Full Circle Director Steven Soderbergh and Cast Loop Us in on the Crime Series

Full Circle Director Steven Soderbergh and Cast Loop Us in on the Crime Series

In Full Circle, the crime drama from frequent collaborators Ed Solomon and Steven Soderbergh, the sins of the past have returned even for those who never knew they ever existed.
The Max streaming service miniseries grew out of an article Solomon read in the early 2000s about an insurance scam ring in Queens and also has hints of the Akira Kurosawa film High and Low, Soderbergh said. It follows two families who seemingly have nothing in common: One is made up of upper-crust Manhattanites Sam Browne (Claire Danes) and her husband Derek (Timothy Olyphant), who helped turn her dad, Jeff...

In Full Circle, the crime drama from frequent collaborators Ed Solomon and Steven Soderbergh, the sins of the past have returned even for those who never knew they ever existed.
The Max streaming service miniseries grew out of an article Solomon read in the early 2000s about an insurance scam ring in Queens and also has hints of the Akira Kurosawa film High and Low, Soderbergh said. It follows two families who seemingly have nothing in common: One is made up of upper-crust Manhattanites Sam Browne (Claire Danes) and her husband Derek (Timothy Olyphant), who helped turn her dad, Jeff (Dennis Quaid), from a small-time tomatillo maker into an Emeril Lagasse–like personality and are now reaping the benefits with a fancy Fifth Avenue apartment, black-tie galas, and their sheltered and overprotected son Jared (Ethan Stoddard). (Photo by Max) The other “family” is a more liberal definition of the word. It’s a Guyanese crime syndicate headed by CCH Pounder’s lioness Savitri Mahabir. Among her disciples is her nephew, Jharrel Jerome’s power-hungry Aked. He’s put in charge of a mission that includes two new recruits: his fiancée Natalia’s (Adia) brother Louis (Gerald Jones) and his friend Xavier (Sheyi Cole).
That mission? Kidnap Jared, a kid they’ve never met or even heard of until they receive this order.
Things don’t go to plan, especially with Zazie Beetz’s Mel Harmony, an agent with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, on the case. The central crime overlaps with something she’s covering, and her boss, Manny Broward (Jim Gaffigan), is asking his own questions. Over the six episodes, secrets are exposed, allegiances are made, and moral dilemmas become life-or-death decisions.
“I was viewing this whole thing as a real New York City melodrama,” Soderbergh said. “I liked the sprawling aspect of it and that it started out about this group of well-off white people being victimized and then, over the course of the show, the whole thing starts to … tilt. But by the end of it, we’re in a very different place than where we started. But I liked the sort of bait-and-switch aspect of it.” Sheyi Cole as Xavier, Gerald Jones as Louis and Adia as Natalia (Photo by Max) Soderbergh’s own penchant for reality programming has long amused his fans. And he justified his fascination with the upstairs-downstairs yacht-centric Bravo program Below Deck earlier this year when he told Rolling Stone that this is a show where a ship’s crew members are frequently put in a position of “if you’d literally done nothing, you would be in a better situation than you are now.”
In his mind, Full Circle presents the opposite of that. Soderbergh said there’s even a line in the series where Gaffigan’s Manny sat by Danes’ Sam “on the bench at Washington Square Park and said, ‘If you actually do nothing, this will all go away and go back to normal.'”
“That was an expression of my witnessing people in my life getting themselves into more trouble by making a choice that is demonstrably worse than if they’d literally done nothing,” Soderbergh said of that scene.
The stakes for this show are even higher, Olyphant told Rotten Tomatoes, because it is a program that puts younger people’s lives in danger.
“It’s the heartbeat of the show; all the young people in the show,” Olyphant said. “They are at a point in their lives where they’re about to be full-grown adults and have to make these kinds of decisions in their own lives. They’re still somewhat innocent. But they’re not little, little kids that make some very adult decisions.” Jharrel Jerome as Aked and Adia as Natalia (Photo by Max) Soderbergh described the brother and sister Louis and Natalia as “the heroes” of the show because “they’ve found themselves in a bad circumstance, but they’re good people.” These circumstances are best epitomized by Jerome’s...