[This story contains spoilers from the season finale of Get Millie Black.]
Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James’ first foray into television with Get Millie Black, from Motive Pictures for HBO and Channel 4 in the U.K., is set in his home of Jamaica. In her first series lead, Tamara Lawrance plays ex-Scotland Yard detective Millie Black who returns to Jamaica from the U.K. haunted by a past that includes her inability to save her brother from their mother and their country’s toxic homophobia. Those same ghosts drive Millie to risk it all — her life, her job, her relationship with both her sister and police partner — to save a little Jamaican boy named Romeo, whom she doesn’t even know, from child trafficking back in the U.K.
James and his writing team tell this story over five episodes narrated by each of the main characters — Millie, Hibiscus, Holborn, Janet and Curtis. The finale, which released earlier in December, is narrated by Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) as he delves into his complex friendship with Millie, as well as his closeted life with his partner Daniel (Jomo Tafari Dixon), while also following Millie’s decision to go to the U.K. off the grid in hopes of saving Romeo (Tijhon Rose). James tells The Hollywood Reporter that the episode mirrors of lot of his life as a Queer man in Jamaica.
As a storyteller whose main platform has been novels, James is adept at digging deep beyond the surface of his characters. Transferring that depth to television, particularly to predominantly Black characters in a Caribbean country, especially one as fabled as Jamaica, to confront the tyranny of homophobia while also sustaining a conversation with the U.K. about its tainted legacy of colonialism, is bold and visionary. It’s also extremely vulnerable.
“I think masculinity is always up for grabs,” James says in discussing Curtis. “It’s not just Jamaica. I see it in Mexico and other countries… it’s more dangerous navigating that, especially if you’re playing the game of trying to pass, which is kind of what Curtis is doing. He’s trying to pass [as a heterosexual man], but he’s also trying to be in a glass closet.”
Then there is the commonly held belief by too many impoverished Jamaicans and others in formerly colonized nations that the “mother country” is their ticket out of the conditions they experience because they are oblivious to the role colonialism plays in their oppression. This is what the teenage Janet (Shernet Swearine) represents in episode four.
She and Millie’s interaction after Holborn (Joe Dempsie) kills Janet’s rich, white boyfriend Freddie Somerville, because he could identify Holborn as a dirty cop in cahoots with criminals he’s purportedly come to Kingston to help catch, is an insightful one. Like us all, Millie is surprised to find out that Freddie was not the one misleading Janet. Instead, it was 16-year-old Janet who set out trap to him as her ticket to a better life away from Jamaica. Ultimately, it’s her ambition to secure the life she sees rich white people like Freddie and his family lead that kills her. Somehow, she believes Millie, who is trying to do the right thing by saving Romeo, is standing in her way and chooses to side with Holborn who kills her.
“I think she’s a type of detective that when she gets that kind of nudge [that’s] like an itch that she can’t stop scratching, she has to follow it, which obviously leads to the fact that Janet has been lying,” Lawrance explains to THR. “Once that has happened, that really mars Millie’s trust. And there’s a level of grace in the fact that Janet is young, but when [Millie] realizes what Janet’s caught up in, she toes the line between trying to be understanding towards Janet’s potential ignorance [over] the prospect of social mobility [to finding Romeo]. But it’s Millie that knows the reality as somebody that has left the country and gone to the place where a lot of people idolize going to have a better life. She really knows the reality of living in the UK and that actually life is hard in a different way. And whatever you think you might obtain [there], it’s not necessarily as simple for you.”
Now that Get Millie Black is done, James answers many pointed questions about the series below, including if he would like to do more.
***
What did you set out to achieve and what do you think you accomplished with Get Millie Black?
Damn. I just try to set up to tell a decent story. But I also think I set up to tell more than one. The story of Hibiscus is very important to me. The story of Curtis as a queer Jamaican is very important to me. As a storyteller, I like when people have to deal with impossible questions. “Millie, in order to save one, you lose two,” Curtis says. But he knows if she had to do it again, she’d do it.
To Curtis’ partner Daniel, Curtis is always choosing Millie. Why?
I think it’s because Curtis doesn’t have a lot of people in his life who see him for who he is in his totality. In fact, far as I know, it’s only Daniel. And I think he needs more than just Daniel. I think anytime Millie is dealing with Curtis, she deals with Curtis as who he is. That’s why she’s over for dinner and hanging out with him and his partner being gay life partners. I think it’s not just saying she’s cool with him being gay. I think she’s cool with him being with Daniel, cool with him being Curtis. And that’s important. It’s important for us to feel seen.
