Casting call
CASTING is currently underway to identify acting talent for an upcoming original TV series created by award-winning Jamaican writer Marlon James.
The Jamaica Observer understands that filming for Get Millie Back, which has been picked up by American cable television giant HBO and Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, is slated for later this year.
Local talent agency Raw Management — headed by actress, director and producer Nadean Rawlins — is among those charged to find the Jamaican actors for the six-part series which follows ex-Scotland Yard Detective Millie-Jean Black, who returns to Kingston to work in the missing persons branch and soon finds herself entangled in a web of personal and professional matters.
The casting call is for five characters and, according to the advertisement posted on Raw Management’s Facebook page, they are looking for: one black male in their 20s to 30s; a white Jamaican male in his 30s; and, another male in his 30s of any ethnicity who is open to an intimate scene with a male. For the females, one must be black between 16 to 18 years old; while the other must be between 40 to 50 years of any ethnicity.
“We actively encourage people to apply for this who, perhaps, have no experience in acting but are open to trying something new,” the advertisement further stated.
Hopefuls are required to submit a one-minute-long video sharing information about themselves to Raw Management.
Get Millie Black reportedly explores themes including the legacy of racism, slavery, sexuality, classism, and cycles of trauma in the post-colonial landscape of Britain and Jamaica, told through the eyes of Millie — a girl of Jamaican and British stock.
“My mother was one of the first policewomen in Jamaica to make detective,” James said.
“Storytelling has always struck me first and foremost as a mystery to be solved — which I’m sure I got from her. Millie, from the second she appeared in my imagination, was a brilliant, mercurial, hilarious, unpredictable force of nature; someone who was always there, just waiting for her story to be told. I didn’t create her, I found her,” James told the online media outlet deadline.com.
James made international headlines in 2015 when he copped Britain’s coveted Manbooker Prize for fiction for his work A Brief History of Seven Killings— a novel based on the attempted assassination of Bob Marley.
His other books include The Book of Night Women, John Crow’s Devil, and Black Leopard, Red Wolf.