, taking up a showrunning role with a hand in every aspect of making this six-parter, which examines mother-daughter relationships against a backdrop of social media and peer pressure.
Within the privileged confines of Richford Lake, self-made millionaire Lorna (Carmen Ejogo) and her best friend Juliet (Eve Best), a woman born into wealth, ensure their daughters – and BFFs – Grace (Imogen Faires) and Allegra (Amelia May) live a life other teenagers can only dream of. But when Grace and Allegra are implicated in a shocking scandal at their exclusive private school, their mothers are forced to take sides as their friendship is pushed to breaking point. Toxic secrets and lies then threaten to fracture the façade of their idyllic town, revealing the ugliness underneath.
Though she’s not among the central quartet, Lecky does appear in the series as Gigi, an American resident of the fictional town, who finds herself on the outside no matter how much she tries to ingratiate herself with its other inhabitants.
Speaking to DQ during post-production ahead of Wild Cherry’s launch on BBC One this Sunday, Lecky says she has enjoyed adding the final flourishes to the show alongside director Toby MacDonald (Extraordinary, Fifteen-Love). Like Mood, the series also promises more music and dance sequences, not least a choreographed TikTok routine performed in episode one. Firebird Pictures is the producer, with BBC Studios handling distribution.
“It’s a lot of fun. I really love being in post and love doing the music and working with the music supervisors. That’s where you’re really shaping what it is,” she says. “There’s lots of other characters to factor in, in a way that I didn’t on Mood, so there’s lots of different perspectives – and not having to just stare at my own face for ages. It’s quite nice to look at the other actors.”
When it came to which supporting role she would play, “it was always Gigi, always,” she says. “I came up with this central four and then when I was building the world out and talking to the BBC about it, of course I’m an actor, so I was like, ‘Oh my God, who can I play in the world of Richford Lake?’
“There were two characters at the time of the initial development of the show – one of them didn’t actually end up being in the show – but it just felt like a really fun role to get my teeth into, in a way that she’s so desperate to be liked and be in the town, and she’s a bit of an outsider. So she was a lot of fun to think about.”
It’s also Gigi who introduces viewers to Richford Lake through the show’s narration. “I do love that voyeuristic way into the world, and they live in this very rarefied, privileged world. Having somebody like Gigi pass commentary on it and lead you across the season was always something I really wanted to do,” Lecky says. “Yes, there are more thriller elements to the show, but it’s a mystery drama and it felt like she was the right person to take you through, as opposed to the detective. That strand felt right for Gigi.”
The origins of Wild Cherry actually date back to the same time she was developing Mood, which debuted on the BBC in 2022 and went on to win the Miniseries and Original Music: Fiction prizes at the BAFTA Television Awards the following year.
“What was crazy about it is when you’re starting out as a writer, you develop lots of ideas. You’re always generating ideas, really, as a writer. I had this idea for this show and I was pitching it at the same time [as Mood]. But we’re talking 2019, it’s going back,” Lecky says.
“Then when Mood got the greenlight and I started working on that, this took a back seat. But I got the commission while I was writing Mood, so it was always once I finished Mood, I would write the pilot and just see what happens. You never know what’s going to happen. Fortunately, the BBC liked the pilot so I got to make the show.”
Lecky’s pitch offered to take viewers inside the world of an exclusive gated community, just like one in Surrey she would often drive through. On those occasions, “I was like, ‘Oh God, people just don’t really know this level of wealth exists in a way that doesn’t feel a bit fanciful or really heightened. People are really living like this,’ so I always had it in my head that I wanted to create something there.”
She also knew she wanted to examine the relationship between mothers and daughters, while also imagining what her life might have been like if she’d had social media when she was a teenager at school.
“I don’t even know the level of pressure, so I knew I wanted to do something in that space,” she continues. “Then I just went down the rabbit hole. I wanted to say, ‘Well, these people have access to everything and should have amazing lives, and shouldn’t, in theory, be facing all these issues. But of course, everybody is. It doesn’t really matter what class you’re in.’ So that was what I wanted to explore – the people who had the perfect life, and then break it apart.”
Imagining the scandal that would cause this house of cards to crumble wasn’t easy, however. “I definitely did the Uno Reverse on quite a few storylines,” Lecky jokes. Ultimately, she didn’t want to create a traditional thriller, having to fit a certain structure or include certain tropes, principally because she didn’t want the police to become a constant presence in the series.
“So that was probably the challenge. I wanted to create a drama. I wanted there to be mystery. I wanted there to be this scandal that the girls are embroiled in, but I didn’t want the police turning up every two seconds, or lots of crimey aspects happening in the world,” she notes. “That was probably the hardest thing to do, to make sure you felt their presence but it didn’t overwhelm some of the fun dynamics between the women. Trying to get a specificity of tone on this was a challenge.”
The nuance of the series “comes from me sat in my office talking to myself and playing the characters as I’m writing them,” Lecky says. She also used her lived experience to inform the various characters that populate Richford Lake. “Teenage girls are so nuanced, as are women, and there’s these different worlds happening between the mothers and the daughters, yet there’s a lot of mirroring each other that’s happening,” she says.
“Frances [Sophie Winkleman] won’t let Gigi into the WhatsApp group, which is quite a big thing for my character, for instance. And there’s a lot of minutiae between the women and the daughters that I just felt like they could all be really varied, and that’s the truest thing. Lots of friends are very different from one another and yet they have a commonality between them.”
Crafting Wild Cherry in the wake of Mood, Lecky says she didn’t feel any pressure to follow its success, as she was motivated to tell a new story. That she wasn’t the lead actor also meant she had more time on set to sit behind the monitor and space to make decisions with the show’s heads of department.
“It’s still super busy. I don’t think I even enjoyed one particularly over the other,” she says. “It was very different and quite nice, actually, to watch the actors doing their stuff and doing their magic. The pressure’s off you at that point when you’re watching, so you just get to enjoy it.”
Taking up the role of showrunner – a job at the heart of US drama but yet to break through in any meaningful way in the UK, Europe and beyond – Lecky held the vision of the show and passed that on through the script and her work with MacDonald, DOP Aaron Reid, production designer Sherree Phillips and costume designer Buki Ebiesuwa, among other HODs.
“I was really clear about the colour. I could really see the colours in the world,” she says. “So when I was meeting directors, I was like, ‘This is kind of how I’d like it to be,’ and I wanted somebody to come in and run with that, essentially, and not try to create something different.
“I was so clear on the vision. We all knew what we were aiming for, and it was like those unspoken rules or guidelines of like, ‘Oh, that’s not what we’re making. It’s this thing.’ You do everything as a showrunner. You’re casting it, you’re hiring everybody, you’re picking [HODs for] music, costume, hair, make-up – everything really.”
Having worked as an executive producer on Mood, being the showrunner was helped by the fact she wasn’t a total newcomer. Even so, “some people aren’t used to it,” she says of showrunning in British TV. “But I’d say people are pretty on board, because you like having a vision to be working towards, and that keeps a consistency and then everyone really knows what they’re doing. I really loved working with the heads of departments we picked, and you’ll see there’s cohesiveness across the show. Well, I hope so anyway.”
As with any work she creates, Lecky hopes Wild Cherry can provoke questions among viewers, or lead them to find ways to relate to the story and characters. “There’s not necessarily a right or wrong here,” she says. “It’s just like, this is what can happen in the world. We are living in a time where, particularly, teenage girls can be really vulnerable online. So there is a cautionary tale element to it, perhaps, but you take it for what it is and make what you make of it.”
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tagged in: BBC, BBC Studios, Firebird Pictures, Mood, Nicôle Lecky, Wild Cherry