Currently airing on Sundays at 9pm on Showtime is their latest drama series CITY ON A HILL, starring Golden Globe winner and Emmy nominee Kevin Bacon (The Following) and Screen Actors Guild award winner Aldis Hodge (Underground).
Created by Chuck MacLean (Boston Strangler) and based on an original idea by Academy Award winner Ben Affleck. In the early 1990s, Boston was rife with violent criminals emboldened by local law enforcement agencies in which corruption and racism was the norm – and then it all changed in what was called the “Boston Miracle.” In this fictional account, driving that change is assistant district attorney Decourcy Ward (Hodge), who comes from Brooklyn and forms an unlikely alliance with a corrupt yet venerated FBI veteran, Jackie Rhodes (Bacon). Together, they take on a family of armored car robbers from Charlestown in a case that grows to involve, and ultimately subvert, the entire criminal justice system of Boston.
CITY ON A HILL also stars Jonathan Tucker, Mark O’Brien, Jill Hennessy, Lauren E. Banks, Amanda Clayton, Kevin Chapman and Tony Award nominee Jere Shea, with Kevin Dunn recurring.
For Banks, who plays Siobhan Quays, the love interest of Decourcy, this is her first big role since graduating with an MFA from the Yale Drama School. Her recent credits included recurring roles in Maniac, opposite Justin Theroux and on Dietland, opposite Julianna Margulies.
Blackfilm.com had the opportunity to speak with Banks about landing the role, and working the cast of the series.
What was it that attracted you to doing this and how was the process of getting the role?
Lauren E. Banks: I was in LA. I was living in New York at the time and I was in LA for meetings in December of 2017. I graduated from Yale School of Drama in May of that year. I got an agent here. I hadn’t spent enough time in LA as I wanted to do as much as I wanted to, and I knew pilot season was coming up. So I reached out to them and let them know that I would like to take meetings for about a week when I can so that I when I submitted for pilot season, the casting directors wouldn’t be surprised or wouldn’t be unfamiliar with my name and my work. So that happened, and in the midst of that week, after a meeting with Showtime, I received this audition from my agent, and it was a jam packed weekend. It was the last day of my visit, but I told them when the audition came in, I was very much interested in auditioning, and it was the only audition of the week and that everything else were just general meetings.
I changed in the car on the way there and I worked on my lines the night before. Needless to say, the audition went very well. I got back to New York from the redeye. I woke up around noon, and had a million missed calls from my agent about testing for the part. I think the day or two later, I was told that they will use my audition tape against the other woman that was testing for it. Then two days later I was in Boston shooting the pilot.
How would you best describe your character?
Lauren E. Banks: Siobhan’s a young professional. She’s an attorney, she’s very ambitious, has a lot of hope for what’s possible and idealistic as well and sometimes, her detriment leads to dealing with the political and current landscape that exists in Boston. I think Siobhan has a lot of skill set because she literally has all the tools to get the job done, but she hasn’t had as much experience, especially working with some of the people in the crooked infrastructure that Boston has to maneuver and that is difficulty for her. But she is brave, and courageous. I am excited for her because you get to see our journey throughout the first season. I think the more she goes the more powerful dynamic of a person she will become.
From the episodes that I’ve seen, there seems to be a lot of emotional conflict within your character between a sense of duty to a husband and a sense of duty to her job. Is that the way it’s going to play out throughout the season?
Lauren E. Banks: Yes. Siobhan’s father passed on early in her life. Her mother raised her for the most part, and her mother remarried to her stepfather, who is Caucasian. I think she is in a place where she fell in love with Decourcy because they went to school together. Both my father raised me and my mother raised me as individuals and I had gone back and forth every week between them. I had to witness them be individuals and I think that’s important to Siobhan’s journey and witnessing that and yet she has this love for her father as well; and I think she sees a lot of what her father would have been in Decourcy.
I think she wants to have her own identity and individuality and yet have this partnership with Decourcy. I think a large part of that is her belief that it’s possible to be individuals and be partners, and and she’s doing something that she didn’t get to witness growing up. She’s determined to make both work. They have a lot of difficulty in and around that. But I do think there’s a lot of hope.
Can you talk about chemistry between you and Aldis, and how do you work at making on screen? Being that this is your first series, we have to believe that this couple is happily married. How’s working along with Aldis on the set on the series?
Lauren E. Banks: Working with Aldis is pretty awesome. We met at the first table read and as I had mentioned earlier everything went really quickly in the casting process and in getting together, we had some catching up to do because apparently our characters had been married a couple years a few years. So we had to connect quickly.
Aldis is extremely generous as a scene partner. He is young as well, but he’s been doing this for quite some time. He couldn’t have been more supportive of me in the process of this being the first time for me. We have conversations, on and off screen about the work, and we read scripts and immediately hop on the phone to discuss our relationship, and now we’re navigating this and now we’re building together. So there’s a partnership as actors off screen. And I think translates for the trust that we have for each other for the work.
What about the rest of the cast?
Lauren E. Banks: It’s definitely an ensemble cast, and I think a lot of that is thanks to our show creator Chuck MacLean and Tom Fantana and making sure that all the characters are balanced, and that we get to show how multifaceted Boston was and still is. Sometimes we see shows about Boston, and we only see one perspective, we only see the crime violence, we only see a certain type of person perpetuating that. But in the midst of ensemble, we can see and all the faces of Boston from the different neighborhoods of Boston. I don’t think there’s the type of person that we don’t explore or a character that we don’t explore within our show, and like I get to do a couple scenes with Kevin Bacon, and he’s just like a consummate professional in that regard.
He’s on all the time, from the beginning to end, and getting to work with him, you come to the set and you have to be ready because he’s so prepared and I say that for everyone else, even the people that don’t get to work with but who I see. I’m literally surrounded by veteran actors in this business, people have been doing it for a very long time. From the writers room to the cast, to the directors that show up, they’re pretty phenomenal.
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