american gods
Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is now the ultimate TV road trip. Stephen Kelly hitches a ride with showrunner Bryan Fuller
“I’ve been a fan of American Gods for 15 years”
Follow only the highways of America, trace its arteries from city to city, and chances are you’ll never encounter anything quite like Jack’s Crocodile Bar: the novelty haunt of leprechauns and gods, the dive whose centrepiece – among crocodile stools, crocodile tables, and a huge, Hook-style crocodile statue – is a bar in the shape of a crocodile’s jaw; glowing teeth and all. It’s strange. It’s quirky. It’s the apex of back-road Americana; the buried quirks of long-forgotten towns. And that, of course, is the point.
First published in 2001, American Gods was written around America’s back-roads; the idiosyncrasies of the American experience that author Neil Gaiman, an immigrant from England, had long found himself fascinated with. “I was living in a huge strange country that resembled the America I’d encountered in books and in films so much less than I had expected,” he once said. “The place was filled with oddness and, it seemed to me, with the kind of hubris that gets authors into trouble, that I thought I ought to point out to Americans how very odd it actually was.”
He wrote a study of faith; of mythology; of a world where the things we worship manifest themselves as gods — meaning the gods of old (Thor, Odin) are dying out in favour of the new (technology, celebrity). But above all, he wrote about America as a bizarre amalgamation of people; one culture made up of many; of immigrants and the gods they bring with them.
It was relevant as a book in 2001. It’s even more relevant as a TV show in 2017.
Long, unwieldy, weird: American Gods is a notoriously difficult book to adapt for screen. Just ask HBO, who bought the rights to the story in 2011, and then let them go years later, having exhausted three different writers. They were then picked up by production company Fremantle Media, who began to develop the idea for Starz.
“When we bought the rights,” says executive producer Craig Cegielski, co-CEO of Fremantle Media, “we set about trying to find the right showrunners and often their approach was literally ‘chapter one will be episode one, chapter two will be episode two’. A really straight-forward approach. And I said, ‘We need a magical thinker, because that’s the world in which Neil lives. We need someone like the guy who did
Pushing Daises and Hannibal. We need Bryan Fuller’.”
Bryan Fuller got the call midway through filming Hannibal season two, a show which he (wrongly) did not anticipate to be commissioned for a season three.
“Our ratings were not great,” he laughs, “so I thought this would be an ideal palate cleanser. I’ve been a fan of American Gods for 15 years and, on the last day of shooting, Neil flew up from New York to have a conversation about what the book meant to me. We talked a lot about the immigration experience and how there was one interpretation of this story that could take it into something like the Marvel universe, and give these gods superhuman powers, and make it a superhero story. But that felt less interesting than the more human, relatable tale of ‘what is it to go to a place where you don’t belong and try to find belonging?’ And that felt like a powerful story because all of these gods who are migrating to America are doing so on the backs of their worshippers who eventually die out, leaving them to fend for themselves. And that felt human while at the same time as proving the opportunity to have a discussion about faith and belief and where we direct our lives. I was excited about doing something that could be a conversation starter. And, of course, I was excited about writing Shadow Moon and Mr Wednesday.”
What we wanted to do was to be faithful to the book
COMING TO CANADA
On the day SFX visits the set of American Gods, filming in Toronto, Canada, our two heroes are driving hard into the night, their hulking green Cadillac cutting through the snow. On-camera, they argue – something about delusions; off-camera, they laugh and joke around, at one point breaking into a rousing rendition of “Let It Snow”.
The driver – in more ways than one – is Shadow Moon, the strong, grieving ex-con played by former Hollyoaks and The 100 star Ricky Whittle. It’s through him that we navigate this world of gods; with the death of his wife, Laura (Emily Browning), leaving him with little reason to refuse the offer of an enigmatic old man: a road-trip to unite the gods of old against the newly-formed gods of the modern age. The old man, the passenger, calls himself Mr Wednesday, and, in a perfect piece of casting, is played by grizzled acting legend Ian McShane. Needless to say, he is not what he seems.
In the book, the duo’s journey defines the narrative; their relationship gradually becoming more and more complicated. But the TV show presents Fuller, and his co-writer Michael Green (Heroes, Logan), with the opportunity to expand the world beyond them.
“What we wanted to do first and foremost is be faithful to the book,” says Fuller. “Michael and I want to do something that would make Neil Gaiman proud and feel that when he sees the show he’s seeing his work. But we also wanted to expand the point of view of the book. We wanted, for example, Laura to have a much bigger presence in the story; so much so that episode four tells the story from her point of view. Laura the character in the book
was ‘Shadow’s wife who cheated on him’ and there wasn’t a lot more real estate to explore her beyond that. Michael and I were very dedicated to understanding her as a character and weaving in Shadow and Laura’s story equally.”
Laura Moon, of course, was not the only opportunity to expand the source material.
American Gods, after all, was published in 2001; months before 9/11, years before YouTube and Twitter. The gods themselves were ripe for an update; for new stories of their own.
In the old god camp, you have the African spider god, Mr Nancy (Orlando Jones); you have Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth as Easter; Demore Barnes as Mr Ibis; and the Queen of Sheba herself, Bilquis (Yetide Badaki), who’s a big fan of eating men with her vagina. Meanwhile, they face extinction from the likes of Media (Gillian Anderson), the televised face of the new gods; and Bruce Langley as Technical Boy, updated from the fat, nerdy dweeb of the book to the vaping embodiment of social media obsession. Not to mention totally fresh inventions, created by Gaiman, Fuller and Green to reflect the times. Vulcan (Corbin Bernsen), for instance, is the god of guns; while the TV show breaks from the book to tackle conventional religion, adding Jeremy Davies as Jesus.
AMERICAN DREAM
Like the book, these gods will be explored through Coming To America vignettes; short stories based around the immigrant experience, around the idea of America as a sanctuary; a country that welcomes your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. The timing is not lost on Fuller.
“It feels resonant,” he says. “It feels like we are, in an unfortunate way, able to address a lot of the fears that got us to a Donald Trump election, and there is certainly an experience of working in post-production and watching this show before the election and watching it again after the election and feeling as though there is quite a bit that is resonating with what’s happening. We have storylines (Coming To America vignettes) that open every episode, and some are about what is it to come to America as a black person, what is it to come to America as a Mexican person; what is it to be an American and strive for success as a woman, when all around you are men who would tear you down just because they feel you are not equal to them. It’s a strange word to apply to a television show, but it made the show feel important; it felt more important to be initiating those conversations now than it did before the election.”
American Gods airs on 1 May on Amazon Prime.