Murder rocks Cape community in ‘Hightown’
A life of hedonism is about to catch up to Jackie Quinones.
As played by Monica Raymund (“Chicago Fire,” “Lie to Me”) in the Starz drama “Hightown,” premiering tonight, she’s a National Marine Fisheries Service agent in the raucous LGBTQ resort town of Provincetown who drinks too much, snorts too much and has too many casual hook-ups with other women. But that changes when she’s involved in a DUI crash that forces her into rehab to avoid a jail sentence.
Her life becomes even more complicated when she finds a young woman’s body washed up on the beach, presumably another casualty of Cape Cod’s opioid epidemic. Joining the investigation, she must contend with
Sergeant Ray Abruzzo (James Badge Dale, “24”), an abrasive member of the Cape’s Interagency Narcotics Unit, who isn’t afraid to cross lines. He believes the murder is somehow connected to incarcerated drug lord Frankie Cuevas (Amaury Nolasco, “Prison Break”), so he gets close with Frankie’s baby mama Renee (Riley Voelkel, “The Originals”), a stripper.
As the lives of these and other characters involved in the murder run together, the toll that addictions can exact become apparent. It’s a story series creator/executive producer Rebecca Cutter drew from many of her own experiences.
“At Cape Cod, I grew up going to Provincetown in the summers,” she said. “My husband’s from there. His father is a Fisheries Service agent. So certainly a lot of the background elements. I have been touched by opioid use around me. I’m sober myself. So there’s many elements from my life.
“But the character of Jackie really did sort of come to me in a vision,” she added. “And I say that sincerely, like really it hit me. And that’s not me. And that’s the creative process, is creating that person and using the elements of myself that work and then letting a brilliant actress take it from there and inhabit it and make her real.”
And Raymund was all too willing to oblige. In Jackie, she embraced the chance to play someone who is fighting her way back from rock bottom, an acting challenge and a role that she regards as “a gift.”
“This role is really about … battling my inner demons,” she said, “trying to find redemption, trying to fill something within me that I can’t fill. I don’t have a whole person yet. I’m exploring that as the character of Jackie. … And all of the characters, even though it’s centering around murder, we’re with these characters all throughout and see how they intersect. So, this story … is the real deal.”