Breaking Baz: ‘Supacell’s Rapman Utilized His Own Superpower To Survive Making Earthshaking Netflix Superhero Drama
EXCLUSIVE: Rapman utilized a superpower of his own — one that didn’t require him to don figure-hugging spandex tights and a cape — to survive the setbacks he encountered making the earthshaking new Netflix drama Supacell that began streaming Thursday.
“My superpower is discipline,” he declares.
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Having an indomitable will comes in handy, too.
Rapman required his superpower to be at full throttle to help him wind his way through a thicket of obstacles.
For starters, he began the process in 2020, the year the pandemic hit everything. There were often heated and frank discussions over writers, special effects (the usual), and two composers came and went before he persuaded Netflix to let him chime with a third, Sillkey, the songwriter, producer and musician.
Having persuaded commissioners at Netflix to develop his idea of a drama about a group of regular people in south London who become mysteriously afflicted — because it’s like an illness — with superpowers, Rapman spent six months writing drafts, alone and then in a writers room, for three of its six episodes and the show’s bible.
Netflix rejected them, leaving Rapman feeling dejected and demoralized.
The Netflix executives, Rapman tells me, “felt that it wasn’t the show I’d originally pitched.”
Rapman held his arms out. “You see me, I’m very straightforward. If I’m happy, I’m happy. And if I’m pissed, I’m pissed. If I’m hurt, I’m hurt. I’m just not fake. They’re very blunt at Netflix and I feel like they needed to be and they’re like, look man, we believe in you still, but this aint it, basically.”
One of the Netflix executives informed him they could redevelop the show, starting from scratch.
It could take five years, they reckoned.
“I told them, I need a week. Just give me a week and then you can talk to me about coming from scratch and five years later, just give me a week. So I sat down and I watched all the shows that inspired me. The Wire, Breaking Bad, and movies like Goodfellas,” he says.
It was Breaking Bad that provided the breakthrough he was after.
“What’s clear about Breaking Bad? We know it’s about a guy who becomes a massive drug dealer to save the family. But if you actually watch Season 1, it actually ends with him getting his first customer. And it just made me think, you know what? I need to take this [Supacell] all the way back.”
He realized that the first season needed to be a prequel.
Deep down he’d known all along that the Netflix execs were right about those first drafts.
Earlier he’d shown a version of those scripts to two teenagers he often ran ideas by. They weren’t excited.
“And it stuck with me, like, ‘Bro, why are they not excited?’
“I wasn’t as excited either,” he admits.
“So when the rejection came, even though it hurt, I knew it wasn’t the show that I would’ve written by myself.”
Those wordsmiths in the writers room were talented for sure. “There were some great writers, don’t want to take that away from them. But there’s a sound in south London that if you’re not from there and you don’t understand a certain class,” he insists, “you can’t write it.”
He felt uncomfortable in the writers room, that’s clear.
Writing wasn’t his forte at that point, but he couldn’t abandon his creation to let other writers define his vision. “People have been writing for so many years longer than me. So who am I to say I don’t like that idea? I don’t want to look like the angry Black man in the room who’s shouting at this person and that person,” he says, keeping his voice down as we sat at a table in an otherwise empty warehouse room that was close to a location.
A small part of him wanted to up sticks and pack it in.
But was that a rational move for the filmmaker, born Andrew Onwubolu and raised in south London where his parents had settled after arriving from Nigeria. He’d shot the celebrated Shiro’s Story trilogy in his old neighborhood and it’s where he made Blue Story.
A cherished movie project called American Son, a reworking of Jacques Audiard’s 2009 Cannes jury prize winner A Prophet with Russell Crowe on board, was upended by the pandemic. He’d spent months structuring Supacell on his own before taking it to Netflix.
Did he want to throw that all away and go off on a Nigerian huff?
Believe me, you don’t want to be caught in the middle when a Nigerian’s off having a huff.
“So as hurt as I was, I literally went back to the drawing board and then ended up basically just doing it all myself, which they say nobody does. They say that’s very rare for someone to write every episode. But I knew I wouldn’t get the green light unless I put it all on my shoulder,” he says.
“And then yeah, after that rejection, it took me another nine months. I’ve never worked so hard at anything in my life because I knew that the only way we were going into production was if I’ve done it [the scripts] myself.”
So, you saved the day, I suggest?
“Well, the day is only for me because the other writers that you get hired on shows, they don’t care about it the way you do,” he says passionately.
“They didn’t carry the child for nine months, it wasn’t their baby,” he adds.
When American Son was shut down in pre-production, the producer, he recalls, “said, look, Rap, that’s Hollywood. Sometimes it comes and sometimes it goes.”
But Rapman says he felt “I can’t lose this one as well.”
That would’ve been two, he says. Not that it was his fault that “the pandemic came and blew the film away. But that would’ve been two losses back to back. I couldn’t accept that.
“So with this one, whatever it takes, I need to get this over the line,” he says during a series of conversations stretching over two years, held before, during and after the Supacell shoot.
He concedes that projects in this industry get put through a wringer all the time.
One of his agents at CAA kept telling him that he should feel better because Matt and Ross Duffer went through a tough period themselves when they were developing Stranger Things and now it’s one of the biggest shows in the world.
“And I said, it does make me feel better, but that doesn’t make me feel good.”
Rapman wonders whether the Duffer brothers had to ever over-compromise because they’re not Black.
