INTERVIEW: Tony winner Jefferson Mays travels back to the days of the Black Dahlia
Photo: Jefferson Mays stars as Dr. George Hodel in I Am the Night on TNT. Photo courtesy of Eddy Chen / Provided by Turner Pressroom with permission.
The most infamous unsolved murder case in the history of Los Angeles — if not the entire United States — involves a young woman named Elizabeth Short who was found brutally murdered in the late 1940s. She became known as the Black Dahlia, and her killer was never brought to justice.
Many books and movies have speculated on what exactly happened to Short; some of them are fictionalized accounts (James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia), and some are based on new investigations into old evidence (Steve Hodel’s Black Dahlia Avenger).
Patty Jenkins, director of Wonder Woman and Monster, has added her own creative touch to this true-crime head-scratcher with the limited TNT series I Am the Night, starring Chris Pine, who plays a journalist who became obsessed with the Black Dalia case.
In the series, which airs new episodes Mondays at 9 p.m., India Eisley plays Fauna Hodel, a young woman who starts to question her family’s mysterious past, including the details of a relative, an infamous Los Angeles gynecologist by the name of Dr. George Hodel (Jefferson Mays). Her family eventually starts to connect with the Black Dahlia case, and fingers start to be pointed. The project, written by Sam Sheridan, is based off Fauna Hodel’s memoir.
“I must say that I only had a cursory knowledge of the Black Dahlia murder,” Mays said in a recent phone interview. “Unfortunately I had seen the crime scene photos at an early age. … You realize very quickly they can’t be unseen, so they haunted me. But I was rather ambushed by this project. I was just called in. There was some interest in me to read for it, and I remember having a delightful Skype with Patty Jenkins. And then the part was mine.”
To prepare for the role of Dr. George Hodel, Mays read Black Dahlia Avenger by Hodel’s son, Steve, who suspects his father was responsible for Short’s murder. The author, who was an LAPD homicide detective, has followed up the original book with two sequels and more evidence. Many people are convinced Steve Hodel’s thesis is true, and the case is being further explored on TNT’s companion podcast, Root of Evil: The True Story of the Hodel Family and the Black Dahlia.
“I mined [the book] for descriptions of the man, the way he carried himself in the world, what he talked like, what he sounded like, what he read as a youth, what influenced him, what art obsessed him, so various things that I could hopefully inject into my performance,” Mays said.
As Mays dug deeper into Dr. George Hodel, he started to realize some of the bizarre truths of the doctor’s life. As he explored, all the actor could think was, oh dear, this is who he will embody for the next few months.
“What’s that going to do to my own psyche?” Mays wondered. “And I remember voicing those concerns to Patty Jenkins in a meeting we had before we started shooting, and she said, ‘I think we’re going to be OK. I think it’s going to be fine.’ And she was right. She injected such joy and playfulness and good humor into the whole process that I didn’t feel unduly weighted down, although after spending the day with George, I was very keen to get into a hot bath and fix myself a martini. But it was a wonderful experience. I find that to be true though. Generally the more morbid and serious the subject matter is, the more lightness surrounds the making of it.”
He added: “Comedy is just the opposite. Comedy is deadly serious. It feels like rocket science and everybody beating their heads against the walls arguing about how long a pause should be or whether a line would be funnier. It’s quite a process.”
To play the “bad guy” of the series, Mays needed to inhabit the character not as a villain, but as someone who believed he was perfectly fine. That’s the essential art of acting.
“Villains never think that they are villainous,” said Mays, who has appeared on Broadway in Oslo, The Front Page, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder and I Am My Own Wife. “They are behaving entirely reasonably and doing the right thing always, and it’s the rest of the world that misunderstands them and doesn’t get it. So I try to approach every scene with a conscience free and clear.”
I Am the Night has been lauded by critics for its noirish atmosphere of depicting mid-century Los Angeles, and much of the series was shot on location in iconic buildings in Southern California. The look and feel of Jenkins’ production appealed to the actor.
“I think that’s one of the things that draws me more than anything else about acting, whether you’re in a play that takes place in 17th century France of Molière or this neo-noir piece in Los Angeles in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s,” Mays said. “I love the time travel aspect of it. I love being able to wear the clothes and to ride in the cars and to be in the interiors. They tell you so much about both the time period and the character you’re portraying.”
Mays has built an impressive career with numerous stage, TV and film roles. He is clearly successful in all three areas, but his legendary work in theater has influenced his work on the small screen. In fact, it helped specifically with the George Hodel character.
“There was something about the George Hodel character, as I understood it, that was theatrical,” Mays said. “I sort of tried to bring a certain theatrical quality to the role. He was extremely self-conscious about the way he presented himself to the world. His speech was described as being stilted and formal. He was indeed raised as a European aristocrat by his émigré parents who valued art and culture and speaking foreign languages. … He was a child prodigy, played piano, instructed by [Sergei] Rachmaninoff, so he was a very odd duck you can imagine in the Pasadena High School in the 1920s. So I tried to give him a veneer of being of another time and place even outside of the time and place depicted in I Am the Night.”
Working with Jenkins was a delight for Mays. He found her leadership on set to be filled with joy, curiosity and exploration.
“She was not a Cecil B. DeMille browbeater by any means, and she also exhibits what is to me an essential quality in a great director in any medium, which is every single thing mattered to her,” he said. “She had an opinion about anything, whether it was the width of my mustache or the color of my socks. It was all important, and to have that sort of mind where you can look at the big picture and also all of the minutiae simultaneously is an astonishing thing. She has that quality in spades.”
Ditto for his co-star, Eisley, who is central the plot of I Am the Night.
“I was so fortunate to have India Eisley largely as my scene partner,” Mays said. “She was a revelation to me, an actress of such intelligence and emotional availability and a striking face, one of those faces where thoughts and emotions pass across it like the shadows of clouds. It was a wonderful thing to behold every day.”
Working on I Am the Night appealed to Mays on many fronts, and it’s yet another impressive bullet point in a résumé filled with impress bullet points.
“I’m fortunate enough not to make decisions solely based on the amount of money being offered,” he admitted. “If something intrigues me, if something makes me curious and if the writing is good, then I’ll seize it. You want to be intrigued by the mystery of a project or a character.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
I Am the Night, starring Chris Pine, India Eisley and Jefferson Mays, continues Mondays at 9 p.m. on TNT. Click here for more information.
