The CW has provided ComicBook.com with an exclusive first look at a number of Black Lightning character portraits, including the best look yet at Jill Scott in the role of Lady Eve.
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Black Lightning is the most recent comics adaptation to become a big ratings success for the network, which also airs Supergirl, The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Arrow, Riverdale, and iZombie.
(On its CW Seed digital component, they also have animated series Vixen, Freedom Fighters: The Ray, and the forthcoming Constantine.)
Black Lightning has managed to stand out in a crowded field of superhero shows in part because of its philosophy that executive producers Salim and Mara Brock Akil are making a family drama with super powers.
“I’m not really doing a show about a superhero,” Salim Akil recently said during a set visit. “I’m doing a show about a man who has a family and is trying to affect his community. Someone asked me, what’s the most difficult aspect of doing the show, and it really is me coming to terms with that he has powers, because I could write a whole script without him ever using his powers, which nobody wants me to do.”
To that end, Akil made a decision that while there are characters with powers on Black Lightning, most of the violence is not the kind of over-the-top wirework that defines the action set pieces on shows like The Flash and Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, but gunplay — and those shots will result in some shocking and sad consequences, and some onscreen blood so that it doesn’t look “pretty.”
“I know and understand the result of extreme violence in my own life, in my friends’ lives, and so I know what violence really is,” said Akil. “I’ve held people who have been shot. I know what a gunshot looks like; I know what violence looks like. So if you ask me what violence is, I’d say it never leads anywhere. But at the same time, violence leads to freedom. Nobody ever fought for freedom without some degree of violence.”
Here, then, are the literal portraits of the characters shaped by a world of ugly and pervasive violence.
Jefferson Pierce
Jefferson Pierce, played by Cress Williams, is of cousre our titular superhero.
On last week’s episode, a school assembly spun quickly out of hand when Garfield High School principal Jefferson Pierce, Black Lightning‘s civilian identity, seemed to have no clue about some of the darkness encroaching on his community.
Confronted with some uncomfortable truths, Jefferson was visibly frustrated — and later, when he decided that Black Lightning needed to come out retirement officially, he told his ex-wife that he was hiding behind his fantasies of a “white picket fence” and the illusion that he could keep his family safe even as the community is something of a war zone around him.
“I’ve heard this phrase, ‘no good deed goes unpunished,’” executive producer Mara Brock Akil told ComicBook.com. “Jefferson is going to have a little of that, of course, becuase you can’t save them all. Even just some kind is not going to be able to get into that school. But there are a lot of schools, that’s how a lot of people are approaching the hope, is through these schools that are oasises so that the kids have an opportunity to better their lives.”
While Jefferson is “Black Jesus,” a savior to some in the community, that same nickname can be turned to acid quickly as people like Lawanda White, whose daughter was kidnapped in tonight’s episode, believe that he can do anything, and that when he does not it is a lack of will.
There is, of course, a third class of people: those who don’t like what Pierce is doing because he is interfering with their own agendas.
“I think it’s both: I think some people look up to him. If you’re inside the bubble then you love it, then you really dig him. And some people outside the bubble respect him and appreciate that he’s doing it within the chaos,” said showrunner Salim Akil. “Because not everybody can do that. I think those who don’t appreciate him see him as shining a light on things that they don’t want a light shined on.”
Black Lightning
There is an inherent conflict to Jefferson’s superhero secret identity, Black Lightning.
He had been a costumed hero a decade ago, before he gave it up at Lynn’s insistence. She, a medical doctor, claims that he is addicted to his powers, and between that addiction and the danger he puts himself in, she does not want her husband to be doing it.
On the other hand, his surrogate father figure Gambi tells him that Freeland needs Black Lightning.
“I think if I had to lean, I lean more towards Gambi in that the community needs me,” Cress Williams told ComicBook.com. “I don’t think I’m fully convinced that it is an actual addiction addiction. I mean, Lynn looks at it like being a drug addict, and using the powers feels very good, yes. But I don’t think I’m ready to commit to that part of it yet. I mean I think I desperately try to lean towards her because I love her and I want my family to get back together. I want my wife back. But ultimately I do think that I’ve, you know as the story picks up, I’ve tried nine years in a sense, of doing it her way. And have had some success. The school has thrived. But everything around the school has not done so well. So I think it’s kind of coming back to this medium of that we need both, the city needs both Jefferson operating at full capacity and Black Lightning operating at full capacity. “
Lynn Pierce
Christine Adams plays Lynn Pierce, ex-wife of Jefferson Pierce (Cress Williams) and a big part of why he stepped away from being Black Lightning years before the show’s story begins.
As we saw recently, at least one of her daughters — Anissa, played by Nafessa Williams — will take on her own costumed, superhero identity before the first season is up.
