FX’s Adaptation of Octavia Butler’s ‘Kindred’ Has Wrapped Shooting

When FX acquired the rights to SciFi heavyweight Octavia Butler’s Kindred, it became the first of her works to get the live action treatment.

Although hugely influential, few non SciFi fans know her name, but among those who know, they know. Published in 1979, Butler became the first Black woman in the genre.

The Hollywood Reporter: FX’s take on Kindred centers on Dana, a young Black woman and aspiring writer who has left her life of familial obligation and moved to Los Angeles. But before she can get settled into her new home, she finds herself being violently pulled back and forth in time to a 19th century plantation with which she and her family are most surprisingly and intimately linked. An interracial romance threads through her past and present, and the clock is ticking as she struggles to confront the secrets she never knew ran through her blood. “Since my first encounter with the novel nearly two decades ago, there have been few, if any, books and even fewer authors who have meant as much to me as Kindred and Octavia Butler,” said producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. “It has been the highlight and honor of my career thus far to try and finally bring this timeless story to life — and especially at FX, whose catalogue of bold, thought-provoking, and cutting-edge television has been an endless source of inspiration and delight.”

Vanity Fair: It’s a tremendous amount of interpretation by an impressive slate of Black talent, a gift that seems to have fallen from the heavens. [Speaking to] producers Jacobs-Jenkins and Courtney Lee-Mitchellon the day they wrapped the pilot episode shoot for Kindred, and they were in high spirits. “As more information [about the pilot] is rolled out to the public, the response has been so encouraging and affirming,” Jacobs-Jenkins says. “It’s been a long time coming, we’ve been developing this for a long time, but I feel very happy to be where we are. It’s kind of a miracle.”

Above: Janicza Bravo, Mallori Johnson

Even before news of these adaptations, Butlermania was on the rise with graphic novel interpretations and multiple in-depth podcasts. (In March, a NASA Mars landing site was named after her.) Lee-Mitchell believes the 2016 election of Donald Trump spiked interest in Butler’s work: “So many of [her books] seem to be very prescient about the circumstances around him. I think people just started talking about her in those terms. Then people who hadn’t heard of her started reading her books.”

All the producers and writers wish that Butler were here to see her vision embraced so enthusiastically by so many. “She would constantly update her literary biography to give to publishers or people,” George says. “And there’s that great line, which I’m sure you’ve run across: ‘I’m a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles.’ I love it because it is tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also true about her. She knew there were times she had to self-isolate because she was working or thinking. She was an introvert, so she would get, as she said, ‘peopled out.’ ”

Butler’s introversion seems to have given her a meaningful perspective on togetherness, beyond political sloganeering. “I think she could kind of bore into that feeling of what would it be like to float?,” says George. “So when she creates these communities, like the Earthseed [in the Parable series], this ragtag group of people coming together because they have to find their humanity—I think that’s her wish for us.”