We had the recent pleasure of being invited to an exclusive sit down dinner with the cast of Marvel’s “Luke Cage” on Netflix. The dinner was hosted by the renowned Red Rooster in Harlem, New York. After dinner, guests were treated to an impromptu panel with some of the cast and its creators. See some of what they had to say after the jump.
Interviewer: Let’s Dive into it.
Cheo: I’ve never been more excited than anything I’ve ever worked on than for people to see what we gave our lives for. We’re either really right or really wrong, because we left it all out on the field. If we’re wrong, f– it. All you can really do is just really be as artistically true as you can. The thing is that this cast pulls so much out of us because they elevated the material. When you see what Simone feels in that first look, and Alfre, and Mike, and Frank, and what everybody did to this, it’s incredible. The thing was that when you get into post, which is my favorite part after everything is filmed and you start to add the music. One of the things that Adrian and Ali said from the very beginning is, “Look, we know you like your needle drops. We know that you’re going to want to use Nina Simone and Mahalia Jackson and Donald Byrd,” which we did, but also the one thing that they talked about doing is making music very specifically for the images.
Basically, it’s for a reason. Every single episode has music tailor made for the characters and because they did a 30 piece orchestra, it sounds different than anything else that’s out there. What’s interesting is that when you actually hear the music with the combination of the incredible acting and the visuals that were put together from our various directors and of course, Manuel Billeter, which I think … If you don’t know who he is yet, after you watch this you’ll know who he is as a cinematographer. The whole combination when you see the finished episodes is just, it’s amazing. I just can’t wait for you guys, for everybody, and also really see this show.
Interviewer: Simone what was your reaction to the song choice for you? Did it give you chills?
Simone: It did. I haven’t seen any of the episodes yet. It’s so funny; it had such a good soul to it. It’s so reminiscent of so many artists that I grew up listening to I’m from Detroit you had Nina Simone and such wide array of music. I grew up, every Saturday morning I just remember my dad was a huge Miles Davis fan, just a jazz aficionado. He’s got thousands of records. Every Saturday morning was just music constantly from sun up to sun down. That song just took me back to, although it just started on the show and it took me back to being that kid and that music.
Interviewer: Let me open it really quick so you can talk about your character. Misty Knight, yeah talk about her because she is so, so sexy.
Simone: Misty Knight is the first black female superhero in the history of Marvel comics, first ever. Yes she predates Storm and just the fact that she exists on this street level superhero, in that universe is great because she’s just a woman from Harlem. Cares about her community and her people and it’s interesting in a time where you look at the police, and I know I don’t necessarily identify with police officers even though I got cops in my family. My aunt was a detective for over 25 years in DC. I always looked at her and thought, “What in the hell made you decide to do that?” To then have to go play a character who does exactly that, who looks at the system and her community and says, “F– that. I’m going to make it be better. I’m going to do it my way.” She’s a very strong and self-assured woman, and yet she’s vulnerable and she’s sexy, and she’s unsure of herself at times as well. It’s a lot of fun to play with it.
Interviewer: Love it. Mahershala and Theo, I want to know what you guys feel about the music because it’s super dope, love it. What was you reaction hearing it?
Mahershala: I’m a hip-hop head, so I was first … I always talk to Cheo and he heaped about the fact that Adrian and Ali Shaheed were doing it. My mind ran with the possibilities there. Just getting an opportunity to see what they saw in us, what they felt was necessary to lay in as a foundation, the sonic foundation for this story is phenomenal because I can’t start with another project without thinking of playlists specific to that character. It taps me into something about … We’re all energy, right? Waves and sound, we respond to that, so everybody is so different that way. These characters and if you’re fortunate to work with a good bit, you don’t want any of them blending together. Maybe there’s certain qualities that might carry over, but I try to get really specific with everything that I do, with every character that I play. That for me, honestly starts with music. I do that with my own work and so just to get together with musicians who are my favorite people in life, who are so talented and inspiring to me was a win.
