Damson Idris recently disclosed in an interview that he had “nightmares” after invoking the “devil” to get into the character of Franklin Saint in the sixth season of “Snowfall.”
The performance of Idris Elba as Franklin Saint, a teenage drug dealer in Los Angeles in the 1980s, has been praised by critics.
“I was hitting a block, right. I was like, ‘I’m not doing it right.” He said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “So I went in the corner, and then I was looking at the wall, and I was like, ‘Come on, devil. Come on, devil,’ right. ‘Come to me, like, come to me,’ because I had to do something, like, crazy, right.”
“I had nightmares for a month. Like, I had nightmares every day, like, I felt, I just felt that energy. And I had to pray and do all this stuff to get rid of it. You know, you call your mom up, and you’re like bring me back to life. And that stuff is real. That stuff really is real.”
Despite the obstacles, Idris’s performance in Snowfall has garnered widespread acclaim, with many critics hailing him as a breakout talent. The show, which ended in April in its sixth season, has been praised for its realistic depiction of the crack epidemic in 1980s Los Angeles, as well as for its complex storytelling and nuanced characters.
Showrunner Dave Andron recently spoke about how they had a hard time deciding how the show should end.
“Over the years, we talked a lot lot of different variations of it, I can remember pitching FX the fifth and sixth seasons and at that point, I was like, ‘Well, maybe he gets his money and loses everything and everybody and destroys his community, but he becomes the soloist.’ But this was the right thing to do and even in the very, very, very early mini rooms we did with Leonard [Chang] and John [Singleton] there was a talk of ‘Well, maybe he ends up destroyed like his father.’”
Isaiah John (Leon) and Gail Bean (Wanda) also revealed on Hot 97 that even the major trip to Ghana to shoot an episode was just an “idea from the beginning of the last season [season 5],” and the decision to actually go was last minute.
“It feels like the right thing,” added writer Walter Mosley. Mosley also told Variety that killing Franklin just wasn’t in the plans for their writing team. “I read it many times and I think we had the right ending for him and for everybody else.”
In preparation for the final scene, Idris even left some of the production crew emotional as they also said goodbye to his character.
“When we walked onto the set for the first time with him and we talked about what they were going to do hair, makeup, wardrobe, right? But I hadn’t seen the full thing. So we walked onto the set for rehearsal and it was in Cissy’s house. We shot that stuff before we shot the stuff out in the street. The director, myself and our script supervisor walked on set and our script supervisor saw him over in the next room, in the corner, head down and muttering and shuffling around. She started crying. And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is gonna land.’ Just seeing him, she couldn’t take it.”
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