ANAHEIM, Calif. — Actress Mallori Johnson first encountered the work of writer Octavia Butler when she read “Fledgling,” a novel about a young Black vampire. It was the summer before she left home for the Julliard School in New York City.
“I just fell in love with the fact that she was able to create these kinds of fantastical, magical worlds that centered on Black people,” says Johnson, who grew up in San Diego. “That was something that I had never heard or experienced before, so that was really exciting.”
A year or two later, Johnson’s mom gave her a copy of “Kindred,” another novel by the late Pasadena-based writer, and that book – in which a young Black woman suddenly and unpredictably begins to time-travel between present-day Los Angeles and a slave plantation in the antebellum South – had an even bigger impact.
“I fell in love with her intellect, and what she set out to do with the story,” Johnson says.
As she was finishing her studies at Julliard just a few years ago, Johnson saw an audition notice for a television adaptation of “Kindred.” She went for it, never mind that she had no professional credits at the time and the audition was for the lead role of Dana, an aspiring writer whose life is turned upside down when she experiences time jumps.
“Kindred” showrunner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who adapted “Kindred” for FX on Hulu, where it premiered Tuesday, says that lack of experience might have mattered – except Johnson’s audition immediately made it clear that the part belonged to her.
“I’ll be honest, the one thing you’re freaking out about the most is, ‘Who is gonna be Dana?’” says Jacobs-Jenkins, a MacArthur Fellowship recipient in 2016 and a Pulitzer finalist in 2018 for his play “Everybody.” “And I would say it was kind of clear to me from the minute I saw Mallori’s audition that she was that person.
“It was like an alien who dropped out of the sky, you know, and kind of claimed this for herself,” he says. “I look back on it and it was almost like a no-brainer. It was just so clear to me.”
From page to screen
In the series, Dana has just moved to Los Angeles when the time travel starts. She’s terrified that she might be losing her mind until her new boyfriend Kevin, played by Micah Stock, sees her vanish and later reappear one night.
During time jumps to the plantation, the year is 1815 and Dana meets its residents. Its owners, Thomas and Margaret Weylin, played by Ryan Kwanten and Gayle Rankin, terrify her with their cruelty and racism. Others she meets include a pair of slaves, Luke, played by Austin Smith, and Sarah, played by Sophina Brown.
And in an addition to the 1979 novel, she meets there her mother Olivia, played by Sheria Irving, who apparently had experienced the same phenomenon years earlier.
Jacobs-Jenkins says he first discovered Butler’s books as a sci-fi and horror fan obsessed with Ray Bradbury and his college-student babysitter brought him several of her books.
“It was really profound because it was the first time I’d ever had a book like that with a brown-skinned person on the cover and, like, a cool landscape,” he says. “The first books I read were the Patternist books that start with ‘The Wild Seed,’ and they still have the most sentimental place in my heart.”
But “Kindred,” which he first read in college, stuck with him and six or eight years later while living in Berlin, Jacobs-Jenkins says he decided to pitch it as a TV project.
“Of course, I could not get arrested,” he says, laughing. But he didn’t give up, and in 2016, the FX network expressed interest, and after years of struggling with seemingly no end in sight, “Kindred” suddenly was a go.
Jacobs-Jenkins went to work adapting the book, digging into Butler’s papers that are held at the Huntington Library in San Marino to find out as much as he could about her thoughts and process as she wrote “Kindred.”
“I think we struggled because at that time Octavia Butler was this very well-kept secret amongst certain kinds of readers,” Jacobs-Jenkins says. ‘But for whatever reason, after 2016 she kind of mainstreamed, and I think a lot of the work that she did was sort of being thought of as prophetic or visionary.
“You know, she got the Mars landing pad named after her, she was inducted into the Library of America. I just felt really fortunate enough to be the dummy who decided early on I wanted to make this TV show, and the winds of fortune blew in the right direction, it seems.”
Sci-fi and enslavement
While “Kindred” unfolds in the realm of speculative fiction thanks to the time-traveling mystery at its core, there’s a reason Butler saw it more as “a grim fantasy” than science fiction. Slavery was a brutal institution, and racism still a blight on the United States and the world.
The themes and stories of “Kindred” feel as relevant today as ever, its actors all agree.
“The horrors and the oppression in the ways in which this country was founded, which was on the backs of the enslaved, is no mystery to those who are true students of history,” says Stock, who like the character Kevin in the novel, is White.
The resurgence of interest in Butler’s books is partly due to the issues she explored in the past which are even more a part of the societal conversation today, he says.
“Alienation, oppression, racism, familial ties, gender dynamics,” Stock says. “All of those, it’s unfortunate that it’s taken us this long, but at least we’re talking about it.”
Irving, Smith and Brown, say that as Black actors playing slaves in the past world of “Kindred,” was a powerful experience.
“I’m a trained actor, I went to Yale. I should be able to rip it off,” Irving says of the figurative bandages over her character’s trauma. “But I found myself sometimes really sucked into the gravitas, the pain that my ancestors felt. Even being on the land (of the Georgia locations), there was a palpable sense of spirit there.”
Brown pointed to the way the Black community in 1815 embraced and protected Dana in her appearances there and said that made her think differently about the role of communities today.
“Hopefully, we’ll not only have that conversation as the Black community, but what does it mean to be part of the American community and dealing with this history?” Brown says. “How can we reconcile it?’
Smith added that he hopes “Kindred” can offer some enlightenment as well as entertainment.
“I hope that a show like this will strengthen our resolve to not actually go backwards in time,” he says. “I think that there are people who want us to, and I think that what we’re witnessing now is a resistance to that.”
Kwanten and Rankin, who play the plantation owners, are not American – he’s Australian, she’s Scottish – but they well know the history of slavery in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
Despite their characters living lives and benefiting from the enslavement of others, both actors say they worked to make Thomas and Margaret Weylin fully formed people to challenge viewers to consider who they might have been and what they would have done in the Weylins’ places.
“We’re both so diametrically opposed to these people and their actions,” Rankin says of their characters. “But like Ryan was saying, I think it’s very easy and kind of dangerous to work with a kind of separation from these people.
“Especially as White people, I think it’s unhelpful for anyone to say, ‘Well, they’re evil people, this is not me,’” she says.
“I would say we pull back the curtain and we sort of say, ‘Look, scream, but never forget,’” Kwanten says. “The past is never dead and you are accountable for your actions and they have consequences.”
A unique performer
Jacobs-Jenkins says he felt Johnson was a star almost from the minute he met her.
“There’s no one that acts like her, there’s no one that talks like her, and the camera loves her face,” he says. “When I think of Octavia Butler’s female heroines, they’ve very unique individuals, and she just screamed that.”
This is not to say Johnson walked onto set the first day and felt right at home.
“Um, yeah, it was terrifying,” she says, laughing. “It was everything you could possibly imagine. I was just coming out of school. I didn’t have a process. I didn’t even know what it meant to work on a set for as long as that, for six months, where you’re basically the only person working every single hour of every single day.”
Stock, who shares the screen with her more than perhaps any other actor, says it was clear to him when he first read with her while auditioning for Kevin, that she was preternaturally talented.
“There was no mystery in my mind as to why this person had landed the role,” Stock says. “And that continued to be true. She’s a joy to act with. She’s terrifying to act with. She’s wild, she’s wonderful.
“And as our friendship grew, and we became closer, I mean, I just feel a really intense amount of pride in what she did,” he says, wiping at his eyes as Johnson reached out to touch his arm. “Yeah, I think she’s risen to the whole thing with aplomb.
“And magic.”
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‘KINDRED’
Rating: TV-MA
How to watch: Hulu
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