Theo: One of our first connections actually on set was, we discussed our playlist for characters and how we’re all … There’s music in every one of us, but also how it sets our moods. Our music, every parts of our life we could probably look at years of our life and remember what we’re listening to at those moments and what was happening. For a character, to start we were talking about where we were and where we were in Harlem and things we were listening to as these characters. I was fortunate enough, the other day I was in Mexico City doing press for this show, which the fans were just absolutely insane about. It always strikes me so beautifully that before they’d even seen basically a snippet, just a little trailers, how they show up. I don’t know, hundreds of them, thousands of them. Comic Con in Mexico City is really amazing, but because it’s been a little while since we shot it, I had to remember what I could talk about and what I couldn’t talk about. I watched part of episode 7 and I had seen stuff in ADR, but actually watched part of it.
I just spoke about this coming in, I say this and my first reaction to it is like watching a painting come to life. I think the biggest mistake that people are going to make when they come into this is think that’s it’s a comic book show. It’s so far from that, and talks about political stuff and the neighborhood, and things like that. We also talk about what they did with music, I’ve been doing this 16 years. Thank god recently at a much higher level. I’ve never heard something like that. It was very operatic. It sounded like opera. I was so incredibly blown away and I was touched not just as an artist, but also as a human being. It was watching these characters in the short amount that I watched so beautifully come to life. I am blown away by the music and I can’t wait to see it and that’s why I can’t wait for everybody else to see it.
Interviewer: Theo and Mahershala, really quick, tell everybody who you guys play on the show.
Mahershala: I play Cornell ‘Cottonmouth’ Stokes. He’s a crime boss by day. A club owner by night. He is for lack of a better term, the criminal element or the criminal element by tribe in the peace. I’ve been doing this over 20 years, but professional. This is the first time I had the opportunity to work with someone who literally wrote for me and approached me about really trying to craft scenes for the character and had such an excitement to see what I could do, that challenged me. I’m really grateful for this, really, man. I can’t thank you enough, brother.
Cheo: Thank you, I’m grateful to all of you guys because it forced me personally and all of us, the writers room to elevate the quality of the script. Not that we were going to come incorrect before, remember that. At the same time, it’s almost like when you create an offense and then you realize, wait a minute, this is golden state. They’re running offense to such perfection that it’s on the look. They’re running and the ball’s here and boom.
Theo: I’ve said it a hundred times, it’s hard for me to say anything because we can’t speak about anything. I play a character named Shades Alvarez. What I love about him more than anything is, you never see this motherf-er coming. He is the shadiest dude. He is like, there’s always something going on. He’s thinking 3 steps ahead of everyone. He has a plan and he’s going to jump to whatever lily pad he has to get to get across the pond, and I love that about him. In this complex beautiful world that Cheo created, there’s a lot of things that happen when you know you’re in the right place. They say deja vu is when you know you’re in the right place. You got it and you know you’re on the right path. We got things that happened to us.
When I came into this show, I didn’t even know. I had just finished a movie that I was so excited about to come out for Universal called, Lowriders. It was just this incredible film that, there’s a writer on it, Justin Tipping, who did an incredible film that’s out right now that you should see called, Kicks. He directed that and he was one of the writers on this film, Lowriders, and then I came into this and I realized the original writer of Lowriders and the whole idea came from a man named, Cheo. It was like, I completed this film and we’re sitting there. All these things were happening to know you’re in the right place. All this had this specific connection. This show is special for a lot of reasons. Many talk about a lot in the press and many people do talk about more after they see it. It’s not just important, it’s special. I’m really excited for everybody to just finally see it.
Interviewer: Cheo, take us back to the beginning. Why this journey? Why did you embark on this character, this project?
Cheo: That’s the thing, you have so few opportunities as a black writer to write a superhero. Me being a comic book geek and at the same time, always loving music that we’ve devoted our life to covering, I saw an opportunity to kind of melt both worlds. When this opportunity presented itself, I knew that once we decided to set the show in Harlem, that Luke Cage was not only working in terms of being a superhero story and the journey of a man who reluctant to be a hero to ultimately accepting his role. It could also be a Trojan horse form which we could talk about all types of things in terms of, Harlem’s history, in terms of politics.
