I sat down for an interview with Dennis Lehane (Creator: Apple TV+’s Blackbird) about performative masculinity, the power of fire, and his new Apple TV+ show Smoke (starring Taron Egerton).
Lehane is a really interesting TV creator as he’s written the books that became the source material for some of my favorite recent crime films:
Mystic River
Gone Baby Gone
Shutter Island
Lehane then transitioned to writing on TV shows like The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, and HBO's The Outsider. In the interview, he spills some pet peeves about unprepared showrunners.
Next, Lehane served as a showrunner on Apple TV+’s Blackbird, which thrusts hyperconfident criminal Taron Egerton into a scheme to elicit a confession from a child murderer (Paul Walter Hauser) in prison. I thought Lehane’s ability to show Egerton’s struggle to weaponize his friendly personality in the face of a man whom he finds disgusting was mesmerizing.
Lehane’s latest show is Apple TV+'s Smoke.
The show revolves around an egotistical arson investigator, played by Taron Egerton, who must track down two arsonists wreaking havoc on the community.
Part of the brilliance of the show is a spoiler, so I’ll refrain from giving any more detail, but it’s a wild ride that digs into the vaporous masks we put up to defend who we want to be.
Like much of Lehane’s work, the more you watch, the more interesting and twisted it gets.