He even says that Millie sees him several times.
I know as a queer person I’m still friends with all the people who first see me for who I was, even if I didn’t want to be seen.
But when Millie’s over for dinner with her guy Richie (Derrick Levy), she’s the one who feels uncomfortable.
I remember somebody said to me that the opposite of loneliness is not company. Millie sometimes thinks whatever is gnawing at her, whatever is this thing that haunts her, it will be fixed with her sister moving back into the house, or it’ll be fixed by fixing up the house, even though she can’t go any further than the couch, that it will be fixed by acting like this guy’s her boyfriend, or fixed by friends and camaraderie. I’ve been through that myself, thinking that those things help fix something that’s gnawing in you, and it’s only when she is in the presence of something that’s supposed to fix everything, that she realizes it’s not enough. I think in the narration, Holborn kind of calls it out. It’s supposed to be enough. It should be enough, but it’s not. And she’s haunted, in a lot of ways, by a dead boy. And you can’t haunt the ghost back.
Talk about the powerful exchange between Bis [Chyna McQueen] and Millie about their abusive mother’s house being haunted and essentially packed with generational trauma during the second episode. It’s like a therapy session in a way.
It is like a therapy session [with] it’s hard truths being aired. And Millie, in a lot of ways, is being forced to deal with it. I think Millie has this thing where she says that a place of really bad things is worth getting back, which is, of course, total bullshit. But a lot of people believe it. I’m sure there’s therapists who believe [that] you have to go back to the site of trauma for healing. It’s a way of seeing that actually a lot of therapists don’t do anymore… I think it’s a fallacious thing believing healing is going to happen there. For one, she’s sleeping on the couch [or armchair]. Me, personally, I just think ghosts are too powerful.
Millie’s efforts to save Romeo also exposes modern-day human trafficking and exploitation.
Especially in the U.K., where human trafficking has exploded, and they still don’t talk about it. Usually, when a trafficking victim is identified, they immediately become an immigration problem, not a trafficking problem. And they’re deported, and usually within weeks, they’re right back in the U.K.
It’s like the victim is being blamed.
Yes, the victim is being blamed. I wish we had more time to do more about trafficking in the story.
Why doesn’t Daniel leave Curtis after they are both taken and beaten over Millie being missing in the U.K.?
Because, one, he loves him. I think he sees that there can be repair here. I think he also is aware of the usual narrative with gay relationships. Of course, it was me taking a potshot at film and TV when [Daniel] says [“Oh? Don’t get enough TV shows where the gay people either break up or drop dead?” to Curtis’ tearful “I thought you’d left”], which is literally Marlon James saying, “I’m tired of those gay stories.”
I think it is so powerful that Curtis is so tearful and grateful that Daniel didn’t leave him.
The script doesn’t call for crying. I didn’t write tears in the script. I think that it’s one of those many scenes when we were filming where these characters get almost overwhelmed by the role they’re playing and the situation they’re in. I didn’t write tears in that scene. Curtis doesn’t have a lot, not really. And I think Daniel really is it [for him]. And I think Daniel is, in some ways, long suffering, but Daniel also is the person who’s calling a spade a spade to both Curtis and Millie.
Let’s talk about Holborn and his purpose. Why make us think he’s dead for him to not be dead then to be dead again?
That’s because I love killing the character twice [laughs]. I knew Holborn was going to be the villain in a way, but I also didn’t know in what way. He created this niche for himself where I do clean up, and he ends up doing things which he’s never done before. That’s the first person he’s killed. He’s cleaned up bodies before. That’s his job. He came to Jamaica to clean up, to fix it, not to be involved in making it worse. The fact is he is a dirty cop. And like a lot of dirty cops, they compartmentalize. So, yes, they can have perfectly fine families. I think we have this idea that somebody who’s bad in X is bad in everything else, you know. It’s like in American TV where the racist woman is also an alcoholic and a hussy, or the racist man also beats his kids. A lot of racists adore their children.
And his wife is not white either.
And he loves his children. He loves his wife. And I think Holborn certainly forced me to reconcile these, you know, people who do bad things but somehow find a way to be good in this one thing or something else.
One of the things that’s clear at the end of the series is Millie and her adversary Natalie (Umi Myers) basically have the same dynamic in their lives, just on opposite ends of the law. Millie’s need to save Romeo is motivated by her regret of not being able to save her own brother Orville, and Natalie is trying to kill Millie to save her brother Nico (Jamael Westman) whom she feels she also abandoned when they were kids.
