2024 is a monumental year for the Power franchise — not only is it a celebration of a decade since the original Power series premiered, but also it is the year the final season of the beloved spinoff, Power Book II: Ghost, airs.

 

To commemorate this moment, Blavity and Shadow and Act gathered the cast for our September Blavity cover story, filmed in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It is the first-ever joint cover shoot that the cast has done.

 

Power Book II: Ghost, the very first spinoff of the main show, was revealed to fans in a surprise announcement once the original series concluded. Many viewers were delighted to know that the show would immediately resume in some form — not as a prequel, and not necessarily an offshoot, but a direct continuation of Power itself.

 

Aside from series lead Michael Rainey Jr., who plays Tariq, the main cast consists of two other characters who carried over from the parent series — Gianni Paolo, who plays Brayden Weston, and Alix Lapri, who plays Josefina “Effie” Morales.

 

Lapri recalled, “They [Rainey and Paolo] definitely knew first, and so I thought I wasn’t going to be a part of it, but then Gianni told me because he found out [laughs]. And then he called me, and he told me before they told me. I was hyped.”

 

Paolo remembered how a photo from the set of Ghost was actually posted by 50 Cent before the official series announcement came down.

 

“It was so funny because 50 had come to set, and this was when it had already been announced [internally], but the public hadn’t known,” he said. “And 50 posted a photo of me, him and Michael, and it was up for like four hours, and he was like, ‘On the set of the new spinoff.’ And that was kind of when it started really, the buzz started happening about the show, and I remember that was so funny. 50’s like, ‘No, I’m not taking it down.’”

 

Rainey added, “They was telling us to take it down. I’m like, ‘Bro, 50 Cent got like 30 million followers, y’all worried about my little 800,000 at the time?’ I’m like, ‘Bro, chill.’

 

Rainey and Paolo, who truly get the opportunity to collectively become the dynamic duo of Tariq and Brayden in this continuation, initially thought the idea of the show wouldn’t work.

 

The former said, “When they first told us what it was going to be, [or] when they first told me at least, I was like, ‘No, what are you all thinking? This is not going to work.’”

Paolo understood his co-star’s sentiments, though he said he knew the project would work due to his prior work with the creator and showrunner of both Power and Power Book II: Ghost, Courtney A. Kemp.

 

“I had a weird feeling, like — Michael was kind of was kinda thinking like that, ‘I think everyone hates me [Tariq]’ — [but] for some reason, I just had a feeling that it would work. I just had so much trust in Courtney, in her writing, and I was like, ‘She’s going to turn it all around.’ And she did.”

 

But as Rainey noted, he “wasn’t scared” about the show itself, but rather as a result of fans’ prior reactions to Tariq.

 

“I’m not saying that because I didn’t trust Courtney and her writing and stuff,” he clarified. “I just know the fans really stand on business, and they was not liking Tariq. So I’m like, ‘I don’t know how it’s going to work.’ But it worked. … I was just going with the flow, whatever Courtney and the writers wanted for Tariq is what I wanted for Tariq. They kind of told me what the plans were going to be going into the spinoff. They was like, ‘We’re kind of going to show Tariq kind of what he’s really been going through and the reasoning behind all of his prior actions.’ And they’re going to show why he’s doing what he’s doing currently for his family and everything, and they just wanted to make him more of a relatable character. That’s what they did, and people kind of saw the reasoning behind everything, and they started really resonating with him [and] kind of gaining a little bit of sympathy for Tariq.”

 

Outside of the three returning stars, the show needed to fill out its universe with other main characters. Enter the Tejada family, led by Mary J. Blige’s matriarch, Monet Tejada. The show tapped Woody McClain, then most known for BET’s The New Edition Story and The Bobby Brown Story, and then-relative newcomers LaToya Tonodeo and Lovell Adams-Gray, to play Lorenzo “Cane” Tejada Jr., Diana Tejada and Dru Tejada.

 

“For me, I was always, and I say it all the time, always a fan of Power, fan of Courtney, fan of 50,” Tonodeo said. “I literally had Starz, with a Z, on my vision board in 2017. So when I got on this show, it was just a blessing. And just be a part of this culture, and then be able to learn so much on this series and play a character like Diana? Hey, I’m thankful.”

