Literary detective finds way to TV with series ‘Will Trent’
Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agent Will Trent is a figment of Atlanta author Karin Slaughter’s imagination come to life in 10 bestselling books.
Now ABC and actor Ramon Rodriguez have turned her literary creation into a TV character debuting Jan. 3 in the series “Will Trent.” The show will also stream on Hulu.
Trent, the way Rodriguez conveys him, is fastidious, well-dressed and smarter than anyone else in the room. He is a product of the foster care system, a plot point that shapes him as a detective and is given heavy weight in the first two episodes.
“He has dyslexia, so he is forced to see things in a different way,” said Liz Heldens, showrunner and writer. “He wears nice suits as his armor, to cover up his scars. He has a very cool specificity. It’s fun to unpack a lot of Karin’s choices over time.”
Casting didn’t follow Slaughter’s character description of tall and blond. Rodriguez is neither. But that didn’t matter, said Slaughter, who is also an executive producer.
“Ramon is really mesmerizing on screen, and he really gets the character,” Slaughter said. “Even though he isn’t how I described him in the books, he is everything I’d want the character to be on the show. Ramon understands what motivates Will and what’s important to him.”
Rodriguez, once cast, said he read all the “Will Trent” books and became obsessed with him. “I was just fascinated by what this guy had been through, how he found his way to
the GBI and built up the department’s highest clearance rate. His spirit and resilience blew me away.”
The series starts with Trent first adopting a dog, then investigating a death. At the scene, he awkwardly interacts with Atlanta Police Department officers who are angry with him because he had just implicated some officers in a corruption scandal.
Trent is “sometimes off-putting,” Rodriguez said, “but he also has a pretty thick skin. Nothing gets to him. He can walk through a crime scene where all the cops are hating him and still get the job done.”
His supportive boss Amanda (Sonja Sohn) forces Trent to partner with officer Faith Mitchell (Iantha Richardson), whose mother was one of those officers sent away for said scandal. Naturally, the tension between the two is palpable in the early going.
His closest confidante is Atlanta Police Department officer Angie, played
by Erika Christensen. They were in the same group home in foster care, experiencing similar traumas with various foster placements. Over the years, they sometimes get intimate.
Angie starts the show sober but struggled with drug addiction in the past. Slaughter said she is relationship-avoidant. “She’s more comfortable when someone is working against her. She always goes back to Will when the chips are down.”
Heldens, who discovered Slaughter’s books in her Kindle feed and quickly became addicted, said the pair are “soulmates and terrible for each other at the same time.”
The past year has been a good one for Slaughter in terms of getting her works on television. Netflix in 2022 aired “Pieces of Her,” a limited series starring Toni Collette based on Slaughter’s bestselling book of the same name. That was the first time one of her books had made it on screen. And now she has an ABC series to boot.