“It was very important to Fifty [Cent] and Courtney and me that we didn’t bring someone on who was just going to do an imitation of 50 Cent, who was just going to do an imitation of Kanan,” explained Sascha Penn, Creator, Showrunner, and Executive Producer of Power Book III: Raising Kanan. Season 2 of the STARZ Original premiered today and the cast and creator recently sat down for a TCA press conference about the new batch of 10 episodes. “One of the things I'd say about MeKai and Patina and frankly everyone on this show is that they have taken all these roles, and they've elevated them, and they've given them a complexity that, frankly, wasn't necessarily on the page. For a writer, a showrunner, creator, that's the massive win. Those are the moments where you are like, wow, this thing has taken on a life of its own.”
(STARZ)
MeKai Curtis may have avoided imitating Fifty Cent’s performance from the original Power Book, but he still had to do his homework. “It was just understanding the work he had done,” MeKai explained. “So that was going back and watching film that he had done on the show and pulling apart this super-layered, extremely interesting character that he had put so much work into and just this power, yet this innocence that he carried and trying to deconstruct that and trying to reverse engineer that on Raising Kanan. Going back to that innocence that he's always carrying, you see that in his relationship with his mother… the overall mind space of this mother and son relationship and how that constant back and forth with this young man trying to come into himself while his mother's also doing the maternal thing and wanting to protect him in all ways possible, and that constant back and forth. Those are the conversations that happened and what went into building the character to where he is now.”
Kanan’s name may be in the title, but the foundation of the show is his mother, Raquel “Raq” Thomas. “She's a single mother,” actress Patina Miller said about her approach to the character. “That is, for me, how I connected to the piece. Finding her strength in being the matriarch of a family because, at the end of the day, it’s a family drama that has elements of crime and elements of all of those different things, and what you’re seeing is this strong woman who wants so desperately to make something for herself. Nobody’s going to give it to her. If she could have been the CEO of a business she would have been, but these are the cards that have been dealt, and she’s choosing to play the game her way, and she’s also raising the son, and she’s trying to leave him a legacy, and she’s also trying to get him to not to make the same mistakes but, along the way, these things happen. I think for me when I get into it with it it’s sort of finding that strength in Raq but also the vulnerability in her and she has this unwavering strength that she’s not afraid to be in a room with any of these people and she holds strong to her power.”
“He literally is Raq's mirror, in a way,” MeKai Curtis added about the strong connection between the mother and son. “You see everything that she's taught him in the way he moves, the way he observes things, the way he takes information from everything that's around him and builds his own way to the top. You absolutely see the strength that Raq has exhibited from day one throughout him.”
“As a writer, what’s exciting for me is that now I know Patina and MeKai in a professional and a personal level, and it’s like I’ve seen the depth of their talent and also the depth of their emotions,” Sascha Penn said of the opportunities afforded in Season 2 and beyond, with Season 3 already in development. “We’re so fortunate and so grateful to both STARZ and Lionsgate for letting us tell these stories and for allowing us to come back for a season three which, obviously, we’re tremendously excited about. What we constantly do is expand the world. That’s what we’re doing, and that allows us to tell more stories and tell different ones, and I feel like that’s always been the mandate here, and that’s what we’ll continue to do.”
Season 2 of Power Book III: Raising Kanan is now streaming on STARZ.