Detective Alex Cross is back in action in Prime Video’s latest series, Cross.
Based on the character created by James Patterson and the protagonist of many of Patterson’s novels, this television adaptation from Ben Watkins is a thrilling experience you’ll have to see to believe.
Ahead of the show’s premiere on Prime Video, Geeks of Color was able to sit down with some of the cast and creators of the series to discuss their experience working on Cross.
Series creator, Ben Watkins, delved into the nitty gritty of Cross, adapting the character for current audiences, advice for aspiring show writers, and much more!
Check out the full interview with Ben Watkins below:
Perhaps one of the best things about Ben Watkins’ Cross series is that while it remains true to the beloved titular character, it also beings something fresh and new to the table with this modern iteration, and all that entails.
“I think for me, I just felt like, you know, we had a unique opportunity here, and we should take advantage of it–especially telling this story through television where I have a little more real estate. I can still deliver on a really compelling thriller with a lot of twists and turns, but also do a character journey. And in this day and age, if you’re doing a character journey about a Black detective, you can’t tiptoe around the fact that there are questions about social and economic justice and racial justice, and there’s even a conversation going on that we’re all aware of between law enforcement and the Black community. And if you want to be honest in your storytelling, you can’t tiptoe around that, and I think audiences will appreciate the fact that we don’t tiptoe around it.”
In addition to Cross, Watkins has a slew of other writing and producing credits under his belt including other shows like Hand of God and Burn Notice. Watkins had some words of advice for aspiring writers looking to work in Hollywood.
“First of all, I think, and this is tough to do, but you should put aside any sort of evaluations about what the business is. I’ve never seen any generation come into Hollywood and people say, ‘It’s going to be easy.’ So it’s always going to be tough. And I think what you really should be driven by is your need to tell stories and how you want to tell them. So that’s one thing, because you can talk yourself out of some things. If you listen to people say, ‘Oh, it’s tougher than ever,’ you might be extremely talented and inspired, but that takes a little bit of the wind out of your sails. There’s a lesson that I just got out of just doing my own thing, which was not wait for permission.”
Cross was an exciting IP for Watkins to dive into. However, when asked if there were any other IP projects he’d like to tackle that fit into the geek genre, he mentioned anything based in Afrofuturism, Static Shock, and the Morlocks of X-Men fame.
“Afrofuturism, because I think we’ve been left out of that. There are a couple of things that I would like to do. One of them is Static Shock, and the other one is, you know, I spent some time when I was younger, where I was unhoused, and there was in the Marvel Universe, there was some characters that lived in the subway, and they were the Morlocks. And I wish that somebody would tell that story. They were mutants, and they created their own community in the subway. And I’ve often felt like that would be really, really fertile ground to tell a story and all of those things. One of the reasons I love them is because you get to really delve into some relevant themes and commentaries happening in our society, but with sort of this buffer that is sci-fi, or, you know, the comic genre, and so I would like to be able to do that at some point.”