“Black Bird” premieres July 8 on Apple TV+.
The six-episode drama, adapted from James Keene’s 2010 book, “In With The Devil,” revolves around Keene (Taron Egerton, “Rocket Man”), a charismatic, armed-to-the-teeth Chicago drug dealer and son of an ex-cop (Ray Liotta in his final role) who, in 1996, is busted and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Shortly thereafter, he’s offered a deal: transfer to a maximum-security prison in Missouri and befriend high-talking, mutton-chopped serial killer Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser, “Richard Jewell”). If he can elicit a confession from the next-level-creepy Hall, who’s suspected in the murders of at least 14 young girls, Keene’s sentence will be commuted. If not, he’ll serve out the rest of his time.
Greg Kinnear and Sepideh Moafi co-star as Brian Miller and FBI agent Lauren McCauley, the investigators who put Hall away — and are now revisiting his case for more evidence when he wins an appeal that could set him free … to kill again.
“Black Bird” executive producer, writer and showrunner Dennis Lehane (“The Wire,” “Mr. Mercedes”) spoke to The Post about the series and about working with Liotta, who passed away suddenly on May 26 at the age of 67.
What was it about Jimmy Keene’s story that you found compelling?
There were a few things. One, I have no interest in serial killer mythology — it bores me and annoys me, sometimes. I wasn’t trying to make Larry Hall some sort of pop-culture icon. If you look at the story, there are poles of masculinity, the most positive being, without a doubt, Greg Kinnear’s character, Brian Miller. That, to me, is the male we should all aspire to become … he’s practical, dogged, he follows the path where it goes and doesn’t have a preconceived narrative, and that’s why he caught Larry Hall. On the most toxic end of the male spectrum, you’ve got a serial killer, and the question to me became, where does everybody else fall if Miller is the shining knight and Hall is the ogre in the cave? And that became a question I tried to ask for Jimmy in his journey.
Larry Hall is very intriguing, though, with a lot of subtle psychological shading.
Without a doubt. I held two separate ideas in my hand at the same time. One, Larry Hall is categorically a monster — he is irredeemable, end of story. On the flip side of that, however, he’s a human monster; he’s not an “other,” not an alien, and I wanted to investigate that. Jimmy goes in and he thinks, “Oh, this is gonna be a walk in the park, I’m gonna buddy up to a psycho and it’s gonna be cut and dry.” What he doesn’t realize is that he starts to like the guy, not always, but every now and then, and that’s really confusing. I have little kids and I spend a lot of time dealing with this concept with their social politics at school. The hardest thing as a human is not only to accept that there’s bad in good people but that there’s good in bad people … and that’s extremely confusing. So there’s some good in Larry Hall, there’s that Civil War [re-enactor] stuff, you’d want him to work on your car, he can occasionally be funny — and yet he’s a monster.
What was it like to work with Ray Liotta?
It was a dream come true. I wrote the part for him and he jumped at it. He’s always been one of my favorite actors and I consider him one of the most underutilized actors out there. He had so much range … This is a guy who did “Field of Dreams,” “Something Wild,” he played Johnny Depp’s father in “Blow,” “Goodfellas.” We’d never met, and when he came on set Ray was there to work, which I love. He wasn’t there to party, to get to know anybody, and we completely hit it off on that level. Having said all that, he wasn’t a touchy-feely, huggy guy, but the first thing he did when he saw Taron was he walked up and hugged him and that established the father/son relationship right there. He was an absolute joy; we had plans from that point on that he was going to be in everything with me. The last conversation we had was three weeks before he died and he was such an actor, he was like, “Am I in the next thing?” and I was like, “Of course you’re in the next thing” and he said, “Make it a big part this time!”
One thing you couldn’t do with Ray was you couldn’t lie to him. If he asked you a question and you gave him a weak answer you were in trouble, put it that way. One of the best exchanges I had with him, he was like, “Dennis, why would you write this?” and I was like, “Well, it was nine months ago, Ray, I don’t f—king know” and he was like, “Fair enough” and on we went.