Yeah, that was a parallel that caught me off guard when I noticed that we end up with two brothers and two sisters, and that this person [Natalie] is also trying to save her brother[but] her brother is different: he created this whole mess. But still one could say her loyalty to her brother is blind to what her brother has done. But Millie’s loyalty to her brother is also kind of blind because her brother no longer exists.
Why does Millie’s former partner in the U.K., Meera (Anjili Mohindra), who is still working and has a high level of access, still help Millie even when she finds out Millie is not being straight with her?
I think Millie, in some ways, is a very good friend. Millie is a friend who makes you feel seen. She knows what to say to disarm you and immediately go, “I’m on your side.” I think that’s one of the reasons why people do stuff for her because they feel seen.
Get Millie Black is very good at showing how and why people feel trapped and don’t come forward.
I like desperate characters. I tend to write a lot of them. I like people pushed to the point where they have to make a decision. In Janet’s case, it costs her her life. In Millie’s case, it cost her her loved ones.
I see online that Jamaicans were excited to see ’90s crossover dancehall/reggae queen Patra and other familiar Jamaican faces in it. How was it to have Patra, whose real name is Dorothy Smith?
Well, Patra was a great one. Of course, it was great having star power. And it’s great showing [that] Jamaican talent can do different things. I was kind of star struck. And she is a total sweetheart. But Patra, also, what she sees in the script, she knows. She’s not a hit girl, but she knows the hit girls, and she’s been around women who have very little choices in how to survive. She chose music, but she’s surrounded, not anymore maybe, by boys and girls who chose other ways that didn’t end up so well.
Online, many Jamaicans seem to really like Get Millie Black. How gratifying is that?
That was very gratifying. I was talking to somebody about the diaspora versus the country, and that people are surprised when I said I come across more open mindedness in Jamaica than I do with, say, Jamaicans in Minneapolis. Because I think if you left in 1980, technically you’re still in 1980 and you’re around people from 1980 and you can keep the values of that. And I find that with a lot of Jamaicans, I’m not saying all because I am literally living in the diaspora, but I think even people in the diaspora, sometimes when they go back to Jamaica, don’t recognize it. And why would they?
Our country’s evolving; people are evolving. And I knew that Jamaica was different when I went back actually to talk about [A] Brief History [of Seven Killings]. I thought, after writing that novel, I wouldn’t be allowed back in that country. And what you find is the younger generation, they want to talk about the stuff that we used to whisper about. There are Jamaican kids who are friends with people who have come out in high school and I’m like, “Damn, that’s shocking to me.” So it doesn’t surprise me now. I think also people are watching with an open mind. I think it’s the most Jamaican Jamaican show. I think Jamaicans are surprised by how Jamaican it is because they’re used to a Jamaican flavor to what could easily be a Bahamas show. And I think they’re surprised by how much Patois is in it. And I think they’re surprised that they’re seeing all these Jamaicans that they know.
I was in LA and went to a conversation with Lena Waithe at the FilmGood Film Festival, which is Jamaican or Jamerican-founded actually, and she was raving about Get Millie Black and reaching out to you about it.
Yeah, she texted me. She was mad. “You did not tell me you were doing this,” [she texted], and I’m like, “I totally told you.” That she did Master of None tells me that Lena is somebody to whom characters come first. And that’s the case for me as well. It was very important to me that there was an interesting mystery going on, but I was primarily concerned with the characters. As somebody who grew up with [a mother who was] a cop, I am interested in, “what does it take to get to work every morning?” and, “what kind of baggage are you bringing back home?” because I had to live with both of them.
It’s interesting you say that because when Millie goes to the U.K., people tell her she’s putting her life in danger, but she puts her life in danger every day as a cop.
Yeah, she puts her life in danger all the time. I think there are a lot of people who have decided not to save the boy. But then they also don’t have to live with knowing that I didn’t save someone I could have. That’s just something she couldn’t have on her conscience.
What do you hope the audience takeaway is?
I hope people take away that there’s more than one kind of story that happens in Jamaica. That, yes, the trials are real, but it’s complicated. I hope these characters become people that become unforgettable that they want to see, whose lives they have become interested in and that they’re participating in, and they want to see where it goes.
Will we see a second season?
I do hope it goes to another season. There are a lot of unfinished stories. For one, we have a brother and sister over in the U.K. hellbent on revenge. Millie just wrecked their lives big time. And she comes back to a Jamaica where she’s more alone than ever. What is she going to do? And where the hell is Hibiscus?
***
All episodes of Get Millie Black are now streaming on Max.
English (US) ·