Writer-producer Raelle Tucker was still reading Naomi Alderman’s 2016 dystopian novel “The Power” when she realized she had to be involved in bringing it to television.
“I was about halfway through and I called my agents and said, ‘If this is in development I need to know why I am not the showrunner,’” Tucker says. “I freaked out because I came off shows like ‘Jessica Jones’ and ‘True Blood,’ and I had been looking for something of this scale.
“I wanted to do something super ambitions,” she says. “And I love genre and have a very comfortable relationship with that kind of story telling. So I felt like I was the obvious fit for this show.”
To her great disappointment, Tucker learned that others had already snapped up the rights to adapt Alderman’s dystopian novel. “So it was, ‘All right, I missed the boat,’” she says.
Still, the story in which teen girls suddenly can emit dangerous levels of electricity from their bodies, giving them the ability to turn the global power dynamics from male to female control, never left her, Tucker says.
“Years later, my phone rings and it’s a friend at Amazon and they’re like, ‘You want to come on board a project that’s already started?’” Tucker says. “I was like, ‘Absolutely not, I’m doing a bunch of my own things.’
“They said, ‘It’s “The Power” by Naomi Alderman,’ and I was just like, ‘Shut the front door!’
“That’s not just me exaggerating,” Tucker says. “I would have done anything for the show, because I think it’s exciting, it’s epic. It’s female-driven, there’s nothing like it on television. And honestly, as a female showrunner, the sad truth, we seldom get offered things on this scale.
“Something this big does not come knocking at your door every day. And when it does, you say, ‘Yes, tell me where and what time.’”
“The Power” debuted on Prime Video last week with the first three of nine episodes, with a new episode each Friday until May 12. It’s stars include Toni Collette as the Seattle mayor who becomes an early supporter of the power-enhanced teen girls, John Leguizamo as her doctor husband, and Josh Charles as the Washington governor scheming to hold onto his political clout.
But most of the cast are fresher faces – Toheeb Jimoh from “Ted Lasso” and Eddie Marsan from “Ray Donovan” two exceptions – and Tucker is excited for viewers to discover actors such as Halle Bush, Auli’I Cravalho, Ria Zmitrowicz and Zrinka Cvitesic.
“It’s incredibly exciting to see these new faces that nobody knows yet, that I think are going to become legends,” Tucker says.
‘Brilliant characters’
British actors Marsan and Zmitrowicz play London crime boss Bernie Monke and his illegitimate but beloved daughter Roxy Monke. The Croatian actress Cvitesic portrays Tatiana Moskalev, the unhappy trophy wife of an Eastern European dictator. All three joined a recent video call to talk about what drew them to “The Power” and how they think it will be received.
“What I love about the script in general, not a single character is just good or bad,” Cvitesic says. “Which immediately made them human beings. I mean, we can be as good as we can, but like a little devil every now and then.
“And there is so much space to like build a spider’s web around every character,” she says.
“I think the characters that existed in the book from 2016 were brilliant,” Marsan says. “Knowing that was our point of reference, that was the guiding star, made it enjoyable to work on.”
Zmitrowicz read Alderman’s book more recently, as she was auditioning for the show, and said she came away impressed by its visionary approach to male and female power dynamics.
“There were moments in it where things happened to me,” she says. “Tunde (the Nigerian journalist played by Jimoh) gets attacked and it turned my stomach.
“And I realized how desensitized I’ve become to violence against women,” Zmitrowicz says. “In that way that it holds a mirror up to the society that we’re living in now.”
Bernie, Roxy and Tatiana all are characters who’ve been traumatized in different ways, which gave the actors plenty of room and range to explore.
“It was really cathartic,” Zmitrowicz says of Roxy, whose anger at being left out of her father’s official family finds an outlet through the electricity that shoots out of her fingertips. “I got to scream loads and have loads of anger, and that was really great, because you don’t usually get to behave like that.”
Bernie needs the power he’s had as a crime boss to cope with the trauma of his life, Marsan says. When the world shifts?
“The more the power is taken away from him, he then is forced to sit with the trauma that he’s been avoiding,” he says.
“Imagine that you lived your whole life, as a kid, as a teenager, and as an adult, in relationships with no love, no understanding, no protection,” Cvitesic says. “After 35 years of that you get the power. That’s the moment that she can have her life back.
“It’s like you were dead, and now somebody gives you an oxygen, you know, to be alive again.”
Fierce and in charge
Asked how “The Power” fits into a career that includes such characters as Marvel’s Jessica Jones and Sookie Stackhouse in “True Blood,” Tucker has a quick reply.
“I write kick-ass women,” she says. “I write really strong, really fierce female characters. But I hopefully also write about flawed human beings when I do that. I’m not interested in heroes and never have been. I find them boring. I don’t believe in bad guys.
“I think we all exist within gray areas,” she says. “That gray area is where all the exciting (stuff) happens.”
In “The Power,” those shades of gray allow for the teen girls and women who suddenly find themselves in control of events to use that power for good and ill. This a complex world where characters may not always do things viewers endorse.
“It’s about putting women, putting people of color, putting people who aren’t historically the leaders in shows at the center of their own stories,” Tucker says. “And then watching them be strong, but also be allowed to make mistakes and do terrible things and try to redeem themselves.
“That’s the work that I’m most interest in,” she says. “I guess some part of me aspires to be like those people. I want to be a kickass fierce leader, and I’m drawn to stories about those people.”
Like Tucker, Cvitesic and Zmitrowicz also noted the sad resonance this feminist sci-fi scenario has in our real world today.
“It raises questions and speaks about problems that are unfortunately too common,” Cvitesic says. “It’s mental that in 2023 that being black, being gay, being a woman in a powerful position, being able to make decisions about your own body are still issues.
“It just shows us we didn’t go very far,” she says.
“I don’t have much to add, other than it’s just incredibly sad that over the three years that we’ve been making this it’s gotten even more relevant and more timely. And yeah, hopefully the show is just really thought provoking because it is holding that mirror up to society.”
Showing the world as it is “The Power” – a world with women in control – can be not only greatly entertaining, but also illustrate a different way of being, Marsan says.
“The brilliance of the book and the brilliance of the series is that if we were making something about teenage boys getting this power, it would probably put them in Lycra and a cape and they’d all be superheroes,” he says. But no, we’re talking about teenage girls, so what you’re doing is you’re reversing the sexual power dynamic.
“It’s a brilliant way of addressing the situation at the moment by reversing it,” he says.
Tucker agrees with the cast, saying that in addition to creating a thrilling alternate world, “The Power” might also stick with viewers after the channel changes.
“If people walk out of the show, and they’re having conversations about these things in a away they might not have had them before?” she says. “That would be a massive triumph.”
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