“It’s going to be an ongoing struggle” for her character, Adams admitted. Lynn was never comfortable with her husband putting his life on the line to be a superhero, and it seems unlikely that she will be any happier to see that her teenage daughter has decided to pick up that particular family legacy.
Anissa Pierce
Played by Nafessa Williams, Anissa Pierce is the eldest daughter of Jefferson and Lynn, and the first to suit up as a superhero.
We have already seen her beginning to realize her powers in the first two episodes of the series.
Passionate and quick-witted, Jefferson’s twenty-something daughter balances the demands of medical school with her job teaching part-time at her father’s school.
Since the show went into development, producers and cast have referred to it as a family show more than a superhero show, and suggested that Jefferson’s daughters getting powers might be a way to connect them.
“The thing is is that, being her older sister, there’s some exciting things that [Anissa is] discovering, but there’s also some struggles that I as the older sister, want to shield your younger sister from going through,” Williams told ComicBook.com during a recent set visit. “There are some struggles that if I could keep her away from, I would.”
The revelation that Jefferson’s powers are genetic is not something that the family has always known, and the realization will rock the show’s world a little bit, according to Christine Adams, who plays Lynn, Anissa’s mother.
“It’s funny, you know cause as, again, as a scientist something should have occurred to her, and actually we do get in one of the episodes where we sort of talk about that,” Adams said of her character. “She talks about feeling like a failure, for not really thinking about it sooner, but I guess in the great scheme of everything…either she was somewhat in denial, or she genuinely thought that [Jefferson] was this super metahuman that had been, had inherited these powers that are particular to him. So it is a discovery, but it’s one that she will obviously then vigorously pursue as a scientist.
Jennifer Pierce
Jennifer, the younger of the Pierces’s two daughters, has been seen smoking on the roof, hanging out at Club 100, and drinking on school premises in the first two weeks of the series.
Standing between her and her father is her sister, Anissa — although she usually sides with Jefferson — and her boyfriend Khalil.
As Jennifer rebels against her structured life and her father’s authority at home and at school, Khalil wants something better for her. In an inversion of the standard boyfriend/girlfriend dynamic, he encourages her to respect herself and do better, while she loves him but has little patience for his lack of patience with her rebellion.
“We’re going to break [his heart a little],” China Anne McClain, who plays Jennifer, told reporters during a recent set visit. “He is a very great influence, which I really appreciate. He’s smart, he’s athletic, and he’s on his own path. He wants Jennifer to be along with him, but he’s like, ‘You keep messing up, this is not going to work out.’ It’s great to see the roles switch a little bit because usually that’s the girl telling the guy, listen you’ve got to get your stuff together. The rules are switched in this one and it’s very, very interesting. I love that. A lot of things happen between Jennifer and Khalil. It’s a whole journey throughout their story. I’ll just say right now that she really cares about him and he really cares about her, but they have some bumps in the road coming.”
Tobias Whale
The series’ big bad is played by actor/musician Marvin “Krondon” Jones III who, like Whale, is a black man with albinism — but that is about where the similarities end.
Jones is always smiling, with a sense of humor and a love for his work. Whale is…well, he’s a businessman, but he doesn’t seem to particularly relish much of what his job requires of him.
And good-humored? Well, on last week’s episode, Whale launched into a racially-charged rant filled directed at one of his employees.
After referring to someone as a “darkie,” one of Whale’s other people accused him of hating black people. Whale, who is an albino black man, responded that he didn’t hate black people, per say, but strung together a number of racist comments about inner-city blacks. And if you are anything like us, you found yourself thinking “Did Tobias just say ‘darkie’ on prime time TV on The CW?!” We asked Jones about it, and he…well, he didn’t disagree.
“I had the same thoughts you had, like ‘okay, CW gonna do this, honestly?’” Jones admitted. “And trust me: Before the rewrites? Trust me, my brother, you got the mild version of it.”
The series has not shied away from dealing with racial issues, from police violence to gang violence, with showrunner Salim Akil saying that he hoped to address how black-on-black crime affects cities like the one being represented by Freeland on Black Lightning.
Whale’s internalized racism is an extension of that philosophy, and just one of a number of issues that will be dealt with in the first few episodes of the series.
“It’s dealing with the truths of today, whether you are a single mother, single father, student, gay or straight, black or white, dark or light, you know?” Jones said. “It’s dealing with the truths and the realities that you may deal with of substance in your own life. That’s what I’m hoping happens: That there’s a great conversation. There’s a great conversation about albinism and there’s a great conversation about single fathers, you know what I’m saying? Lesbians. All these things and I don’t mean to say all these things in a low tone, because in our society these are things that you say like that. But now we’re able to put them on primetime television and see what the world thinks about it then. I’m so excited.”