Harlem to me, is a combination of Washington, DC and Las Vegas with a little bit of Atlanta also because you’ve got politics, you’ve got music. Anytime you start scratching music, of course there’s gangsterism. It’s all coming from one well spring when you put bulletproof black man into that mix. I just thought that it would make an incredible dynamic show. That’s really what I hope everybody takes away from the 13 episodes that they’ll see on Friday.
Interviewer: There is a lot of blackness in Luke Cage. Can you talk about from the writer perspective as well as the actor perspective, the responsibility of doing that justice?
Cheo: The responsibility is, if you’re going to show … if you have the opportunity to show as many aspects of blackness as we have, you want to keep it real. You want to basically, show nuance because there is one single black experience. It’s varied experiences, it’s varied background. I thought from a writing perspective, you want to show all these different aspects to it. If you have somebody like Luke Cage, Luke can be brawny, but he can also be the New York, he can also be literary. You can have a criminal like Cornell, going to call him, Cottonmouth, Stokes, who is also a musician and can be very serious about what that means to him. It’s not just about owning the nightclub, it’s about, it’s his only way of protecting the soul, the neighborhood that he only knows how to control.
There’s so many different aspects of all the different characters. When you have a cast as rich as this one, everybody came ready to show nuance. It caused us to lead into that and not worry as much about the superhero and super powers as much as it is, let’s try to capture a real drama within this context of being a superhero show. From the actor’s standpoint, how’d you guys feel about it?
Mahershala: What was most interesting to me was, to have an opportunity to work with a black show runner. I don’t know if people really get how rare that is. I really don’t mean from a standpoint of checking in a box, it just doesn’t exist. Just to see Cheo doing what he was doing, everything is going to be inspired from that as well. When you point the camera at a group of folks who live in a community that is largely black and then you make the show runner, who is responsible for the arc of the story, the sense of the narrative, being over the other writers that are contributing to it.
It’s going to spring from a place that reflects how he perceives that place. That’s very different if somebody else who is not black is in that position. 99.9% of the time, shows that have people of color in them, which rarely have been the leads, but if you are the lead, it’s still not a voice that is totally familiar with your experience unless it’s somebody like David Simon who does his homework. That’s what is most exciting to me in terms of how it connects the rest.
Interviewer: First question is for Cheo. When you look at Luke Cage in the trailer, you talked about how he didn’t want to be the hero, but he was put in position of being a hero. Where do you plan on taking the character in terms of evolving him and growing him into possibly really being this hero that he didn’t initially want to be.
The second part of the question is for music producers, how do you all go about choosing artists, because you need special artists and special appreciation for the culture to bring it out on the screen.
Cheo: To answer the first part of the question, every black man that steps up does so at great personal loss and risk when you look at Martin Luther King. You look at Malcolm X, you look at Medgar Evers, when you look at a lot of people that have stepped up to try to effect change. While this isn’t necessarily a civil rights story, when you have what that takes and you match that to someone that’s bulletproof, it’s basically, you have all these things that are happening. What I will say about Luke Cage is that, he’s a black superhero. He’s not a superhero that happens to be black.
The one thing about it is that, it’s something that my grandfather taught me. My grandfather, he was born in Virginia but was raised in Harlem. The one thing he always said was that … There was all this responsibility that they had because they knew that if they failed it was going to be bad for everybody back home, but don’t forget to fly the damn plane. I think Luke Cage has a similar thing. It’s not that he’s divorced from being black, he knows it, but at the same time he knows that, he’s also reluctant, but eventually becomes a hero. He doesn’t leave the blackness behind … he knows that he walks a different path as a result of it. When you talk about where the character evolves, it’s really about a man who’s dealing with personal tragedy who’d rather not get involved, but realizes that he has to get involved and doing that does have a great personal sacrifice, but then realizes that he has to do that because people have sacrificed much more before him. That’s really who he is and that’s really essentially where we’re going.
Interviewer: Why does he not want to be called ni**a?
