Lennie James (Fallout) Interview
Channel 4 has commissioned award-winning playwright Roy Williams to adapt his acclaimed stage play Fallout as a single drama for Channel 4 as part of a season of programmes that will address the issue of gun and knife crime on Britain’s streets from many different perspectives.
Set in London, the drama stars Lennie James (Jericho, C4’s Buried) as Joe, a policeman returning to the estate he grew up on to investigate the murder of a black teenager.
Lennie has recently moved to America to continue working on the drama series Jericho. Other television work includes The State Within, The Family Man, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Oberon), Born with Two Mothers and Buried. Theatre includes seasons with the Globe Theatre and the RNT where he won the Clarence Derwent Award for Best Supporting Actor in The Coupe. Plays at the Royal Court include Fallout, This Is a Chair, Outside of Heaven and Etta Jenks. Lennie is also known for his writing and plays include No Two Ways and Waking Hours.
“I play Joe, one of the police officers, who has to return to the housing estate and neighbourhood that he grew up in, in order to investigate the killing of a kid who was a lot like he was when he was growing up there. I did the stage play at the Royal Court, and in the process had a hand in creating this character and putting Joe on stage, along with the writer Roy Williams and the director Ian Rickson – so I feel like it’s my part! I didn’t want anyone else to play Joe on film (laughs), so I’m glad it worked out that I could come home, from the US, to film it.
“Joe’s not exactly a veteran police officer, but he’s an old enough and ugly enough police officer to know exactly how he’s used by the Metropolitan police because of where he comes from and what he knows. He’s a guy that doesn’t really have much time for political correctness or for anybody making excuses for the choices that they have made. He’s willing to cut corners but he’s not dishonest and he’s willing to almost do anything in order to get what he wants- what he wants is justice. But he’s very flawed.
“When Joe comes on to the investigation, it’s hit the typical wall of silence, as they say in the community, and my character has been brought in to try and break that down. Joe’s referred to in the script as the poster boy, but in my interpretation of the guy, he’s grown enough to know this isn’t the first time he has been brought in because of the colour of his skin. It’s the lot of black police officers in all of the metropolises around the country. They are used in certain areas, because they bring a different expertise and knowledge and people react to them differently. He doesn’t care about how other people are using his colour. What he cares about is how best to do his job in order to bring justice for the death of this boy, Kwame.
“One of the themes that runs through the whole piece is about belonging – where do you belong? Even though Joe spent his formative years on this estate, he never belonged there, as far as he’s concerned. He belongs somewhere else and coming back just reminds him how much he doesn’t belong there any more.
“Part of the beauty of playing Joe, is he doesn’t realise what the effect of coming home will have on him, until it starts having an effect on him. Joe has been running away from this estate all of his working life. And then he’s brought back. Almost the first thing you hear Joe say is: ‘I promised myself a long time ago I was never coming back here’. If all the time you were at school you were the smelly kid and everybody called you ‘the smelly kid’ and then you leave school and get head hunted by a modelling agency and you turn out to be Kate Moss. And you go round the world and you’re hugely successful and you’re an icon to your generation. But then you go back to your school in Croydon and you’re walking down the road as your big self and somebody just goes ‘hello smelly kid’ and you’re returned right back to who you started. And it takes very little to remind you of who that person is you’ve been running away from. And that’s what happens to Joe.
“One of the things I hope I’ve got right about the character is that he’s not a guy that has always behaved in the way that he behaves while he’s investigating the killing of Kwame. He’s probably never beaten a suspect before, never argued with his police partner in this way before, or made the mistakes he’s making this time around – but it is the effect of coming home. And that is pretty much his big battle all the way through. Outside of investigating the killing of this boy, he’s dealing with the fact that the more he finds out about Kwame, the more he realises that this kid was going through what he was going through, but never got the chance to escape.
“In the story, one of the brilliant things that Roy (Williams) does is that he doesn’t tell you who the goodies are and who the baddies are – but I’d be hard pushed to think who comes out of it well. When you’re in that group of four boys who have killed somebody there are moments where you care about them in a way that in most other dramas you wouldn’t – they’d be the baddies.
“Roy, on one level, is trying to make the audience to not necessarily understand, justify or make sense of their behaviour. The scary thing is that it doesn’t make any sense except to the kids who are perpetrating it. To them it makes absolute sense and it doesn’t matter what we understand. What we’ve got to deal with is what they believe to be right or wrong; what they believe to be the thing to do next if somebody scuffs your trainers or looks at you in the wrong way or walks through an estate where you’ve decided they shouldn’t walk. If we’re going to do anything about it we have to try and break and change what it is they’ve come to understand as being normal, because it’s not normal and the more we go ‘it’s senseless and it’s mindless’ the longer it’s going to carry on.
“And in a way that’s what Joe does, he’s the one who is doing what no one else either dares to do or remembers how to do. That’s not to say he’s right but he’s doing something, he’s not just walking past throwing up his hands in despair. I don’t think that Joe is a note of hope, but I do think that even when he is doing the most heinous things, he is at his most eloquent. When he is arguing with his partner who says that this is a war on the street, Joe says ‘it’s not a war, wars end and this just goes on and on and on and on and I just want it to stop’. That’s Joe’s thing, he wants it to stop and doesn’t care whose toes he have to step on - he just wants it to stop”.
Fallout is on Channel 4 on Thursday 3rd July 2008 at 10pm.