Gambi
James Remar plays Gambi, a “father figure” to Jefferson who stepped in to fill a void when Pierce’s own father was murdered by Tobias Whale.
A simple shorthand is that he is like Alfred to Jefferson’s Batman, but their relationship does not really fit that archetype; if you wanted to go for a mainstream comics-adjacent touchstone, Remar would perhaps fulfill the role of Whistler from Blade: expertise, wisdom, some tech savvy, and a dry, sardonic sense of humor.
“From a classical perspective, I view them as Merlin and Arthur. Merlin’s kind of behind the scenes, goading Arthur to do this and do that and he knows he’s got powers,” Remar told ComicBook.com. “I mean, he’s got the power to pull Excalibur from the stone, which is supernatural in nature. And, you know, Merlin could almost be the mad scientist of his day. So I have drawn on that relationship. And then there’s relationships that are more modern day, like say Coach Wooden and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I just read Kareem’s biographical piece called ‘Coach Wooden and Me,’ and that freed me up a lot to play this character because it’s a black man with great abilities being coached by a white man with a lot of experience.”
The relationship with Lynn, of course, is tense: she sees Gambi as a threat to her family, as he encourages and enables Jefferson to use his powers.
“She’s got her point of view and I’ve got mine, and in some ways they work at cross purposes, but we both have Jefferson Pierce’s best interests at heart,” Remar said. “It could be a wife or a mother saying, ‘I don’t want my kid to play tackle football,’ and yet the coach is saying, ‘But he loves it. It makes him happy.’ You know, he’s not going to do anything that would make him do. So they do have different points of view, but they are bonded by the fact that they both love the guy.”
Inspector Henderson
One familiar DC name that has flown largely below the radar on Black Lightning so far is Inspector William Henderson, who appears in the series, played by actor Damon Gupton.
It is likely that Gupton’s Henderson is a modern reinterpretation of the Superman character, especially since Henderson appeared in the Black Lightning: Year One miniseries that influences much of the TV show. Gupton sees him as such a divergence from the traditional take that he is almost a different character — but that doesn’t mean there are not things he can take away from the version fans are familiar with.
“Originally, when Salim first talked about it, I was curious as to whether it would be that guy that showed up in Superman or whatever,” Gupton told ComicBook.com. “But he’s his own thing, he’s pretty separate from that. I think what I want to draw on is his steeliness; he gets to doing his thing, and he really gets to doing his thing. That’s the one thing….And maybe the hat as well.”
After years working as a Superman supporting character among the Metropolis police, Henderson became a Black Lightning character in the 1970s.
Henderson was created for The Adventures of Superman on the radio in the 1940s, appearing for the first time in the comics in 1974. The character, who appeared on The Adventures of Superman TV series as a white man wearing a fedora. He was black in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, as well as in Superman: The Animated Series; in both, he was played by Mel Winkler. Brent Jennings, another actor of color, also played Henderson on Lois & Clark.
In the comics, Henderson has never been as prominent as he has been in live-action — although he did become the police commissioner in the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths Superman reboot. In The New 52 timeline, he was reintroduced, again as an African-American character, in Supergirl in 2009.
Lady Eve
On Black Lightning, Grammy Award-winning singer Jill Scott will play Lady Eve, a DC supervillain who has a long history with Black Lightning.
While her character has not appeared onscreen yet, she has already been name-dropped; in the pilot, Jefferson attended a fundraising event for Garfield High School. After addressing those in attendance, Jefferson then moves on to mingling and briefly catches up with his secretary who advises him to “turn on the charm,” because a very wealthy woman, Lady Eve from Blackbird Funeral Parlor, is there as a possible donor.
Lady Eve isn’t just a random person, though. As comic book fans may recall, Lady Eve is a villain and a member of the Kobra Cult, joining with the villain Kobra/Jeffrey Franklin Burr and his plans to use mind control on high ranking officials of the US Army so that he could steal a defense program satellite and blackmail the government.
Fans may also recall that while Kobra has had clashes with numerous heroes, namely Batman and his Outsiders, when he expanded his operations to the Midwest, his base of operations was Keystone City — putting him firmly in Flash territory.
In the show, Lady Eve will serve as a connection between a secret group of corrupt leaders and Tobias Whale, leader of the notorious and dangerous gang The 100, played by Marvin “Krondon” Jones III. While it is not clear Scott’s Lady Eve will maintain her connection to Kobra, it wouldn’t be surprising if the corrupt leaders she connects to Tobias Whale were manipulating the crime lord for their own, nefarious reasons and using Lady Eve as their agent.
Black Lightning airs at 9 p.m. ET/PT on The CW, Tuesday nights after The Flash.
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