Samuel L. Jackson stars in and executive produces Apple TV+’s The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, based on the critically acclaimed novel by Walter Mosley. Jackson plays Ptolemy Grey, an elderly gentleman who lives on his own and suffers from dementia. Dominique Fishback (Judas and the Black Messiah) co-stars as Robyn, an intelligent and thoughtful teenager who becomes Ptolemy’s caretaker.
Executive producer Mosley adapted his novel for the six-episode limited series and joined Jackson and Fishback to discuss the Apple TV+ drama during the 2022 Television Critics Association’s winter press tour. The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey will premiere on March 11, 2022.
Samuel L. Jackson said he and Walter Mosley have discussed adapting The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey for 10 years, and Jackson’s been picturing how to bring the character to life in his head all during that time. Part of the reason Jackson’s been interested in playing Ptolemy Grey for so many years has to do with his personal connection to the subject matter. Multiple members of his family have suffered from Alzheimer’s.
“I watched them change, deteriorate, and become different people over the years,” said Jackson, explaining why he was so passionate about being a part of this limited series. “And being able to tell their story or listening to them and understanding that things in their past are more their present than what’s going on in their everyday life and understanding how to convey that to people. And giving an audience an opportunity to know that they aren’t the only people who watch their loved ones deteriorate that way, who need an outlet to look at someone else dealing with those particular things, and having a young person like Robyn, played by Dominique, to come in and access this person and to look at that person like they were worthwhile, that the memories that they have aren’t a place that they should abandon – that it’s okay to have that, that it’s okay to remember. It’s okay to live in a place, and that you are still a worthwhile individual even though a lot of people discard you. Like some people say, some garbage is other people’s treasure. And she [Robyn] comes in when his family kind of discards him and treats him like a really valued individual, and that’s something that a lot of people don’t have.”
Walter Mosley described the process of adapting his novel for the series as difficult, noting that books are different from screenplays and unfold in different ways. “Working all the way through, I kept on looking about what was going to happen next,” explained Mosley. “When you’re writing fiction, you don’t have to worry about that so much because people are reading it, they’re moving through it slowly at their own pace, whatever. But at this time you have to, one, make sure that the revelations that you run across work out for the audience. The other thing of course is we’re making a movie. I don’t have the freedom to just, ‘Okay, and now we’re going to be on the beach in Santa Monica or now we’re going to be in the mountains.’ You can’t do that. You have to say, ‘Well, listen, physically, what am I going to do, how am I going to make things fit?’
But the great thing, of course, is that the actors — I mean certainly Sam and Dominique, but everybody who was involved in the project — they were so good and they so much wanted to make it work that it actually became easy to change things according to what people needed.”
The relationship between Ptolemy and Robyn is the heart and soul of the series, and Samuel L. Jackson revealed he knew he found their “Robyn” while watching Dominique Fishback in a Jamie Foxx film.
“I was just so happy that she had a gap in her schedule that she could do it – and that she really wanted to do it. And when she came in, the relationship between the two of us just being able to talk and laugh between shots… She’s a very focused and different kind of actress than most of the actresses that I’ve met,” explained Jackson. “She embodies the character in a way that a lot of people don’t. I mean, she probably wouldn’t even want you to know that she journals her characters, which is kind of crazy. I don’t have time for that.”
Dominique Fishback confirmed she was so committed to bringing the Robyn from the book into the series that she created a pdf file specifically for the character. “Walter was really great about that. Different quotes I would match with pictures and say, ‘What if she did this?’ And then I emailed it to Sam. I was like, ‘I know it’s a lot, I don’t know if you’re going to read all of this, but this is what I’m thinking.’ It was a huge collaboration with both of them, so I was really thankful.”
Walter Mosley described his novel and the limited series it inspired as a dark fairytale, and Jackson agreed with that description. “[…]It’s a story about a person who has Alzheimer’s but it’s a fairytale. Walter created a drug and a person that comes with a cure, in theory, that’s temporary, and it’s not a real thing. It’s a story of what if we could do this? It’s almost a modern-day fairytale of once upon a time there’s a guy who had Alzheimer’s and he had an opportunity to not have Alzheimer’s for a while and he didn’t, and this is what he did. It helped him remember this thing or it helped him rediscover a piece of his life that was very important to him with the help of a wonderful young lady who came in and gave him the support that no one else did,” said Jackson.
Jackson continued: “So, it’s a fanciful story in that way. It’s based in the reality of, yes, someone who has lost himself over the years to himself, who rediscovers things about himself and she [Robyn] helps him discover things about himself. That’s the fanciful part that allows people to come up out of the heaviness of the story of who Ptolemy is into the lightness of what his life had been when he had a full and fruitful and lively life, and help him solve a mystery that’s been bothering him that’s the nagging, dragging thing that disturbs him more than anything else that he has not fulfilled his purpose in life. And she [Robyn] helps him do that – and this fanciful drug.”
Asked where Ptolemy Grey ranks on the lengthy list of memorable characters he’s played over the decades, Jackson replied, “That’s a difficult question because all the characters that I portray mean something to me and in the moment of doing them, they’re the most important character of the moment. And even characters that I repeat. I’m here in London doing Nick Fury now. I repeat him a lot so I know who he is and he’s easy to access. Ptolemy was easy to access because I read the book a lot. I mean, I read the book a lot of different times in different time periods when we were trying to deal with other people to get it made, and they wanted to make it as an hour-long or hour-and-a-half-long movie, which was impossible. And I was always banging my head against the wall about that because I never wanted to tell the story that way.
Ptolemy fits into the real-life chronology of my life in terms of honoring all those people in my life who had Alzheimer’s, or all the people that I met at the places that my mom was where there were other people. Or every time I walk into a room and I can’t remember why I walked in there, or I can’t remember the name of an actor in this movie. All those things mean something to me.
So, it’s an honest and hopefully endearing assessment of the deterioration of life that a lot of us face, feel, in a personal way with someone who’s in our family or maybe people who feel themselves slipping and need to see and find a way to pull themselves back. So, it’s right there.”
