AI, the FBI, and Kate Mara’s Bionic Eye: Class of ’09 Creator and Cast on FX’s Captivating New Thriller
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The post AI, the FBI, and Kate Mara’s Bionic Eye: Class of ’09 Creator and Cast on FX’s Captivating New Thriller appeared first on Consequence.
The new FX thriller series Class of ’09 is notably set in three different time periods: The past (2009), the present (2023), and then the future (2034). But when its creator was developing the idea, he originally thought about going forward a few extra years. “The future was actually further,” executive producer Tom Rob Smith (London Spy, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story) tells Consequence. “We pulled it rather closer to the present because AI is much more alive as a technology. And now it’s become a phenomenon — we realized we didn’t have to kick it 20 years into the future. We could set it much closer.”
The three different time periods offer the viewer a unique point-of-view on the lives of FBI agents Poet (Kate Mara), Tayo (Brian Tyree Henry), Hour (Sepideh Moafi), Lennix (Brian J. Smith), and Murphy (Jake McDorman); the series intercuts between them beginning their careers as Quantico cadets, working in the present as agents, and then, in the future, grappling with the ramifications of the advanced crime-predicting technology now assisting their investigations.
Says Sepideh Moafi, “I was haunted by certain themes that are explored about identity, about the consequences of our actions and the way that these things sort of manifest throughout our lives. How certain decisions that we make impact things, maybe not in that moment, but decades down the road. And, really, this whole idea of what is too much with technology — where do we draw the line?”
With some help from hair, makeup, wardrobe, and (in the case of Poet) a bionic eye, the actors play their characters across all three time periods. “You don’t usually get that opportunity, for so many episodes, to actually get to play in different timelines,” says Kate Mara. “You really get to explore the different emotions that your character goes through and the different relationships between the other characters — and how those evolve and how they grow and change.”
Understandably, the cast all had preferences as to which period was their favorite. “My first answer was I really liked the past timeline, which is true,” Mara says. “But mainly because my character is sort of her most… I don’t wanna say naive, but like wide-eyed…”
“Pure, hopeful and innocent,” supplies Moafi.
“Totally. Most pure is for sure correct,” Mara agrees. “And I love being able to play the first emotions of a relationship, not just romantic relationships, but any relationship that you’re first exploring as friends. Even the relationships between us and our teachers our instructors at Quantico — all of that. I always find that really fun as an actor. But I also really did like playing the present day as well, because I really enjoyed that aspect of where Poet is, in her life. And it’s a little bit darker, a little bit more difficult for her emotionally.”
Moafi agrees with her: “The past was my favorite, because of the same reasons. There’s hope, there’s joy, there’s like an innocence about that period.”
Meanwhile, Brian J. Smith says he “enjoyed the present day, if for no other reason than I really loved my suits. I had some really great suits to wear and I had a really, really sick house, a really nice house. So that was fun.”
The inspiration that led to the creation of Class of ’09 was simple, according to Tom Rob Smith: “I stumbled across this podcast by a retired FBI agent called Jerri Williams, and she was interviewing lots of retired agents and just basically asking them to tell their life story.” (Fun fact: Williams eventually became a consultant on the series.)
Continues Tom Rob Smith, “It was really eye-opening, in the sense that a case can take like three years to work on — we think of agents, particularly in the TV world, as solving a case a week or a case every two weeks, and actually that has no relationship to the truth — that they work on these for years. They really invest, and sometimes they end in frustration, sometimes they end in success. And so automatically time is built into the story because it’s this span of their career. And I thought I’d really like to tell a story where the main character is the agent and not the crime.”
When it came to picking the time setting for the past, Tom Rob Smith notes, “We wanted a sense of idealism, and certainly 2009 is an interesting time for that. There’s a kind of hopefulness about that Quantico period both in terms of their own dreams in terms of historically as well, so that was the timeline that kind of came in closer to the others. And then we decided we wanted the same actors to play all three roles, so it would be a much more interesting task for the actor and they could do a real journey.”
Crafting a specific take on the future, director Joe Robert Cole says, begins with knowing the time period: “Once the date is set, then you start to take a look at technology and extrapolate out from where we are to how far things could have gone. You’re starting to calibrate things, where you don’t want to go too far. A lot of conversations about what technology would be in use and how would it be in use and, and what would things look like and how things might change and how things might stay the same.”
Class of ’09 (FX)
For the future sequences, adds producer Jessica Levin, “The guiding design approach was to always to keep it very grounded and not to be a huge distraction, just because it was really important to keep it focused on our characters and story and that kind of plausibility.”
The focus on AI, says Tom Rob Smith, “is at the heart of the piece, which is that over time things are changing. When we were making [the show], we were thinking this is a really interesting idea, but we didn’t quite realize that it could happen now. So even pulling it closer to us, we we were still pushing it away, when this technology is now everywhere.”
In later episodes, the show depicts the FBI’s future AI system, which drew direct inspiration from ChatGPT and other AI programs. “The advancement is extraordinary and we’re lucky to be on that wave, because I think people are now really engaged with it — intellectually and emotionally as well,” Tom Rob Smith says.
Mara says that the actors received the first three or four scripts first, without knowing what would be coming in the second half of the season. “Because we’re obviously playing ourselves in the past, present, and future, a lot of the puzzle pieces are there for us to guess what’s happening — or get little snippets of what might happen in in future episodes as well.”
Says Brian J. Smith, “It’s always so great when you finally get to go back and watch the episodes. I knew while we were filming that they were being very meticulous about the way they lit it, about the way they shot it — it felt like there was extraordinary care being put into the visual language of this show. And so to go back and watch it and to see how gorgeous it looks and what a vibe it has… It looks like itself, it doesn’t look like anything else I’ve seen. That’s really cool.”
As with other limited series released recently, there is potential for another installment — “Class of ’10?” is Tom Rob Smith’s immediate response to the idea, before tackling the complications of it. “Because the premise [of Class of ’09] is very much that you’re following this group of people through their lives, it would be very hard, impossible, to continue with this cast. You couldn’t do the Bureau again. So in some ways it really is limited. But you could use the shape of the story to tell a different institution’s story — so if people love it and they’re clamoring, we’ll do Class of ’10 in the CIA or something.”
The first two episodes of Class of ’09 are streaming now on Hulu. New episodes will premiere weekly on Wednesdays.
AI, the FBI, and Kate Mara’s Bionic Eye: Class of ’09 Creator and Cast on FX’s Captivating New Thriller
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