- How would you like to
never pay rent again?
- Where did you get the money
to buy yourself a house?
- Episode three sort of takes it.
It's a little bit more
of like a horror episode,
I mean, the whole thing
is, everything's scary.
The whole show is, it's scary
on a number of different levels.
How was Holy Ghost sort
of explained to you?
- Initially we spoke about this feeling
of displacement that Leti suffers from,
you know, what James Baldwin talks about
when he says about the great
shock that as a black American,
you come to when you
realize, your birthplace,
this place that you owe your identity to,
it hasn't actually
evolved a space for you.
And so having come from
this death and this
desire to be reborn, Leti,
she's trying to create a
space for herself, right?
And she so desperately wants the people
in her life to see her as a new person.
And so I think, you know,
she's in this pattern
of sabotaging relationships in her life
because she's such a wanderer,
she's such a drifter.
You know, she was a parentified child
and she inherited this lineage of trauma.
And when you are habitually abandoned,
like she was by her mother,
you seek this healing,
you seek to rectify the
situation, you seek security.
And wanting to pioneer into
an all white neighborhood,
she wants to create a space of her own.
And she wants to build her tribe.
That's why she moves her artist
friends in and her sister in
and we see that through
the exorcism, it's really,
what Misha and I realized after,
she walked up to me and she said, oh,
after we did the scene, she said,
this is really, Leti needs to
exorcize herself, actually.
And that's the rebirth, right?
That she so desperately is in search of.
- Move to the North side. It's nice.
- If history is any indication,
you won't last very long.
- We know that there's some shit going on
with Leti and Ruby, like
we've seen the money issues,
but like, what is the other
subtext of their relationship?
Like, where is the other,
I mean, they're half sisters,
where is the sort of
disconnect happen with them?
Is it just Leti, just
like abusing her trust?
- No, it's not.
You know, a lot of the issues stem
from that mother daughter
split that they share.
Ruby has been left with the burden
of being responsible, of holding it down,
taking care of her mother
when her mother was sick
and being there and
there's that resentment
that they have towards each other.
I resent Ruby because she
actually had a relationship
with our mother, as flawed as it was.
She resents me because she was left
to deal with the shit from Eloise, right?
And so while there's this real bond,
as siblings, you're
soulmates with each other,
but that person also
represents and triggers
the very thing that you
hate most about your life.
And so that's why they have
that clash with each other.
It's the battle of the love and the hate
that all stems from them
trying to heal the split
that they have from their mother.
With Leti, she just so
desperately wants to be seen
as a new version of herself.
Like I am not fucking up anymore.
I joined this bloody movement,
like I am making all
these choices to improve,
to actually help out our community.
You know, can't you see
me for who I am now?
And we know like, family will always think
of you as the five year old that you were,
or as the 14 year old, who fucked up,
or as the young 20 year
old who screwed up.
Part of that is so frustrating for Leti
because her sister won't see her,
won't see the efforts,
her efforts to change,
her efforts to become a better person,
to become less selfish.
And it's just maddening.
- Yeah, she's putting out a good front.
She looks great all the time.
She has cool friends,
but like, that's not
really what's going on.
- No, she's quite wounded
and she's quite broken.
And really that's just her armor.
When Misha and I were
first talking about Leti,
one of the things that we were talking
about was this idea of dignity.
And in an era when the erasure
of black folks was so prevalent,
Leti is going to try her
damnedest to look good
because it's the dignity
that she is trying
to not be robbed of, right?
You won't erase me.
I never met my grandmother,
but I grew up hearing stories
from my mom, aunt,
uncles, about this woman.
She was the first black Miss Galveston
and she raised four
children as a single woman,
cleaning homes for white folks.
She would go to work every single morning,
regardless of how they mistreated her,
neglected her, underpaid her, abused her.
She would go to work
with her dress pressed
and her hair and makeup done,
and damn it, she was gonna
look good cleaning their homes
because she didn't want them
to rob her of her dignity.
It was a very radical act.
And that's where her rebellion.
That's where the rebellion of
Leti is expressed outwardly
is, you know, damn it,
you're going to see me.
You won't erase me.
(suspenseful music)
- Here we go.
