SWEET TOOTH
WHY SWEET TOOTH IS THE POST-VIRUS TALE YOU DON’T DEER TO MISS…
Why Netflix’s sci-fi show will bring a deer to your eye.
When Jim Mickle picked up a copy of Jeff Lemire’s DC/Vertigo comic book Sweet Tooth back in 2009, he was immediately struck by the cover image: a boy with antlers and deer ears in a redand-black lumberjack shirt, munching on a chocolate bar. “I saw the cover and thought, ‘Man, what a cool character!’” he recalls. Yet to make his breakthrough with vampire movie Stake Land (2010) and crime yarn Cold In July (2014), Mickle put the idea of adapting Sweet Tooth on the backburner.
A dozen years on, and he’s finally been given a shot at Lemire’s postapocalyptic tale, set in a world where a cataclysmic event, known as ‘The Great Crumble’, has led to the emergence of babies born part-animal. Believed by many to be the result of a virus that has swept the world, these creatures are now hunted by fearful humans. As such, many of them live in the shadows – including Gus, the boy-deer hybrid who first grabbed Mickle’s attention.
In collaboration with Team Downey, the production company owned by Robert Downey Jr. and his wife Susan Downey, Mickle made an eye-catching pilot back in 2018, eventually leading to Netflix commissioning an eightepisode series. “I had just had a baby,” remembers Beth Schwartz (Arrow), who joined Mickle as co-showrunner after seeing it. “He was six or seven months at the time. And… [the pilot] just really pulled on my heartstrings.”
EAR AND NOW
It’s exactly this reaction that Mickle and Schwartz will be hoping audiences have now that the first season is complete. The pilot sees the sheltered Gus (11-year-old Canadian actor Christian Convery), who lives deep in a forest with his ailing father, desperate to find his absent mother. It’s a quest that leads him into the path of Tommy Jepperd (Nonso Anozie), a former American football star who lost it all in ‘The Great Crumble’.
“Jepperd is this hard, gruff, kind of modern Black cowboy who’s lived a tough life for the last 10 years,” says Anozie. “Now he wants to live his own life, and that means stealing and killing if he has to.” Gus pesters Jepperd to take him to Colorado, where he believes his mother is. “There’s obviously something in Gus that softens Jep,” says Schwartz. “There’s just something about this kid and how special he is, and that kind of chips away at Jep.”
Comparisons can be made to Star Wars show The Mandalorian, with the Jepperd/Gus relationship recalling Mando’s role as unexpected protector of Grogu (or Baby Yoda, if you prefer). Similarly, much like the way Grogu was brought to life, old-school visual effects methods have been utilised here. Gus’ incredibly expressive ‘deer ears’
– mounted on top of Convery’s head – are controlled live on set. “He has a puppeteer who follows him around at all times and is guiding his ears. And it’s incredible,” enthuses Mickle. “His ears are always alive.”
Ironically, the pilot was filmed long before Covid-19 changed the world. Was Mickle worried that maybe audiences wouldn’t want to watch a show about a virus ravaging the world? “I guess I wasn’t as freaked out as maybe I should have been!” he laughs. Partly, this confidence came from developing the tone of that pilot episode. “I think it was a smart decision to say, ‘What if we actually looked at an apocalyptic story as a sort of security blanket in the world and something you went to, to be uplifted by emotionally?’”
MASK IMITATING LIFE
Of course, they had “no idea that five years later, the entire world would need that [comfort] in a big way,” continues Mickle. Even so, with the show’s writers’ room forced to build later episodes over Zoom, life began to imitate art. “I remember on Episode 3, Michael Perry wrote this scene where a character had a personalised mask that had bedazzled gems on it. And I remember going, ‘All right, I think we jumped the shark a little bit with the whole personalised mask thing. We’ve gone too far!’” Little did he know…
Shot in New Zealand, making fine use of the country’s dramatic landscapes, Sweet Tooth was also one of the first series (along with Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings) permitted to film there during the pandemic. “It felt like a fairytale version of America, which is actually exactly what we were looking for,” says Mickle. “It was a great home for us. And [it] wound up being the only place we could really safely shoot during Covid.”
Now with Netflix on board, the global launch has got the producers pumped about being able to at last bring Gus and Jepperd to the world. “I’m really excited for everyone to see it,” says Schwartz. “Instead of dwelling on the darkness of what we’ve all lived through… this takes us to the other side, out of it.” Anozie readily agrees: “After watching this season, hopefully most people will take away the message that no matter how bad things get, there is always hope...” James Mottram
SWEET TOOTH IS AVAILABLE ON NETFLIX FROM 4 JUNE.
‘IT FELT LIKE A FAIRYTALE VERSION OF AMERICA’ JIM MICKLE