How Tamara Lawrance found her voice on The Silent Twins and the fiery crime noir series Get Millie Black

EXCLUSIVE: Silence was golden for Tamara Lawrance, who was paired with Wakanda forever Enter Letitia Wright the silent twin, won the Best Joint Lead Actor trophy at the recent BIFA Awards.

In the picture by director Agnieszka Smoczyńska, they portray the inseparable twins Jennifer and June Gibbons, who were born in 1963 to Barbadian parents.

It’s a contrast to a TV drama in which Lawrence stars next year, in which she plays a character who has more than enough to say. She refers to the title role in the Channel 4 and HBO prestige series of six episodes Buy Millie BlackA crime noir thriller set in Kingston, Jamaica and the United Kingdom and created by author Marlon James, whose novel A brief history of seven murders won him the Man Booker Prize in 2015.

“The storytelling is great,” says Lawrance Buy Millie Black. She plays a belligerent (as she puts it) ex-Scotland Yard detective who is back in Jamaica working for the local police on a missing persons case. Well”.

The silent twin also takes us on an unexpected journey. “People say to me, ‘Oh yeah, I knew that story, but I didn’t know that know this story. We have a different perspective that defies their portrayal in the media, which hopefully allows us to dissect some real truths about the criminal justice system and also empathize with people we’ve previously vilified and ostracized,” says Lawrance, who Jennifer play.

“I think the expectation was that the film would be more like a thriller, but it has a lot of different genres,” says Lawrance, explaining that some scenes have fantastic animation inspired by the sisters’ puppets, illustrations and text produced .

The film is about the harsh price the brothers and sisters paid to envelop themselves in their own impregnable world. Health and education authorities in rural Pembrokeshire, Wales, where they grew up, could not understand the psychological environment in which the Gibbins girls were trapped. Lawrence says it is a “sad reality” that they would have been better looked after if they came from a middle-class white family background.

They were engaged in “medical apartheid,” she argues, citing examples from peer-reviewed studies in which black children are considered “adults” and young black girls are “oversexualized or very angry.”

The twins started dating other teenagers “to make them feel like part of society, to integrate and assimilate wherever they could,” says Lawrance, but by the time they were 18, they were at a became involved in a series of petty crimes and were severely punished. They spent 11 years in Broadmoor, a maximum security hospital, where they were pumped full of inappropriate drugs. “They were the youngest people ever to go there,” Lawrance said, his voice rising with anger.

She says the girls’ parents believed they were under the umbrella of the British Commonwealth and that “England as motherland and the Queen as head of state” would protect their daughters.

The parents, she says, suffered from a kind of “internalized white supremacy” in which they bowed to the knowledge of white members of their community, including the twins’ school.

She continues: “Obviously you live in the heart of rural Wales, you’re the only black family and you don’t want to cause trouble. It’s a kind of deferential attitude towards white authority that might make some of the decisions made for the girls are taken can affect. Ultimately, I think her parents meant very well and did the best they could,” she explains.

Along with co-star Wright, it’s Lawrance who best expresses the depths of despair behind her character’s eyes. Maybe it’s because Jennifer seems to be the stronger of the two and has to fall the farthest.

The film’s hair and makeup teams created eerily identical looks for Lawrance and Wright. “We had many resources around us that helped create the shared identities,” she says. The research included the engaging non-fiction book The silent twin by the advocacy for mental health journalist Marjorie Wallace and Silent Twin – Without my shadow was filmed in 1994 by documentary filmmaker Olivia Lichtenstein for the BBC Inquiry Inside the story documentary thread.

“We had a great dialect coach who worked on decoding the accent from the BBC documentary and then created a sort of database of different phrases and cadences so we had a commonality in the way we spoke. And then we had an amazing movement coach who also worked with the younger twins in the film, who showed us their movements and synchronized them so that we had that kind of shared body and shared language,” Lawrance said on ‘ Remember a Zoom call.

“We had to create a sense of unity by moving slowly or using what June and Jennifer called ‘eye language’ to look at each other and make sure we were doing the same thing at the same time.”

The power of art also played a role. Costume designers Cobbie Yates and Katarzyna Lewinska found connections in London and other sources through 42, the British management and production company that created and directed the film with the Polish Madants. These and other relationships made it possible for Yates to have twin pieces custom made.

“The visual tone of the play allowed us to co-exist… and helped us create twins where there obviously aren’t any because we are two different people and we look very different,” she laughs. “But I think the film gives you creative freedom, and in the end you buy it and lose the disbelief, even if Letitia and I wouldn’t come off the street as twins.”

Focus Features has taken over film distribution in the US and Universal Pictures will release in the UK this month

Lawrance has shape-shifting twins. Six years ago she was a passionate viola player in director Simon Godwin’s acclaimed 2017 production of Shakespeare at the National Theater Twelfth Night. Daniel Ezra (All Americans) played Sebastian, her sibling. It is available on National Theater Live.

Lawrance studied at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and has returned to the stage many times since graduating. However, she has acted in several television dramas, among others secret, No offense, The Long Song Small Ax, Invasion and movies tied together and Second day of Christmas.

Bring back Millie took her to Kingston, Jamaica. For Lawrance, whose parents are from the island, it was like a homecoming. She hasn’t visited him since childhood. She shot there from early May to mid-September, although she calls it “the hardest job I’ve ever done”, it was also “an incredible experience”.

She explains: “I was able to get to know this place that I had so romanticized in my mind and where I had always loved to go. And I wanted to understand a little more about myself – and where I came from. I was so in love with Jamaica and the people and learned a lot…it increased my desire to connect more with my heritage.

She adds the production is full of “new people and new energy, and I think it presents Jamaica in a way that has never been seen before on international television.”

Lawrance describes Millie Black as “a very impressive person, very brave. I would say she’s traumatized in a sense that she might need therapy or some sort of place to process some of her experiences.”

Sometimes, she says, Millie can cause collateral damage “and cause more damage than she intends” because “she’s definitely very flawed and can be a little self-centered at times, but ultimately I think she’s driven by justice and ‘ a desire to serve.” doing things right “right”.

She chooses her words carefully and tries not to give too much away about a drama that won’t hit our screens until later in 2023. Channel 4 and HBO have not announced any dates.

Lawrence likes that Millie Black is “amazing, a true leader and very self-sufficient,” but wishes she had asked for help more often than she did.

She hopes that “as the series progresses, people will understand that due to her upbringing, Millie is so used to doing things on her own that she has taught herself not to ask for help… but that’s what she needs.” and that’s what she wants. For example, she wants community, support and love, like we all do. And I hope again that there is a humanity, especially when racial black women are like that… it’s so easy for us to write off as if your anger is only internally motivated.

Lawrance says she sympathizes with Millie, “but I don’t agree with everything she does. I understand where she’s coming from and know that she’s living her pain and just needs time to heal, but she hasn’t been given the space to heal because she’s had to be strong her whole life.”

Bring back Millie is commissioned by Caroline Hollick, Head of Drama at Channel 4 and Francesca Orsi, Executive Vice President of Films and HBO Programming. The series is produced by Motive Pictures.

The cast includes Joe Dempsey (game of thrones), Gershwyn Eustache Jr. (A spy among friends, Andor), Nestor Aaron Absera ( Road Trip: Beer Pong) and newcomer Chyna McQueen. Lawrance calls them a “big” ensemble.

She praises Marlon James for “the poignant dialogue, the humor, the complexity of the character” and for writing a screenplay that unfolds like “blooming flowers”.

In a tale of two opposing roles, one thing is certain: Lawrence’s film career is thriving.