Victor LaValle is a multi-award-winning author who first hit the literary scene with his 2002 debut, Slapboxing with Jesus. Since then, he's remained utterly prolific, putting out an endless stream of novels, novellas, graphic novels, short stories, and more into the universe.
This past September, LaValle's 2018 novel, The Changeling, was brought to life on Apple TV+ in a series that, according to LaValle himself, only adds to the material. The series stars LaKeith Stanfield as Apollo – named after Apollo Creed, not the God –and Clark Backo as Emma. Together, the two central characters go through a lengthy, charming courtship process, get married, and decide to have a baby. Things go terribly awry only after their child, Brian, is born.
One of the most enchanting things about The Changeling is that it mirrors many real-world truths and experiences, but in a way that presses upon reality. This series remains resolute in operating under its own unique set of rules. Emma's experience of detachment from her child immediately calls to mind an authentic experience for many. For the tumultuous upbringings of the characters, there's a whole swath of others who will find recognition in the material. But while this is a series that goes to daringly raw emotional places, it also exists in a world that is threaded throughout with cross-cultural mythological truths as well.
When Emma suspects that Brian might not actually be the baby she brought to term, she sets about finding the truth at any cost. For Apollo, who just wanted to succeed where his father failed him, the journey to find his wife and child takes him all around New York City and deep into his soul.
Victor LaValle spoke with CBR about his childhood, and how becoming a father was the most terrifying and wonderful thing to ever happen to him.
This article contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of The Changeling. The discussion of the finale is marked with an asterisk.
First things first, I want to know about how much research went into the novel. What was the inception of this like?
The inception of this novel was the birth of our first son on May 21, 2011. My wife gave birth to him at home, as was set up in the story, the book, and the show – not on the A train. I caught him in my hands because she gave birth in a pool. I looked down at this kid and felt complete joy and utter terror. In a way, that's the heart of the entire Changeling story is those two emotions in almost equal measure.
The background seems to be that each of the characters, whether it's Apollo or Emma, have these vast traumas handed down to them, things that no child should ever have to endure. What are you thinking when you're composing these backgrounds, and what this could be like for new parents?
When the baby came into our lives, one of the things that it did for me was that it suddenly amplified everything that had led to that moment. In a story, you want to turn up the volume on what those past issues were in order to really convey to the viewer, to the reader, just how profound and powerful the sort of aftershocks of this history are. In that way, I decided for each of those characters – Apollo, Emma, even Lily, and William – in my head is a backstory that is profoundly disturbing and warping in its own way. It was the desire to suggest that, when a new child, a new life comes into the world, suddenly all those past histories resonate louder, they ring louder, and echo forward in time. One of the big questions that came up for all of us, but upon becoming a father and my wife becoming a mother, is, how much of that history do I let shape the way I parent? The fear is that you let the bad lessons turn you into something bad. The hope is that you let the good lessons turn you into someone good.
It's interesting because it's a very delicate balancing act between the real-world issues that parents face, whether it's postpartum depression or the fears of being like your family if there were issues there. At what point do you decide it's actually going to take on a larger, mythic quality?
If you look at many of the old fairy tales, like the true old, old ones, pre-being child-friendly fairy tales, so often, those stories read like the dreams you have when your mind is trying to work through a really hard moment in time. Really horrific things happen, frightening things happen, all the rest. As far as I was concerned, I was actually just attaching the real-world fears and concerns of Apollo and Emma to a long history of how people work through the giant questions and fears of humanity – through fairytales through myths. In a way, that's what they're there for. We tell them to each other to teach each other how to get through frightening and scary times. They're fun stories, but they're also deeply in there. You're watching characters try to figure out how they survive the monstrous. And in the real world. monstrous things happen all the time.
Especially with the William Wheeler character, there's a very delicate thing going on there. He's clearly an abusive husband in a lot of ways. There's also this vast network of presumably, well, the finale leaves that very open. But it also seems like it's a more systemic thing.
Yes. It's plugged in. William is plugged into something larger. And he's plugged into something very modern, and something very ancient.
One fascinating thing to me is that there are a lot of what I would consider very disparate worldviews colliding at once. You have some Ugandan elements, elements of this Brazilian trip, the Norwegian mythology. You don't realize at first that the opening thing with the ship has a lot more to do with it. How do you decide what things are conflicting, what to nix entirely, or what things can coexist in this world?
