Last week, I had the opportunity to speak to Byron Bowers, Josiah Cross, and Y’Lan Noel from Apple TV+’s new show, Lady in the Lake. Starring Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram, Lady in the Lake is an adaptation of Laura Lippman’s bestselling 2019 novel from director Alma Har’el. The show is a feverish noir thriller that follows Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman), a Jewish housewife who becomes fixated on Cleo Johnson’s (Moses Ingram) mystifying death.
In unravelling the mystery, the audience meets a number of characters from Cleo’s life, including her widowed husband, Slappy. Played by acclaimed comedian and actor Byron Bowers, Slappy is a stand-up comedian who has been unemployed for over a year, largely due to his refusal to compromise the savage honesty of his material. Meanwhile, Ferdie (Y’lan Noel) begins falling for Maddie during his frequent visits to the shady businessman Shell Gordon’s (Wood Harris) Pharaoh Club, a venue where Cleo and Slappy used to work.
Check out the full interview with Josiah Cross, Y’Lan Noel and Byron Bowers below:
Much of the series navigates the political underbelly of Black Baltimore in 1966, so my first question for the actors concerned the racial dynamic in a city like Baltimore in the 1960s, and feeling a responsibility in taking on a role set in this time period and city.
“I did…it’s such a rich history behind it. So I knew I wanted to go in and not only research that history would tell, like a story that’s authentic to show it in a light before crack kicked in. Like that beautiful auntie who was fine before she started smoking crack, you know what I’m saying? And, you know, just just just elevated and put Baltimore on a pedestal,” Bowers said.
Since Lady in the Lake has two disappearances as central conflicts in the story, I wanted to know if the actors had favourite mystery films.
Noel shared, “Hmm, if we could count Devil in a Blue Dress with Denzel and Don Cheadle as “noir”…you know, I think it’s sort of like more contemporary noir. That’s one of my favorite films to watch that I go back to see all the time.”
Cross said, “I think, on the back of what Y’lan said, I feel like a kind of neo-noir that I was kind of channeling or thinking about, you know, while we were doing this was Gone Girl.”
For those who don’t know, Cross recently broke into the mainstream with a riveting performance in A.V Rockwell’s A Thousand And One. In this series, he plays an equally complex henchman Reggie; a boxer employed by Gordon who is refreshingly free of the traditional mafioso tropes that characters like his tend to be saddled with. In Har’el’s hands, Reggie is a man of physicality who struggles to digest his dirty deeds.
Of working with two women directors in the industry, Cross shared that working with Rockwell, and most recently Har’el, have been some of his most positive experiences.
Cross said, “I feel like it’s the best experience in this industry. All of my positive experiences have come from a female that was at the helm. I feel like, there was no more language barrier. And I don’t mean like actual English language. I mean, like, just more of like a cinematic applicated you know, just nuanced. Like, how are we getting the work done? What is the work? What’s the vision, and I think almost just brilliantly genius, and being such a collaborator, and opening, not only this world of 1960s Baltimore up, but her vision of it.”