Cheo: I think it’s because unlike this new generation, that word means something to him. To this generation, it’s essentially … It’s like there’s no meaning to it because it’s so inundated in music. That’s partially our fault, but I’m talking about the previous hip-hop generation, but the thing about it is that, the reason that word is in this show is because we show how each generation has a different reaction to it. Each character has a different reaction to it. Honestly, to be perfectly honest, it’s like, I think it would be more offensive if people tell me that I couldn’t use the word in this show than actually using it and using it with nuance that was going to fill conversation. We shouldn’t ignore it and we shouldn’t ignore our feeling about it because ultimately there’s so much that we kind of let go as a community that these are some of the things that we really need to think about, to be perfectly honest with you.
Ali Shaheed: Really Adrian and I, our job was to just score the … I want to call it a film so badly, because it’s that 13 hour film, but to score the series. In terms of deciding of features, that’s really on Cheo. I think we had a light discussion of dreams of certain people that we could bring in. Being aware of your budget, lets your dreams go. Diminishes it a little bit, but we just focused on really just making the best music that we could. The show has … because Harlem’s Paradise by Mr. Stokes, owned by Mr. Stokes here, it’s a club for live performances, so there are live performances featured.
Interviewer: With diversity and how its been such an important topic as of late, how do you guys see that being tackled within the show as well as the influx of hip-hop culture?
Cheo: Hip-hop is every single aspect of our life. From my generation. It just goes beyond somebody rhyming. It’s basically we think about a record like, Midnight Marauders. I still play that record the same as if it’s brand new. What would it be like to have a show that felt like that? A show that could be entertaining but at the same time, be political not in an overt way, but in a way that creeps up on you. I think that’s the thing about the show, is that, it just shows how hip-hop has a function in our society that goes beyond the way that it’s used now to sell sneakers or whatever. I think there’s that aspect and at the same time, I don’t know, we have so many things.
When you talk about diversity, it’s funny because some of the reaction that you see with the trailers when you read the comments on YouTube, which is kind of an obsession of mine. It’s kind of fun. You read some of the comments that somebody says, “Where’s the white cast?” My feeling about that is like, when I went to go see Batman, I didn’t say, “Where’s Morgan Freeman?” What I mean by that is, you also see Flash or you see these other shows, you really don’t ask, where’s the black character? You ask, I’m a geek so I want to see a story, so why wouldn’t it be about that. A majority black cast, a majority cast of color, all of a sudden people are asking me about who’s missing, when really every comic book creates a world.
The question shouldn’t be about diversity, it should be whether or not it’s a story worth telling, whether it’s a story well told. We’re telling a black story … I think the show will be called, inclusively black, meaning that it’s a show that has a culture. It’s a show that comes from a perspective, but it isn’t that we’re turning our back on anybody. Everyone’s welcome to partake. You’re not going to get lost. There’s no dictionary … but if you just relax, you’ll float. That’s the whole thing is, rather than have people flailing around, “My god, I can’t swim.”
Simone: One of the things I thought was great about the fact that we have a black show runner which is so important, the writers room is also very black, but female as well. I think that that reflects in the way that you look at the script as an actor. I mean, every week I would go, “Ah, that’s where the white character’s going to be.” You come to the table read and it’s somebody black and I’m like, “You’re black, too,” or it’s a woman. I think that Cheo made such an out of the box choice in making all of the characters who are the head of the police force, women. You don’t ever see that. For them to be black women, you don’t ever see that.
There’s a day on set when it’s myself, Alfre Woodard, and a bunch of people I can’t talk about perhaps, Cassandra Freeman, Karen Pittman, and we’re all in the precinct. Alfre is like, “You have to take a picture of this.” This is a precedent. You do not see women of color in positions of power on television in the same room. They’re not vying for a job or trying to get the man, or lost and confused. I think that the diversity doesn’t just cover color, it also covers gender, which I think is very important.
Interviewer: Harlem’s changed a whole lot. How are you guys dealing with those changes? With those socio-economic changes, and also the ratio demographic of Harlem changes so rapidly.
