Facing the past
Family secrets, horror and historic crimes... Karla Crome’s new thriller asks if we can ever atone for the crime of slavery
Pip Bourdillon
- Gareth McLean
Add Possession to your watchlist
Ad
Karla Crome is as fascinated today with the question that’s central to Possession as she was when she was approached seven years ago by TV producer Jenny Van Der Lande to write a drama around it.
“If there was, by some sort of magic, a man who came here and told me that he was enslaved by my ancestors and he said, ‘I would therefore like all of your wealth,’ what would I do?”
After Crome repeats the show’s central premise, there’s a moment’s silence as the question hangs in the air. Partly, it’s just a natural lull in the conversation. And partly it’s because I struggle to think of an answer. An appropriate, fair answer anyway.
Possession is a supernatural thriller set in the UK and in Jamaica in two time periods, the present day and in 1760 when Britain was reaping the benefits of empire and slavery.
Is the drama’s magical man a metaphor for the legacy of colonialism and the issue of reparations? “I’m not an activist, I’m a writer,” Crome says. “Everything I do starts with character and characters’ journeys. Obviously the core idea of an enslaved man living to the present day and getting involved in an inheritance dispute can be a metaphor for reparations. And in order to do it justice, you have to unpack some things – if you’re going to do a story about an enslaved person, you have to look at enslavement and you have to do your research.”
But, Crome adds, “If I really wanted to effect change, it would be more effective and efficient for me to go and do a speech in Parliament than it would to write a TV show. I’m more interested in bringing those debates into people’s front rooms. My politics are less important than the story being told.”
I'm not an activist, I'm a writer. Everything I do starts with characters and characters' journeys
Karla Crome
Parliament’s loss, then, is definitely television’s gain with this rollocking story of solicitor Claudia McKenzie, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who is sent from Britain to Jamaica to sort out the inheritance dispute and gets pulled into a much bigger, more spiritual, and terrifying fight.
While notching up writing credits, Crome is probably best known for her acting, lately appearing in the acclaimed Netflix drama Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, which does what it says on the tin. She’s currently filming the third and final series of the BBC’s dark comedy thriller Am I Being Unreasonable? with Daisy May Cooper, Selin Hizli and Lenny Rush.
Karla Crome with Daisy May Cooper in Am I Being Unreasonable? BBC
“What a treat and a privilege to be paid for that!” Crome says with joy in her voice. “It’s not hard work in any way, shape or form. I think we might have got through two takes where I didn’t burst out laughing,” she says of the scenes she has just filmed.
Writing Possession and acting in Am I Being Unreasonable? encapsulates what Crome says is the best thing about her career – “the variety and diversity of experience”. It has always been thus. Before she was a series regular in E4’s Misfits in 2013, Crome’s breakthrough role was in the altogether more serious Murder: Joint Enterprise, on BBC Two in 2012, which told the story of a murder through highly subjective monologues and courtroom testimonies. The one-off film, which would go on to win a Bafta, was praised in Radio Times by the-then TV editor, Alison Graham, who singled out Crome’s work as “one of the most astounding, affecting acting performances I have ever seen”.
My politics are less important than the story being told
Does an especially intense writing project require a decompression period of acting – and vice versa? “There may be some truth in that,” Crome says, but to her, it’s all storytelling – and she’s always loved stories and storytelling.
“My mum encouraged lots of trips to the library when we were little. I would usually pick Fungus the Bogeyman over and over again,” she says. “And I’ve still got these Once upon a Time magazines I used to collect when I was little that came with a cassette. I would listen to these fairy tales and world folklore and read through them repeatedly.”
Years later, Crome would read them to her own children and was shocked by some of the content. “On the last page, there would be a line like, ‘a courtier walked through, thought the princess was pretty and so they got married’ and that’s how they’d end. As a woman, I always wonder how that would have penetrated my psyche and my idea about relationships. As a woman of colour, seeing the diversity in children’s books now makes me realise what I didn’t have growing up, and that does make me sad. As an adult, it really does require you to reframe your thinking.”
Perhaps the moral of the story is that all stories are political in some way or another, then? Crome smiles, says that stories such as Possession are “about how we feel about ourselves and other people” and will commit herself only to asking more questions – of herself and then, inevitably, of her audiences.
'Horror is a good fit'
Possession star Gugu Mbatha-raw says the drama’s pace makes difficult subjects easier to digest
Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Claudia in Posession. SKY
"Entertainment is great and important in itself,” says Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who has appeared in such entertaining fare as Doctor Who, The Cloverfield Paradox and the Marvel TV series Loki. “We all need escapism and there’s a healing for a lot of people to watch a story and be taken away from their own lives.”
But, she says, “Occasionally you get the opportunity to do something that also brings to the fore other issues, or brings things into people’s awareness. I want to be moved and inspired when I see a story. And if it also generates an interesting conversation? That’s the real juicy stuff.”
Mbatha-Raw’s career is punctuated with such “juicy stuff”. There’s Belle, the based-on-a-true-story film which saw her play the illegitimate daughter of a Royal Navy admiral and an enslaved African woman, who was then raised as an aristocrat in 18th-century Britain. And there’s also Apple TV’s frothy drama The Morning Show, in which she played a victim of a workplace sexual predator in a MeToo-inspired storyline.
Mbatha-Raw as the lead role in Belle. Allstar/FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES
“It was a real privilege to work on that powerful story,” she says of playing Hannah, who was coerced into having sex with her boss Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell) and subsequently took her own life. “It was an individual’s perspective on something that was a movement and a cultural conversation and that story cut to the heart of the issue.”
If a story generates an interesting concersation, that's the real juicy stuff
Now to this roster of juicy stuff, we can add Possession, Karla Crome’s new supernatural thriller. Ostensibly about Claudia (Mbatha-Raw), a Bristol solicitor who travels to Jamaica to contest a will and ends up unleashing and then battling an evil spirit from the slavery-era Caribbean, Possession is as much concerned with the legacy of colonialism, the question of reparations and how much of Britain’s contemporary wealth is the result of the transatlantic slave trade.
“I’m not the biggest fan of horror on a personal level, but I love a psychological thriller,” Mbatha-Raw says. “There are scenes that are quite uncomfortable and confronting – it’s about slavery – which is maybe why horror is a good fit for the story, because horror is uncomfortable. There’s a supernatural, thrilling, exciting, propulsive drive to the story and I think that maybe makes some of those more uncomfortable subjects a bit easier to metabolise.”
Ad
When telling big stories like this, Mbatha-Raw recalls a conversation she once had with writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood, with whom she worked on Beyond the Lights (2014). “She always used to say that the story has to be bigger than you. When your talent and your purpose meet, you can achieve great things. I’ve always carried that with me.”
Authors
Gareth McLean
Gareth McLean has been writing about television for nearly 30 years. As a critic, he's reviewed thousands of programmes. As a feature writer, he's interviewed hundreds of people, from Liza Minnelli to Jimmy Savile. He has also written for TV.
Ad
Ad
Subscribe for £1 per week
Too much to watch this autumn? Let Radio Times magazine and app do the choosing, with expert picks across TV, streaming and film.
Ad