SPOILER ALERT: This story includes major spoilers from “Smoke,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
When Jurnee Smollett was approached about starring alongside Taron Egerton in the Apple TV+ series, “Smoke,” she remembered hearing about the story that inspired the show when she just a kid.
“We had moved from New York to L.A., and my dad was talking about this case,” Smollett tells me. “I remember him and my mom talking about how crazy it was that there was a man who was literally working in the fire department, and he was the one setting the fires.”
Writer and series creator Dennis Lehane adapted “Smoke” from “Firebug,” a podcast that chronicled the story of John Orr, a Glendale Fire Department captain and arson investigator who is alleged to have started 2,000 fires throughout the Los Angeles area in the 1980s and 1990s. One blaze at a hardware store resulted in the death of four people.
Taking place in a fictional Pacific Northwest town, “Smoke” stars Egerton as arson investigator and serial arsonist Dave Gudsen while Smollett portrays his new partner, Michelle Calderone, a former Marine and now detective who’s been mysteriously transferred from the police’s robbery division.
As Dave wreaks fire-fueled havoc around town, Michelle comes with her own baggage and traumas as she works to expose Dave. She’s having an affair with police department boss (Rafe Spall), and is haunted by a childhood memory of her mother leaving her for dead in a motel fire.
“Early on in my discussions with Dennis, he said to me, ‘Jurnee, you know, oftentimes we all say we want to be happy, and yet we’re drawn to the very things that want to destroy us. That’s Michelle in a nutshell,” Smollett says. “Whether it’s a toxic relationship or a toxic relationship to her job and the workplace, or the traumatic betrayal that happened in her childhood, honestly, I could relate to that that pattern of self-sabotage. I think we all have struggled with that at a moment.
“There’s a great book called ‘The Mountain Is You’ that [screenwriter] Misha Green recommended to me, and then my other friend Questlove recommended this book called ‘The Big Leap,’” she continues. “They’re all about that idea that really we get in our own way.”
While Michelle’s inner turmoil may be more “extreme” than Smollett’s, she says, “I just think that pattern of creation and destruction is very universal for us all.”
Smollett embraced Michelle’s shortcomings. “I loved how flawed she is,” she says. “As an actor, it’s your job to not judge. It’s your job to justify. Does she make some morally questionable choices? I love that because I’m not interested in just playing the strong, badass woman. I want to play a human. I want to play the truth.”
Rounding out the cast of the nine-episode “Smoke” are Greg Kinnear, John Leguizamo, Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Adina Porter, Anna Chlumsky, Dakota Daulby, Hannah Emily Anderson and Luke Roessler.
Variety television critic Alison Herman called the show “a thrilling cat-and-mouse game” that is “deeply satisfying, a fast and clean burn that leaves little behind.”
