Josh Holloway and Rachel Hilson are giving the lowdown on their characters in the new HBO Max crime drama series, Duster.
The series follows Holloway’s character, Jim Ellis, a getaway driver for the mafia who treats his criminal employers like family. His life gets turned upside down when a young FBI agent, Nina Hayes (Hilson), comes into town intent on taking down Jim’s crime family.
Inside Josh Holloway’s loyalty in ‘Duster’
Holloway told Blavity’s Shadow and Act that his character is “definitely having red flags about what’s going on,” adding that the proof Nina is showing him “is compelling.”
“He lives in this world of mafia and hits and these kinds of things. He understands what he’s seeing here. At the same time, that’s his family, his mafia family is his family as well,” Holloway said. “So it’s like you want to not see things when people you love are doing something contrary to what you believe them to be. And so for him, that’s his loyalty to that family. His loyalty to his brother, and his biological family, and his mafia family..that puts these in conflict. So he has to find out this information for himself, but also he’s been shaken down before. But as the thread’s being pulled and more evidence is coming through, he gets sucked in more and more and more to what he believes to be, you know, a, a different truth when he doesn’t want.”
How Rachel Hilson brings cultural depth to Nina Hayes
Hilson talked about what it’s like to play a Black character with a level of specificity that other audience members will be able to relate to.
“[She’s a] character from Baltimore, a character that’s an HBCU alum. We see the Morgan State cup, so we know this woman. We know who this woman is. I always like to have this specific persona of a Black woman who’s trying to take people down [serve as] the genesis for Nina,” Hilson said.
“That Baltimore tie is so cool,” she said. “First of all, it’s just so cool, so important. It tells me so much about her from the get-go, ’cause she was written that way. I did not have anything to do with her being from Baltimore. That was just a really awesome coincidence. And the Morgan piece is also cool because my dad went to Morgan, and both my parents taught English as well. My mom in the show also teaches English at Morgan, or literature at Morgan. So there are a lot of things that I’m coming in with that definitely help inform this person and give her that backstory. I think it just gives me a really solid foundation to start from.”
Exploring the themes of identity and truth in ‘Duster’
Hilson also described connecting with Nina’s experiences with discrimination.
“These things are on the page, but I think there’s also something that I just know innately as a Black woman. I’ve experienced all of these things in a certain way. My mom has experienced these things. Generations of people have experienced misogynoir, this misogyny [and] racism in one package,” she said. “While I did not grow up in the ’70s, I think that experience just carries through generation to generation. And I tried to bring that [to the] character, too.”
Watch the full interviews below.
The first two episodes of Duster are now streaming on HBO Max.
