Marlon James & Tamara Lawrance On Portraying The “Richness” Of Queer Caribbean Communities In ‘Get Millie Black’

Max Goldbart
·5-min read

Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James wanted to showcase the “richness” of queer Caribbean communities when compiling his debut TV project Get Millie Black, which launches on HBO in a few days’ time.

The decorated scribe, who has previously said he underwent gruelling religious rituals in his native Jamaica in order to “drive out the gay,” saw an opportunity to paint rich, three-dimensional queer characters and set them amid a traditional crime noir narrative in the Tamara Lawrance-starring drama series.

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“While we are not shying away from the cruelty that our queer people experience, we also wanted to show the richness of their lives,” James told Deadline. “Some of their most important scenes are some of the lightest.”

James was inspired to write the show’s lead transgender character, Millie Black’s sister Hibiscus, after watching a Channel 4 documentary a decade ago about Jamaica’s ‘gully queens’, a small group of transgender and gay people who live in Kingston. He has previously spoken about his experience of gay conversion therapy in Jamaica and how he was only able to truly express himself and write more freely as a queer person once he moved to the U.S.

Previously, James said there had been little depiction of Jamaican queer communities that didn’t break free of stereotype. “There were not lots of LGBTQ+ characters and usually they were walk-on parts or caricatures that do more harm than good,” he added.

Falling in love with queer stories

Hibiscus (middle) is played by Chyna McQueen. Image: Des Willie/HBO
Hibiscus (middle) is played by Chyna McQueen. Image: Des Willie/HBO

Lawrance, whose past roles include the BBC’s Time and indie movie The Silent Twins, said she “fell in love with” the queer stories penned by “literary icon” James after reading the scripts, and was impressed by the “allyship” that the protagonist displayed towards her sister.

“I just thought for Jamaica this is going to be huge,” she added. “Millie’s allyship was very powerful and important as an adjunct to the storylines. She is what other people in Jamaican society could be in terms of the steps forward that the Caribbean could be taking.”

Lawrance can currently be seen in the BBC’s Mr Loverman, a different UK show about queer Caribbean communities and the diaspora. While the “storylines are so different” – Mr Loverman follows an older gay man who has been having an affair with his best friend for decades – Lawrance said she hopes the pair of shows premiering so close together can “humanize these stories” and demonstrate that gay Caribbean people have existed for decades.

James added: “Even when people try to be open-minded about queers they act like it’s some new thing. They don’t realize the two aunties living at the end of the street are lovers.”

Produced by Simon Maxwell’s Motive Pictures with Leopoldo Gout and Jami O’Brien, Get Millie Black follows the UK detective protagonist as she returns to Kingston to work in a missing persons department and finds herself on a quest to solve a case that will blow her world apart. Its inception goes back almost a decade to a conversation between James and the producer, with Channel 4 and HBO jumping aboard several years later. “I thought I’d do a Jamaican patois story that was ‘unfilmable’ and then [the producer] calls and says, ‘Hey I sold it’,” joked James.

James won the Booker Prize for 2014’s A Brief History of Seven Killings but had never written a TV series before, yet he felt the characters he had created for Get Millie Black were perfect for the small screen.

“A novel can do a lot of things but I can’t make it come alive, that is the readers’ job,” he added. “But with TV you get actors, cast and crew that can make something come alive and I really wanted to do that.”

James said putting together a TV show was the “most fun and hardest work I’ve ever done.” He was inspired by True Detective and Happy Valley – the latter of which he labeled the “greatest show of the past 30 years” – while saying he wanted to draw a distinction between Get Millie Black and previous crime noir by handing the female protagonist “interesting flaws and contradictions.”

“Usually this is reserved for male characters but there are points in the show when you don’t even like Millie,” he added. “For a female character to be given that ‘unlikeability’ I think is different.”

While a U.S. network is aboard in the shape of HBO and Get Millie Black contains plenty universal themes, James stressed that the five-parter is fundamentally a story about Jamaicans and Brits.

Lawrance hopes this will spark a debate.

“A lot of the conversation around slavery or colonial legacy is deflected through America while Britain has this way of saying, ‘Oh we don’t do that’,” she said. “As a culture we have not done enough to excavate the remnants of that bitter history and the ways in which it is still plaguing society today. In my heart of hearts I do hope people can see this huge theme that has been so beautifully and meticulously explored through a missing persons case.”

Get Millie Black launches Monday November 25 on HBO and next year on Channel 4.

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