Comic-Con@Home: Lovecraft Country’s cast talk heroism, the Black family, and monsters

The cast of HBO’s Lovecraft Country discussed heroism, the Black family, monsters real and imagined, and race in America during the show’s Comic-Con@Home panel.

The highly anticipated horror drama Lovecraft Country is set to scare America witless and further the dialogue on race in this country starting August 16 on HBO. In the lead-up to the premiere, the cast sat down with Entertainment Weekly‘s Sarah Rodman for Comic-Con@Home to discuss the show and its anticipated impact on today’s America.

Lovecraft Country is based on the novel of the same name by Matt Ruff. According to HBO’s official synopsis of the series:

"“Lovecraft Country follows Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) as he meets up with his friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett) and his Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) to embark on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America in search of his missing father (Michael Kenneth Williams). This begins a struggle to survive and overcome both the racist terrors of white America and the terrifying monsters that could be ripped from a Lovecraft paperback.”"

The cast also refers to the series as a family drama and credit showrunner and executive producer Misha Green for grounding the show in the tight bonds of community. It’s a stance supported thoroughly by the official trailer and its logline: This is family business.

Watch the trailer for HBO’s Lovecraft County here:

At the center of Lovecraft Country is a story of a son in search of his father. Atticus is a war vet whose return is met with absence. In his father’s place is his Uncle George and Aunt Hippolyta (Aunjanue Ellis), two writers seeking to make the journeys of Black travelers safer by writing a guide akin to The Green Book by Victor Hugo Green.

Atticus himself is a bibliophile. As a lover of pulp fiction, he gravitates toward stories where heroes “get to go on adventures, defeat the monsters, and save the day.” Jonathan Majors was drawn to the role because Atticus embodies the very heart of the fiction he loves so much. Admitting to having read the script twice back to back, Majors explains:

"“I was in many ways amazed that this was written, you know? And he’s a Black guy? Atticus is Black? That’s the guy? That’s who we’re following?What’s happened in the writing and in the making of it with Atticus, and with everybody, you kind of get to explore not just the archetypal ideas of what we tend to play.He’s not just this soldier, right? That’s pretty common, but he’s also a bibliophile. He also gets to travel; he’s an adventurer. He has all these ideas. He has a strong body, he has a strong mind, he has a strong heart.”"

Majors goes on to talk about the series’ exploration of fatherhood, what it is to be a son, a Black son, and grow up in a Black community.

Lovecraft Country is set in Jim Crow America in the 1950s, but it doesn’t take place in the South. Atticus and his family are Chicagoans and the journey he, his uncle, and his friend Leti go on is to New England.

There is a narrative that the worst of American racism happens on the back roads and in the rural towns of states like Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. This series disrupts that false narrative entirely.

When a sheriff threatens to lynch the trio if they don’t get out of his town by sundown, they are not below the Mason-Dixon Line. They are encountering racism as they travel through the Midwest to the North.

Majors describes the threat of violent racism the characters endure as a demonic spirit. His metaphor isn’t absolution for the white characters in the show because they are possessed by hatred and ignorance not anything otherworldly.

Abbey Lee who plays Christina Braithwhite–the sole daughter of the leader of the cult, Sons of Adam–explained her character’s culpability in the horrors Atticus, George, Leti, and Montrose (Michael K. Williams) face by describing her as the white antagonist, the ultimate provocateur, and agent of chaos. Lee expounds on Christina’s position in the narrative with the statement:

"“I think she represents, on a larger scale, the oppressed 1950s woman sort of liberating herself from the patriarchal society and family she’s been brought up in. All the while doing it with her white privilege, so she’s the Karen type character we here about today, you know? The rich white woman.”"

Christina, however, is not one note. She’s searching for and desires the same things Lovecraft Country‘s heroes want: family, liberation, justice, revenge, independence, and love. It’s that quality to the character’s make-up that Lee found to be confronting about the role and disturbing because what should have been common ground is overshadowed by the pervasive and insidious nature of racism and Christina’s ideology.

White dominance, and the fear analogous to it, is spoken about candidly during Lovecraft Country‘s panel. Majors, Williams, and Courtney B. Vance openly discuss their encounters with the police. Vance questions when enough will be enough.

When will he be able to walk out his front door at midnight without being ordered to his knees? When will Williams not have to worry about a white woman too scared to look for her phone in a chicken spot full of Black folks that she calls the police? When will Majors be able to drive without being stopped and think of it as the worst day in Texas (a note he’d written at the top of his script when reading the sheriff scene)?

It is the year 2020 and we still don’t have the answer to when police brutality and harassment will end. Racism has only evolved, it hasn’t changed, but as Rodman points out during the panel, representation in media is a useful tool for combating the narratives that have perpetuated racist beliefs and ignorance of American history.

Storytelling is not policy, it doesn’t change the laws that govern this country. It can’t enact resolutions or initiatives that dismantle structural racism, but it can broaden the larger discussion. As Jurnee Smollett told Chancellor Agard of Entertainment Weekly:

"“[Lovecraft Country is] this radical imagining of our story. It’s centering Black voices in a genre where we’re rarely seen being centered. The story is so ancestral. Our heroes are going on an adventure, essentially to bring down white supremacy, and yet there’s magic involved and all these supernatural elements…”"

Smollett’s character, Leti, like George and Atticus, is a lover of stories, but she tells hers through the lens of her camera. She is a photographer in the Civil Rights era documenting protests as a means of amplifying the voices of her people.

But Lovecraft Country doesn’t focus solely on Black pain or what Smollett describes as blood memory, the generational trauma Black people carry in their DNA due to centuries of oppression and living under the threat of violence and death.

The core of the series always comes back to family which is true for Leti’s character as well. As a woman leading a transient life, Leti is often at odds with her sister, Ruby (played by Wunmi Mosaku), who is stable and like a maternal figure to her younger sister. Their relationship is strained and though they share a love for music, Ruby finds it difficult to allow Leti into her life because of her sister’s screw-ups.

Lovecraft Country embraces the ups, downs, and estrangements that families weather apart and together. It also revels in the differing skin tones, shapes and experiences of Black people.

Monsters are throughout the narrative, both human and creature, but at its heart the series is as the cast says, one rooted in family and the strength and support one draws from their loved ones to get through the day to day horrors of living in America.

Are you excited for Lovecraft Country? Check out a sneak peek of the series and serve up your thoughts in the comments below!