Swarm’s Creator and Star on Embracing the “Strange” for a Dark Tale of Musical Obsession

The post Swarm’s Creator and Star on Embracing the “Strange” for a Dark Tale of Musical Obsession appeared first on Consequence.

When does fandom become too much? That’s the question at the center of Swarm, the new Prime Video series about a young fan whose love for a global superstar leads to a murder spree. Created by Janine Nabers and Donald Glover, Swarm begins with the broke Dre (Dominique Fishback) getting tickets to see her favorite artist Ni’Jah perform on her upcoming tour — by the end of the limited series, an impressive number of bodies has piled up as Dre gets her revenge against anyone who might slam Ni’Jah on social media.

Fishback tells Consequence that her casting was ironic, “because I don’t know that I’ve ever been a super-fan except for when I was a kid, when I loved Aaliyah and Michael Jackson. And still, even then I didn’t have the capacity, for some reason, to think that I could actually see Michael in concert. I never asked my mom for concert tickets to see the people that I loved. I had B2K on my wall, just like any other teenager. But otherwise, I didn’t really have that experience.”

While there are plenty of adults who engage in intense fandom, Fishback notes that “for Dre, even though she’s an adult, I think she’s still very much a kid, and that’s why her obsession is the way it might be.”

Nabers, a playwright who previously worked on shows including Dietland, Watchmen, and Atlanta, says that the idea for Swarm came about while she was working on Atlanta Season 4. “Donald called me and said, ‘Hey, I have this crazy idea about a Black woman fan that’s obsessed with a popstar,'” she says. “We sat down with each other over the course of six months and really hammered out this story over the course of two and a half years of this woman’s life, giving the pilot her origin story, the beginning of her journey. By the end of the pilot, she is changed, she is now set on some journey. That is our story. A very, very complete, beginning, middle, and end.”

The story of Swarm takes its inspiration from real-life events, including the rumored death by suicide of a Beyonce fan (which has been debunked). “We are really happy that we’re really able to kind of figure out the story in a real way, in terms of just these two and a half years of this woman’s life. A lot of research went into it. We’re really, really proud of it. We’re just really excited for people to watch episodes and Google and see the truth behind it,” Nabers says.

There wasn’t an initial true story used as inspiration, though. Instead, Nabers says, “The idea was, ‘Oh, let’s talk about fandom. And let’s find facts that kind of support our theory — is this a story to tell for TV?’ And we did. And that’s what that is.”

While the musical artist Ni’jah is not a real person, her music does exist, as featured in the series: Composer/producer Michael Uzowuru (Guava Island, Becoming), in addition to providing the score for the series, produced original songs alongside Childish Gambino (Glover), with KIRBY providing the singing voice of Ni’jah. (The track “Sticky” is in fact Consequence‘s Song of the Week.)

“Ni’Jah is supposed to represent a feeling of who is the most iconic Black woman representing our culture today in music, who really has a footprint on the internet and really has a footprint just on just social media in general,” Nabers says. “I think just finding a way to emulate that without seeing her face, but hearing this really cool original music, was the goal. I think that we nailed it — obviously, people can project whoever they want onto Ni’Jah, but Ni’Jah is a feeling and is a familiar entity in our universe.”

Prior to getting the role, Fishback says she wasn’t told anything about the project in question. Instead, she says, “They told me that Donald wanted me for a role, and they said, just watch this movie, it’s called The Piano Teacher.”

Watching the 2001 Michael Haneke drama, about the titular piano teacher (Isabelle Huppert) who begins a sadomasochistic relationship with a student, Fishback observed that “it’s really about her eyes. She’s not really using dialogue, it’s really about storytelling through her body and her face. I was like, ‘Okay, cool. I want to do something like that.’ And then it just took a completely different turn than I ever expected. It freaked me out and it made me say, I don’t know if I’m that brave of an actor, and I thought I was a brave actor. It really made me question what that meant.”

