“I was viewed as ‘other’ because I had a thick accent and my skin was a darker hue,” Ayorinde recalls. But fundamentally, I am a Black man, and the common ground, regardless of where you grew up or live, of racial discrimination exists in the face of wanting to provide a better and safe life for one’s family.”ĭeborah Ayorinde, who plays Thomas’s on-screen wife “Lucky” Emory, says her experience moving from London to San Jose as a child also informed how she approached her character. “I had to acknowledge and appreciate that Black British experience and the Black American experience are not entirely the same, in order to fully use myself as a vessel to bring forth Henry. “When it comes to the Black American experience, in particular, I had to study and learn,” Thomas adds. “He is a Black man, in his 70s, who experienced firsthand what it was to be a part of The Great Migration, having moved from Texas to Chicago, then back to Texas and eventually to Los Angeles.”Īlso Read: Did ‘White Boy’ Rick Wershe Jr. “I learned a lot from a gentleman who lives in the apartment building where I stayed during production,” he says. “And what darkness undergirds that Dream.”Īshley Thomas, who plays the show’s patriarch, Henry Emory, says he learned a lot about the Great Migration from a neighbor. “The show examines and interrogates the American Dream of homeownership through the lens of terror,” Marvin adds. Through that, the plot of Them was born - a Black family moves across the country in order to escape harassment, only to find that the very same evil exists in their new home, too. Threatened by the police, or with the police.” “I’d go through my social media feeds and I would see iPhone video after iPhone video of Blacks folks-women, men, children, families-being terrorized in some way,” Marvin says. He began writing the script a few summers ago, and later got Queen & Slim’s Lena Waithe to join him as an executive producer.Īlso Read: Who Is Richard Abath, Security Guard During Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist? The difference is that Black folks had to fight to make those journeys of opportunity within the boundaries of their own country.” The African-American migrant and immigrant experiences in America – though obviously unique and varied in myriad ways - are also quite similar. My mother, an Indian woman, is an immigrant to America. “My father’s family relocated from Alabama to Massachusetts during The Great Migration. “The last four years… had me thinking a lot about the American Dream-who gets their keys to it and who has to fight for their keys,” he says in the show’s press notes. Alison Pill as Betty Wendell in Them, c ourtesy of Amazon Studios.īut Little Marvin, creator of Them, stresses that the show is inspired by the true, lived experiences of many Black people who journeyed out of the South in search of a better life.
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