The funny thing is that the convergence of all these elements is really down to growing up in Queens, New York. In my apartment building where I grew up, I had a Swiss kid, a Colombian kid, a Persian kid, a Korean kid, me, a half-Ugandan half-white kid, Irish American kids, Black American kids, Jewish kids, everybody, right? In a weird way, I know that a lot of people live in communities – even if they're next to each other –each one is its own enclave. But for me, it was like, for lack of better terms, my building was a UN building. And it was not unique to Queens. Bringing all these elements together, for me, feels incredibly natural. I visited one person's house, and I would hear one kid's Korean grandma telling me those stories and demons stories from her culture and background. And then I'd have another friend from Persia, and that dad scaring us with stories from his culture. It all filtered into my head. It feels like the most natural thing in the world that all these things go together and that they meet in Queens because that's where the whole world meets in New York.
It's also interesting that at the heart of a lot of these stories are universal human truths. They might take on the form of various creatures, warnings, and omens, but at the end of the day, many of these stories are 'How do we engage with the world?'
I agree. This is part of what Kelly Marcel and I really bonded over was the way that, at the heart of this story, it's about love between two people, the love of a parent for a child, the love and protectiveness of a child, even for their parent, the yearning of a parent for their lost parent, a child for their lost parent. None of these things are specific to any culture. Our hope was that it would feel like almost anyone could see themselves in at least someone in this world if not more than one person in this show.
There are a lot of conflicting ideologies. There's the sort of extremist view of the island of 'no men shall enter.' But then there's Emma, who enters it, and it's, 'Well, you might think you're protecting me here, but you're also keeping me from my mission of getting to the bottom of this.' It's the same thing with Apollo, who's at risk of being trapped in his own world but also knows he needs to step outside of those bounds to access the truth.
We were fiercely in favor of the idea that, in one episode, one person seems to be the good person, and then the next episode, you'd be like, 'Why did they do that? I'm so mad at that person.' And that would feel more like you couldn't say that, even William, that you couldn't say that anyone really falls into simple, good or evil. They may, in the end, end up being pretty evil, but even still, at the heart of it, for all this wrong with William, his story of himself is that he's just a man who wants his family back. And that, as warped as he is, that's not an evil impulse. It's just how he lives it out that turns it into something ugly.
Let's talk about adapting the book into the series. It's a very different medium; it plays by different rules. There are aesthetic considerations. The way things are timed is entirely different. The way music operates. How does one even approach that? You have something that you brought into this world, brought through its full cycle, and now it's taking on a different form. How do you even begin to wrap your mind around that?
I got very lucky. Kelly Marcel, who is the showrunner and who wrote all eight episodes, worked with me incredibly closely. For a lot of writers, the adaptation process can end up being, 'We cut your body open, and we just took out a couple of organs. And we tossed aside the rest of the body.' But in Kelly's case – I don't know if this analogy is any good – she kept the whole body and then just added another body. When she and I were working, she was saying, 'All I want to do is be additive. I want to give. I can see ways that I want to tell more of Emma's story. Like in the book, it's hinted at what she goes through because you're really in Apollo's perspective.' But she was like, 'I think I can see how to fill out Emma's perspective and her journey.' So, it deepens her story. Then, for Lillian in Episode 107, we get a whole episode of time to really make you understand her. I would say this is more than a Willy Wonka ticket. I got like two Willy Wonka tickets because nothing from the book was lost. Really, everything from the book, even straight dialogue, all the rest, made it into the show. And then she just added more. So it just feels like an even bigger and richer story to me. Which I know is not every writer's experience.
Your voiceover narration, it's great. I love that there's an aphoristic quality to it; there are these beautiful quotes. Are those in the book?
I would say it's about 60/40. A good bit of it is from the book. Other things are what Kelly brought in to help fill it out. What I really liked, number one, I just enjoyed being the voice who tells you the tale. It was just fun, honestly, from an ego point of view, and from a storytelling point of view. But I also loved that the voice, the voice of the narration, is not voiceover. So it's never like just telling you what's going on, what you're seeing. Instead, it's adding hopefully another layer, like when it's telling you an old nursery or an old song sung to babies, or it's telling you for a moment what Apollo was thinking when he was chained to that pipe. It's additive, as well.
*Let's talk about the ending a little bit. Huge cliffhanger. We're hit with back-to-back images of William Wheeler and the network of these faces that we could only surmise have some sort of tree-like quality. I might be totally off with that one. But there's something very, very ominous about it. There are also a lot of allusions to this being a network. That has a lot of real-world corollaries that are all very insidious. And then there's...this eyeball.
The eye!
Where where are we going from here?
Well, one of the things that Kelly and I talked about was building a show that threw out a lot of mysteries. We were also really committed to answering those questions, solving those mysteries, but wanting to really build them up and build them up and build them up so that you feel, on some level, as thrown into a fairy tale as Apollo and Emma are. All I can promise you is we brought up a lot of questions and a lot of mysteries. A Season Two would be full of those answers, including, what the hell is with that eye?
Season 1 of The Changeling is now available on Apple TV+.