We all have to compromise, I tell him. And he accepts that sometimes, but not always, “I did the compromise.”
The Duffer brothers though wouldn’t have felt any of that “you should be so happy to be here kind of energy, and I shouldn’t be happy to be here. I have worked my ass off to be here. I’ve earned my place,” he protests.
He doesn’t often wallow in that kinda stuff, but it crosses his mind now and again.
In Supacell, Some of those feelings are reflected in the psychological makeup of a nurse played by Nadine Mills. She’s beloved by her patients and outperforms her colleagues at the hospital. She’s never promoted, and as Rapman puts it, ”we know why.”
But slowly her bosses do recognize her talent. Her powers, though, once she gains them, do not aid her progress at work.
“Then these powers come in to mess up everything. She hates it. It’s just that she doesn’t understand it. She thinks she’s suffering with mental health. It’s so much more than power. And I think we’re at a time now where as much as I love Marvel and DC, we always know it’s going to work out well in the end because it’s Marvel and DC,” he shrugs.
Whereas, he says, “ in our story you just don’t know what’s going to happen because we’re based on reality and sometimes the laugh doesn’t always work out.”
Rapman got Netflix to rent him a tiny office a 10-minute drive away from his home in tennis-mad Wimbledon.
“I wrote till my fingers bled,” he says.
He wrote two or three full episodes and a show bible that charted every single twist and turn.
Netflix read it and greenlit it within days.
He allows that the experience, as painful as it sometimes was, has made him a better writer. And better able to understand his way around the streaming world.
For instance, he says that he never took notice of every single note Netflix sent his way.
“So the good thing was the notes that they did give me that were good, they were really good and lifted the show. And the notes that I thought was sh*t, we’re never going to hear about them. They were whack. But it made me a much better writer and it gave me thick skin, man,” he says.
We met up again recently over lunch at the Union Club in Soho, by which time I had previewed four episodes of Supacell and I was buzzing with excitement about it.
Yes, it took me a moment or two to get into it and to work out the disparate threads, but the characters are grounded, and as I observed to natural-born star Tosin Cole, around whom a lot of the story revolves, that it’s groundbreaking and gripping.
Cole plays Michael, a courier who’s dating social worker Dionne, played by Adelayo Adedayo. They have terrific chemistry, by the way.
It’s because of Michael’s love for Dionne that he attempts to use his new time-controlling powers to protect her from harm.
“Literally, he goes through hell and back and tries everything he can,” Rapman says.
But Michael’s a fish out of water. When he’s forced to confront darker forces on a public housing estate he has no understanding of drug-gang culture.
He’s a stranger to how it works. The street thugs, the drugs, the knives and the guns, are alien to him.
“And what I liked about that is that it skews the assumption that all people of color know that world and know how it works,” Rapman says.
“Those scenes are so important to me because they think everyone Black must know it and that all Black people must be familiar with that world,” he argues.
If Michael’s an innocent, then Tazer, played with sizzling intensity by Josh Tedeku, is his complete opposite.
Tazer has a complex psyche.
On the street with his gang, he’s ruthless and bloodthirsty. Yet, at home he’s an obedient grandson who serves his grandmother [a marvelously stern turn from Nollywood star Golda John] egosi soup [traditional West African seafood stew], and then brings her a bowl of warm soapy water to rinse her hands.
In my youth, I too served my elders — the Nigerian chieftains, princes and princesses, and kings and queens — in a similar fashion. Hadn’t thought about it for 50 years.
“So that tells you so much about the character of Tazer. They [Netflix] didn’t understand it until I explained. At test screenings every single African Black person, just as you did, just thought, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ I had to fight to keep it in because until then they [Netflix] didn’t understand its relevancy.”
Tazer’s like an alter boy at home where there’s West African discipline. ”But when he’s outside, he’s in the jungle, so he feels like he has to do whatever it takes to survive.”
I ask Rapman about the scenes of violence.
The knife fights. The shootings. They’re superbly choreographed, performed and filmed, but I gulped a few times.
These were kids, our children, being wounded, punished and killed.
Were those scenes glorifying violent bloodshed, I asked?
“It’s dog eat dog, isn’t it? Oh, yeah, the violence is there. I’m not going to pretend that teenagers in that world, in that particular world, that it isn’t violent. So it was important that I’m going to show Tazer as authentic as he would be.
“And I just have to make it real, man. I’ve got a long story that I want to take Tazer on throughout the seasons,” he explains.
“So it was important that you believe him. I want his transformation to be over the seasons,” he says, gently adding that if there are going to be conversations about violence then I should be sure to watch episode 5.
“I want you to watch it and see how you feel about it,” he adds.
As of this writing, I haven’t yet seen the episode in question.
He reckons that the only way you can teach kids like Tazer and his friends “is showing the truth.”
Such kids are not careful, he says. “They’re not careful and they end up with a bullet in their back,” he cautions.
The superb cast also includes Eric Kofi Abrefa (Blue Story, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), Calvin Demba (The Rig), Josh Tedeku (Moonhaven), Rayxia Ojo (Call The Midwife) and Giacomo Mancini (Top Boy).
Supacell is the first show in a long time that I’ll be able to chat about with relatives in Nashville, Washington, Lagos and London, plus one or two in Australia.
I hope all my friends and neighbors watch it too, because we live in a Supacell world. A world of love and violence. And we all possess the power to help extinguish the latter.
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