Then, Fishback took the meeting with the producers, who began explaining the show, including the fact that they wanted her to play the role of Marissa, the best friend of the main character who meets a sad end in the first episode. “Then I read the script,” Fishback says, “and I was like, listen, I want to play Dre.”

She says that “Donald said that the reason why he thought of Marissa [for me] was because Marissa has a very friendly energy and a warm aura and is popular. But it wasn’t because he thought I couldn’t do Dre. In fact, he said, ‘If that’s the role you want, that’s the role you get.’ So I didn’t have to audition for it. He gave it to me. That was a pretty cool moment.”

Swarm (Prime Video)

The show’s unique tone, Fishback says, is “a testament to Janine and Donald. There were moments where I was confused. I was like, I don’t know what the tone is, what it’s supposed to be. And I had to just trust the process and trust myself as an artist. The one thing that I can do is just be grounded in the present moment of her objectives, and what she really cares about. Everything else is out of my control, just like they’re out of her control. I focused on being grounded in her truth. In her values.”

When being directed by Glover during the pilot, Fishback says that she began doing “just whatever came to my mind and I’d see how Donald responded. Sometimes he’d be like, ‘Oh, that was strange. I like it.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh cool.’ Like, you know, I just try. There was one moment in the pilot where she’s laying on the couch and she’s crying and they’re removing all of the furniture and then it gets to the point where they want her to get off the couch so they can take it. And in one take I decided to just roll my body right off the couch, and everyone just busted out laughing. That wasn’t the take they chose, because that was a different tone. But I gave them options. That’s all you can do,” she laughs.

Swarm in many ways feels similar to Atlanta, which Nabers understands: “Atlanta came out before people were really, really shooting a lot in Atlanta,” she says. “I definitely think when you bring like 90 percent of the team that created Atlanta onto another project, you’re going to see a little bit of those kinds of similarities. I think a lot of people in L.A. [beforehand] probably didn’t know much about Atlanta, and just the culture of the Blackness there. So [Swarm] was like that in a lot of ways but for Houston.”

When it comes to her own personal relationship with fandom, Nabers says that “I’m a dark-skinned Black woman from Houston. There aren’t a lot of women that look like me in the world, in the sense of music and even TV, right?”

But, she adds, fandom and fame means something very different to her collaborators (including not just Glover, but staff writer Malia Obama). “Working with someone like Donald, who is a megastar in his own right, and seeing how fans react to him out in the world, is really enlightening. To be able to write a show like this with someone like that, and having high-profile people that are on the show or writing on the show, people who have their own kind of following… There are a lot of multi-hyphenates on this show, a lot of people that have their legs in many different buckets. I learned a lot about myself, writing this show, and I think Donald learned a lot about himself, being behind the scenes of this show, as someone who has his own kind of swarm around him at times.”

What did she feel she had learned? “I think I learned that there are a lot of stories that haven’t been told yet. Just thinking outside of the box, taking something that seems so obvious to people — someone obsessed with a woman — and turning that into an art house event, which is what we did. All the episodes are shot on film and we’re really proud of that. I think the look of the show is really unique. I think it helps aid in the realness of the events we’re portraying.”

No matter how Swarm might be received, for Nabers there’s no question of a second season for the series: “This is one full story. This is one and done. This is the story of Andrea Green. And that is what it is. I think if you look at Atlanta and how that worked, I think I’m of the mindset of Donald, you know, don’t mess up a good thing. I think we set out to tell the story, it has a definite ending, and we are sticking by that ending. And we’re really proud of it.”

Fishback also feels the same way. “Whatever’s supposed to be is supposed to be,” she says. “If I only ever write one poetry book and it’s really, really great, or if I only write one one-woman show and it’s really, really great, then that’s okay. So if I only ever did one sci-fi/thriller/horror thing, I’m glad it’s this.”

Swarm is streaming now on Prime Video.

Swarm’s Creator and Star on Embracing the “Strange” for a Dark Tale of Musical Obsession
Liz Shannon Miller

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