Cheo: That’s really the perspective of both Mr. Stokes as well as his cousin, Mariah Dillard, who’s a local politician, are dealing with that change. The change that we realized that they’re trying to deal with isn’t that they want to deal with that change because they love black people and Harlem so much, they want control of the money. It’s one of the things that as they’re talking politics and talking about keeping Harlem black, it’s really about keeping Harlem black so they stay in the green. We deal with a lot of different aspects.
Rather than saying that Harlem is changing, we show that gentrification is this force that is putting the community at odds, you have people like, Pop played by Frankie Faison, who is one of the cornerstones of the community. That was one of the things that was really important was not capturing a mythic Harlem, but capturing a Harlem that really exists, but you have change, but you have also pockets of people that have always been in this community and will continue to be in this community and be a voice of the history of this community.
We didn’t just want to say Harlem and use Harlem as the backdrop without showing Harlem. That was really one of the things that’s important. Whether it’s us having the exterior of the barbershop on 119th and Lennox or whether it was showing Jackie Robinson Park or showing the various landmarks. Also talking about the history, even of a building like 555 Edgecombe. It was important to basically have things that people from here would actually recognize. Also, various cameos from people from here that people will also recognize.
Interviewer: You spoke earlier, you mentioned, Misty Knight, first African American female superhero in Marvel history. Where there any obstacles or challenges that you faced personally in portraying the character. This is the first time she’s been on screen. To my knowledge, in any form. Where there any obstacles that you faced, and how did you overcome that?
Simone: We have great scripts, obviously. Cheo is such a great collaborator that it was never just my way or the highway “This is what I wrote and you got to stick with it.” He would always make us feel like we had a voice and we had a say in the way that the character would go. I think for Simone, the actor from the ego standpoint, it was difficult to wrestle with the fact that this is called Marvel’s Luke Cage and not, Misty Knight saves the day. I’m like, “She’s this brilliant detective. She’s got Misty vision, how does she not know that she ….” “She doesn’t know, Simone, she just doesn’t know.” I’m like, “This is some bullsh*t.” People are going to look at this and I’m like, “The black woman is stupid,” but he’s looking at the full arc of the show and where it has to go. They’ve already set stuff up for season 2 and other shows. For me, selfishly, I want to say, “No, no, no, no.” I think that that as the actor is the biggest hurdle is feeling like you’re smarter than they’re letting you be. Again, like I said, it was just a gift to be able to have that kind of say in the character in the first place. There was no feeling of, you have to live up to what the fans expect or I have to go and read all the source material because our writers did that. I could trust that when I’m looking at these scripts, I can just approach it as the actor and not, okay, what happened in the comic book from 1987? I didn’t have to do any of that. That was probably the only thing.
Interviewer: I just want to know, because you said this is the first African American superhero on television, how much creative control did you really have? Did Netflix just give you carte blanche to do whatever you wanted to do and do you feel like you created the show that you really intended to create? I know as a journalist, I’ve talked to a lot of producers, and writers, and directors, and they went in with one vision, but what they ended up with was a little something different. Are you proud of what you were able to create? Did you get what you wanted to get out of this experience?
Cheo: Most people that you talked to, if they get 65% of what they wanted to get done, they feel happy. I got 98%. I feel incredibly proud of what we were able to accomplish. The thing that was interesting is that, even though we always had these moments where we had divergent opinions, those differences of opinion caused conversation which ultimately caused everything to reach another level to get better. That’s the thing that I would say about working with both Marvel and Netflix, is that they’re both very opinionated and passionate, but their passion is in the right place. The passion isn’t about ego, it’s about excellence.
When you have iron sharpening iron, you basically have to maintain a perspective of what you want to accomplish, but at the same time understand that you have very smart people on both sides that want what’s best for the show. You have to also have the strength to be able to say, “That’s not what we’re doing,” but at the same time you also have to listen and if things aren’t going a certain way you got to be willing to say, “Okay, let’s think about this and lets’ really go there.” What’s great is, best idea wins. You can’t have an arrogance of perspective. That’s really the thing that I think the most important lesson is that, collaboration is always good. I think that’s why I’m so proud of the show, it’s not an individual projects, it’s a collective project.