‘Kindred’ Showrunner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins On The Process Of Adapting Octavia E. Butler For The Modern Age, Casting Newcomer Mallori Johnson, And Trying Not To “Aestheticize The Violence” Of Slavery Narratives

15.12.2022 - 22:51 / deadline.com

It’s been nearly five decades since the publication of Octavia E. Butler’s critically acclaimed Black sci-fi novel Kindred. In an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, Butler explained that she wanted to write a thought-provoking novel “that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that Black people have had to live through in order to endure.” The themes of racial injustice, systematic oppression and trauma are, unfortunately, still an evergreen topic, but one that has always seemed primed for its own film or television series. We can see from the recent award-winning releases of HBO’s Lovecraft Country and Watchmen (2019) or writer-director Jordan Peele’s trilogy of films Get Out, Us and Nope that there’s an audience for adapting works that challenge, contextualize or expand the notions behind the complicated history of slavery and Black trauma in America.

It’s surprising that since its publication in 1979, Kindred has only ever been adapted into a graphic novel by Damien Duffy and artist John Jennings in 2017. Now in 2022, Hulu and FX’s Kindred, created by playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, marks the first onscreen adaptation of Butler’s works.  Aside from a couple of modern updates, such as changing the present-day time period of the novel to 2016 from 1976, the show’s overarching premise is similar to Butler’s book. Kindred follows Dana (Mallori Johnson), a 26-year-old Black woman who finds herself time traveling between her Los Angeles home and an Antebellum plantation in Maryland during the 1800s.

Below, Jacobs-Jenkins discusses bringing Butler’s works onscreen, why Johnson was perfect to helm the series, and why audiences should challenge their notions of slavery.

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