Get Millie Black isn’t your average detective show. This one takes you to a Jamaica that isn’t the one on your favorite travel brochures.

The cast and crew of HBO’s upcoming series spoke with Blavity’s Shadow and Act about what fans can expect.

Creator and executive producer Marlon James said he wanted to tell a story about Jamaica “that goes beyond the usual stories about Jamaica.”

“I like to tell stories about people who are in the margins, and in Jamaica, certainly [that includes] queer people [and] trans people,” he said. “My mom was a detective, so I grew up with a female detective in the family dealing with solving cases and also fighting against sexism and being a pioneer, even though she didn’t realize that; she would never call herself that.”

“One of the things I got from my mother is to use writing as a way of solving mysteries. That’s how I look at writing in general. So in…a lot of ways, all of it just coalesced and added [to the] story,” he continued. I kind of knew I was always going to write one, I didn’t know it was going to be for TV, but I was going to write one and I was going to draw on the influence of my mom and the influence of how I usually tell stories. For me, when I create stories, the characters show up first and then I try to figure out why the hell they’re in my head. And that was the same thing with Millie. It was Millie who showed up almost kind of fully formed and then I had to beg her to tell me why she’s here and where she wants to take you.”

Tamara Lawrance, who plays the title character, is a detective with a lot of trauma to address. Her mother ousted her from the family home in Jamaica, sending her to relatives in Britain. Her mother also abused her trans sister Hibiscus, played by Chyna McQueen–in fact, Millie’s defense of Hibiscus is what got Millie sent away. After making a career in Scotland Yard, Millie returns to Jamaica once she finds out Hibiscus, whom her mother said had died, is actually alive.

Lawrance and McQueen said they were able to create a sibling relationship on and off screen by building safety and security with each other.

“We started understanding each other more and more throughout the series…It was great to work on [the characters’ relationship] and be able to try different ways of learning each other,” said McQueen.

“We had some rehearsal time as well, which was good before the shoot, so we were able to kind of go through some of the bigger scenes that we have together. But I also really think the beautiful thing was that kind of everything was happening in real-time as well in terms of the more you get to know someone and spend time with each other, the more you kind of feel like sisters anyway,” added Lawrance. “Even though we didn’t know each other when we started shooting, as the shoot went on, I felt more and more connected to Chyna. So…even when you fight and stuff [in character as sisters], you have to feel on some level…safe with someone to be able to really get in their face. Chyna always made me feel very safe.”

Hibiscus brings to light some of the realities of trans women in Jamaica, and McQueen said she shares quite a few commonalities with Hibiscus.

“What I have in common [with her] is we are both survivors of transphobia, homophobia, and what I love about Hibiscus is though [she] lost her sister and [lived] through her abusive mother, she has to do what she has to do to survive and I admired how strong she is,” she said. “All the emotions that you see in Hibiscus is wanting that love from her sister.”

“She tried to put up a tough face and she’s hurting, but she’s also reminding herself what I love about her, that this is who I am and this is standing for myself and I need my sister on my side now to realize that this is me now, that I’m not the same person that I used to be. I’m stronger about what I’ve been through and you need to just catch up,” she continued. “You need to accept me for who I am now. I would say she’s selfish–she doesn’t care what Millie thinks or what Millie wants. [But] at the end, [Millie starts to realize that Hibiscus is the only one she can trust because Millie starts losing trust in everyone. So really, Hibiscus is the only one she can trust.”

Lawrance also said she had a lot in common with her character Millie as a child of a Jamaican immigrant.

“My mom is Jamaican, [and] it’s kind of not exactly the same [as Millie’s upbringing with her mother] but I do understand on some level what it is like to have some distance from your heritage or a severed identity in that you grow up in two places and don’t quite feel at home in either,” she said. “My mom is a Jamaican woman and Jamaican women carry a lot of the heritage and the legacy of the land in their body, in their bones, in the experience and the things that play out in family. So I immediately recognized a lot of the circumstances that Hibiscus and Millie were coming from.”

“The ways in which Millie says that their dad took off and that their mom kind of processed [the grief as] rage–sometimes we inherit a rage which is unprocessed traumas, essentially. So I recognize all of that being a British Jamaican person that grew up in a household with a woman who has also experienced many things and then how that leads into wanting to kind of create a better life for yourself and your family,” she continued. “I think many children of immigrants feel that and people back home as well feel that as well, wanting a sense of [a] sort of psycho-spiritual mobility. Like, how do we move forward? How do we evolve? I don’t think Millie has processed the traumas, really, especially because she thought her sibling was dead and her mother was very abusive and so there was a lot of things that…plays out in her need for justice. That as a psychology made a lot of sense to me why she wanted to join something like the police force and why she is so good at her job because ultimately, she believes in the rights of children. Where she felt like maybe she failed Hibiscus, she might be able to help other children through her detective work.”

As James said, Get Millie Black leaves you knowing Jamaica as a place of multitudes, in both character and environment.

“Nobody will leave the show thinking there’s only one Jamaica, much less one Kingston. For me, that was important for a show,” he said. “A detective show has to be tight in a lot of ways. For us, to pull off that sort of tightness, but also show such a wide range of stories and conflicts, to me, was important. And that, to me, is the Jamaica I hope people take from it.

Watch the full interviews with Lawrance, McQueen, James, Gershwyn Eustache Jnr, Joe Dempsie and EPs Jami O’Brien and Simon Maxwell below.