SPOILER ALERT This interview contains spoilers for all episodes of "Swarm" on Amazon Prime Video. Rumors of the Donald Glover project about a "Beyoncé-like figure" have been swirling in Hollywood for at least two years. And while no one involved will mention Knowles' name - Glover called out to Beyhive and co-creator and showrunner Janine Nabers spoke about "a particular pop star from Houston" - this series is finally here. In “Swarm,” Dominique Fishback stars as Dre, an emotionally stunted superfan of a singer named Ni'Jah , who is unhealthyly obsessed with her own sister, Marissa . When a fight between the sisters separates them for a night, Dre goes out to celebrate Ni'Jah's surprise album drop , while Marissa discovers she's been cheated on by him. boyfriend Khalid . Unable to reach Dre for support, he dies by suicide. Dre, mysteriously turned away from Marissa's funeral by the "family", kills Khalid for both betraying Marissa and out of respect for Ni'Jah. The rest of the series sees her in a rage as she mourns Marissa's and kills her Ni'Jah detractors as she desperately hopes to meet the star someday. In the final he finally does - sort of. After hanging up his serial hat and taking on a new identity, he spends the thousands of dollars he should have gone for rent on Ni'Jah tickets. This upsets his Ni'Jah-hating girlfriend, Rashida , and Dre suffers another mental breakdown. He kills Rashida and burns the body, then realizes he burned the tickets too, so he goes to the concert and stabs a scalp to get his tickets. Dre gets to the front row, then manages to jump onto the stage. As security rushes inside to catch her, Ni'Jah stops them and hugs Dre, but what Dre sees is Marissa's face. Nabers spoke to Variety about how he and Glover invented Dre and all the bodies buried along the way. Donald Glover and you talked about how the idea for "Swarm" came about, imagining what the serial subgenre would look like if it focused on a Black woman instead of a white man. What did you initially envision when creating the character of Dre? The terminology we used was "alien". This woman is an alien in her own world. If you look at the pilot, there are aliens on TV when he arrives at Khalid's house. Right. This is a crossing line with it throughout the series. We really looked to “Piano Teacher” for inspiration. Donald introduced me to that movie and it blew my mind. It revolves around a woman who lives her life on the surface in a very everyday way, and then when you peel away the layers of her complex psychology, you reveal a very alien emotion that is a completely different type of person. But since I'm from Houston and Donald is from Atlanta, we wanted to filter that out from a Southern, Black woman perspective. It's a bit like "Atlanta" sibling when you look at their weird family relationships. In the second and final episode, in the style of a true crime documentary, it is revealed that Dre was in foster care with Marissa's family before she was adopted and was sent back again for violent behavior. We can't get any details on how he got into the system or what it's like for him. Have you imagined your background more than that? The documentary episode in the vein of "Atlanta" felt like a step where you could intellectualize what you've seen – the protective system and the idea of ​​these Black women falling through the cracks – from a personal perspective. Everyone, Black and Southern, has some sort of experience with the protective system, whether it's friends who are involved with it, family they have. This is something very real. Donald grew up with a perspective on this. I grew up with this perspective. But we really focused on not getting a real lens on her trauma. You can intellectualize trauma, but we didn't want to dramatize what it was like before she was introduced to Dre that made her who she was. I think a lot of Black storytelling might go towards that, but we really wanted to let people fill in their own gaps in the story. There's a mystery to how it got to where it is, and that's okay. It's okay not to know everything. Speaking of how race works in the show, I'm curious about the white characters. When Dre goes to dance on the new Ni'Jah album, he loses his virginity to a guy at the club. Why is he white? Initially I saw him as a Black man. There's an actor on the show [Byron Bowers] that I originally wanted for this role, and I told Donald that, and Donald said, "We can do that or put him as the other character that makes you feel that way. lean more towards a white man, and let's put a white man in the role that feels like he's leaning towards a Black man.” Our character in Episode 3 was written as a white man, and we're turning him upside down a bit too. It's really clever and funny, because you don't get to see someone like