Creator Dennis Lehane and star Taron Egerton break down their incendiary new thriller
In Smoke, Taron Egerton plays an arson investigator trying to stop a serial arsonist with the help of a police detective who, much to his chagrin, has been tasked with assisting him. Immediately, a psychological game of cat and mouse commences, but the audience is likely to receive their first shock once they discover that protagonist and antagonist, in this case, are one and the same.
Normally, a plot twist of this calibre is hidden at all costs, but what would normally be the biggest spoiler of the series is really not the reveal at all. “Audiences are so smart, they’re so ahead of you on twists, that I don’t feel like that’s the twist I care about protecting,” says series creator Dennis Lehane. The author of mystery novels like Shutter Island and the creator of the Emmy-winning limited series Black Bird was far more drawn to the psychology of the lead character than in creating a series-long whodunit. “Here was a guy who was so deeply entrenched in denial that he saw himself as a hero, somehow overlooking the fact that he was very much a villain,” the author explains.
Lehane was inspired by the real-life story of John Leonard Orr, a California fire captain and arson investigator who turned out to be one of the most prolific serial arsonists in American history. “He was setting fires all over the damn place, and then he wrote a book about a heroic arson investigator chasing an arsonist whose arsons mirrored the real arsons with details only the real arsonists could know,” says Lehane. “I just thought, that feels both crazy and particularly American, that your need for celebrity overshadows your need for safety or self-preservation.”
Before he set off to write the piece, Lehane approached his Black Bird collaborator Egerton about the role. “He’s a rich, detailed character actor trapped in the body and face of a leading man,” says Lehane. “And Taron and I work well together because Taron only takes roles if something about them scares him. I only do projects if something about them scares me. I think we both like to dance a little bit with the possibility of catastrophic failure.”
For Egerton, professional fear takes on many forms. “I think fear is based on not knowing something or a lack of understanding,” he says. “That also fits very closely with curiosity, and that’s a really important place to be if you’re going to embark on a creative endeavour.” In taking on the role of Dave Gudsen, loosely based on Orr, Egerton found himself walking the unusual tightrope of playing both hero and villain simultaneously. “There were times where I felt unsure if I was getting it right,” he says. “It wasn’t comfortable and I really did have some crises of confidence over the course of the shoot, but I think that’s a worthwhile place to be creatively — to put yourself in a place where you feel challenged.”
Gudsen’s dual mission is further complicated by Detective Michelle Calderon, whose extreme competence and intelligence both excites and unnerves Gudsen. “It started with, ‘Let’s give him an antagonist who’s going to be very smart. Bring in somebody this guy wasn’t ready for,’ and that’s Michelle,” says Lehane. “But the more we explored Michelle, the more we set up someone as messed up as Dave is. And then I was like, ‘Now I’m going to have fun.’” The writer was thrilled to land Jurnee Smollett in the role. “What she brought to it was an embracing of the central chaos of that character,” he says. “You don’t judge characters like that. No, she’s just an extremely psychologically messed up human being and she’s trying to do her best in so many ways, but she’s not getting there.”
The more Lehane delved into these characters, the more apparent the story he wanted to tell became to him. “We were writing about an emotional, psychological relationship and these little mini-infernos that were just blowing up everywhere in the storyline,” he reflects. “The show is about chaos. With this, I wanted to embrace the wildness of it. It just felt like there’s something inherently hysterical about the fact that Orr was writing a book while running around doing his s***. I mean, it’s funny. And once I liberated my writers’ room, the show just took on a crazy energy.”
Making the juxtaposition between tragedy and chaos even more distinct is choosing Vancouver as the location for Smoke. “There was a cinematic paradox. It was this lush green world and the green with the red, to me, was a world filled with contradictions,” he says. “There’s real tragedy in all of the arsons. We never wanted arsons to be played for fun. But fire itself is an interesting thing. Fire is horrific. Fire is repulsive. Fire is sexy. Fire is the thing that advanced us as a species and yet can turn us into ash like that. We wanted the show to mirror that.”
Smoke, streaming Friday, August 1 on Apple TV+