 

“I thought it was a lot of pressure at first,” McClain said. “Power being such a successful show that it is, it definitely came with a lot of pressure. But I remember the OG, Wood Harris, I asked him about a project we was doing [at the time]. I was like, ‘What do you think about it?’ He was like, ‘All I do is make classics.’ So, I kind of had that mentality coming into this series, and we made a classic.”

 

Adams-Gray said, “I think from my head, it was, ‘I’m going into this world that I love.’ I was a big fan. I didn’t know what the story was going to be, right? And so, I was like, ‘I finally get to work with Omari Hardwick and get to hoop with him and see whatever’s going on.” And then [I found out] it was a spinoff of the [original]. But I get to be a part of something new and something different, and that was so exciting for me. They say not to fill a great person’s shoes, but carve your own path. So getting to do that in this world has been such a gift.”

 

Power, along with shows such as Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, was one of the key shows in the era of live-tweeting shows on Twitter (now known as X). Because of this, a large online community has formed for the show, and it has resulted in vibrant and active groups that discuss fan theories, casting ideas, episode analyses and more.

 

And although most people now stream shows or watch them on demand, Power Book II: Ghost has been able to retain fans that still watch in real time when it airs. Though Power ran for many seasons on Starz, its successor took that legacy and ran with it.

 

“It’s just dope to be a part of. This has been a part of people’s schedule and routine for years and years and years and years and years, so the fact that they do still tune in live and they’re still tweeting about it and they’re still talking to their friends about it — that is something really special because people set time aside to tune in with us,” Lapri said. “So all the opinions, all the memes, I feel like that’s just another level to how dope it is for the culture. It really speaks volumes to people. It’s super dope to see, to me.”

 

And since Power was one of the shows from the heyday of live-tweeting, it is only right that this has continued with Power Book II: Ghost as well.

 

“It’s not just a TV show, it’s basically like a community,” Rainey said. “It’s like a big community and people just sharing their little stories within the story, and it’s lit. It’s fire. People making their memes, their GIFs and everything. They got their little theories and everything. They saying I’m Kanan’s son and stuff like that … some of it be making sense. I’m like, ‘Yo, am I Kanan’s son?’”

The cast members have also fostered a close relationship with each other, not only on set, but also outside of the show as well. It is something that they already reminisce on with fondness.

 

“Man, that’s the thing I’m going to miss most about this being the final season,” Rainey said. “Just literally coming to work and looking forward to working with people that I’m super close with, super cool with and just super comfortable with. That, within itself, just makes work so much easier and so much more comfortable. It just brings stuff to life and you see it on the screen [and] it translates. I’m going to miss that for sure because I don’t think I’m going to ever be this close to another cast like how we got close.”

 

He continued, “Not only on set are we this close, we’re this close off of set as well. We’re all super creative. Who knows what he going to write for us to be in, or what I’m going to write for us to be in, or what they going to write. So anything we got, we are going to have each other in our mind. So it’s just like, we are going to keep the ball rolling, whether it’s Power or a new movie or new series. We’ll keep going.”

 

And as the series concludes, it’s not only contributing to the overall legacy of the franchise — the show has a legacy of its own as well.

 

“I hope that this show and the success of this show, and our ratings and what we brought collectively as a universe, can continue to show other people or the powers that be that people of color can continue to bring people in, to continue to bring the audience, continue to bring the dollars in, whatever the bottom line or top dollar is,” Tonodeo said. “We make changes. We make things happen. So I hope that it continues to influence those that need to be influenced.”

 

Adams-Gray added, “I hope this is a moment that we can all look back on 10, 15 years down the line and be like, ‘This is where it started.’ … It’s a benchmark to me.”

 

“Outside of Marvel, there’s not many universes that have expanded this way,” Lapri said. “And 50 did something so special when he did this. It’s really comparable to a Marvel.”

 

“I think it was dope to have such a great writers’ room that they were able to take somebody that we all collectively hated and made them [Tariq] the lead, and by the end of the season we loved this guy,” McClain pointed out. “I thought that was amazing.”

 

For these six rising stars, the sky is the limit after this.

 

“This was a crazy launch pad,” Lapri said. “It’s a crazy platform. So it’s really what we make of it now. Like, what do we want to do? Because everybody here is so extremely talented in so many ways. There are things these people do that people don’t even know. They’re just dope at everything, so everybody here can go create whatever career they want to.”

 

“I feel like it’s just a blessing,” Rainey said. “We were given a platform, and now all we got to do is just take advantage of it and just keep the ball rolling. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”