him lose his virginity to a white man. And you've never seen a Black man talk about his eating disorder. Quantrell D. ColbertPrimeVideo What about the character played by Paris Jackson, the daughter of Michael Jackson? Hailey introduces herself as white, but she calls herself Black because she has a Black grandparent? Was this role written for Paris or did it come later? Our casting director Carmen Cuba was amazing. Paris made an offer to Jackson and we all fell for it. "Exactly. That's exactly what we're talking about.” Paris was great. She is a professional she. She walked in and asked all the right questions. I'm a Jewish woman, she identifies as Jewish, so we got close on this. And he trusted us. It was like, "I understand what this role is and here's how I would approach it." She really had this character of a mild bi-racial woman who was really intent on letting everyone know about her Blackness. Dre killed Khalid to avenge Marissa, but they didn't agree with Ni'Jah either. This is Hailey's abusive boyfriend and later Hailey herself commits the only that Dre has had anything to do with Ni'Jah. This show is an examination of a character and his unpredictability. We saw the pilot. She has a sister who has an unhealthy relationship with a man. We see how this turns out. We're entering Chapter 2 and we're seeing a little bit of that too, right? So you think this is a story about a Black woman defending her girlfriends and sisters at all costs. If men get in your way, they're put down. Right? We see you take down the boyfriend, but again you're turning the narrative upside down. You see what they did to Hailey as another way to turn that narrative upside down a bit and keep the audience alert. Like, wait, what is this show about? Food plays an interesting role in the show. After killing Khalid, Dre eats pie with his hands and eats pretzels while a customer masturbates in front of him, among other awkward moments. Where did this come from? When you look at serial s in history, there's always some weird grounding they've had. Dahmer worked at a chocolate factory, and they're pretty sure he dumped their bodies in chocolate. The Night Stalker would break into people's homes and rummage through their refrigerators. We talked a lot about food. What's a fun, weird and grotesque way to show your relationship with something passionate? And it can be funny. This was the food. Dominique is a very disciplined actress and very meticulous about what she eats, so she came up with a lot of thought and energy. It feels really catchy in terms of the way people talk about him as a character and his "isms", like something that could be really permanent. Dre has a few awkward sexual experiences throughout the show until he sees that he's Tony and gets into a long-term and relatively normal relationship with Ni'Jah-hating Rashida . What were you trying to say about Dre's sexuality? We knew we wanted to start her off as a virgin. In many horror stories, the protagonist, if female, is a virgin. So there is a way to reverse it "Oh, is this the story of a girl who lost her virginity and woke up?" We're making up this story about her sexuality, and it's okay when she loses her virginity. It is what it is. But it is this act of violence that actually stirs her lust, what really invigorates her. Because this is a limited series, we're seeing Dre go through different iterations of his character. By the time we get to the final, he's most confident. It's grounded in its own skin. And that had a lot to do with his journey as a er and his relationship with social media. When you meet him in Episode 7, not on his phone. He didn't focus on Ni'Jah. He feels like someone in remission. The fact that he lives confidently as Tony – grounded, genuine, without any labels – is part of it. This relationship with Rashida is part of that. It's about coming to your own sense of self. Tony is his truest, most humane, present, down-to-earth version. Chris ReelPrimeVideo But eventually, it loses touch again. Before the hallucination sequence at the Ni'Jah concert, he kills Rashida for not liking Ni'Jah. Will the story always end like this? Yes. Because every episode except Episode 4 has a real basis for his . In 2018, we found a of a young woman who was brutally ed in the suburbs of Georgia and dumped into a desert-like woodland. She was a white woman but we did our own thing. These are all based on real situations. The ending was supposed to be a somewhat full circle moment, as emotionally jarring and sad as it turned out. We started here and we are here now, but we understand why he had to take this journey to get where he is. In the pilot episode, he says, "When we meet Ni'Jah, we'll be taken to her house. We'll go out for dinner. And Episode 7 is that dinner - in her mind. Gotopnews.com