TV version of Jeff Lemire’s ‘Essex County’ tells ‘beautiful, emotional, magical stories about ordinary people’

As the TV series “Essex County” begins, a boy in a red cape stands staring at a field of wheat. There’s a vulnerability in the sight of the back of his curly head and exposed neck, but he determinedly straps a black mask over his face, clenches his fists, closes his eyes and rises into the air while a woman in a white dress smiles at him.

Then his uncle interrupts his reverie, asking if he’s fed the chickens.

That scene echoes the opening pages of Jeff Lemire’s acclaimed graphic novel trilogy of the same name and also portends what viewers can expect from this CBC drama: a quiet but moving show in which silences convey underlying emotions as powerfully as words.

It has taken some six years for the series to make the leap to the screen from the pages of Lemire’s first “Essex County” book, published in 2008. It debuts Sunday.

Lemire, who has been called Canada’s most prolific comics creator, known for contributions to Marvel, DC and other American franchises as well as his own inventions, described the experience of adapting “Essex County” as both “amazing” and “exhausting” in a Zoom interview.

This isn’t the first of Lemire’s comics to be turned into TV — the second season of “Sweet Tooth” debuts on Netflix April 27 — but it’s the most personal and the one that has demanded the most from him.

“More than any other story I’ve done, maybe, this one was such a big part of my life,” said Lemire. “You know, it was the story where I really found my voice as a writer, so it felt really important to protect it and to do it the right way.”

Thus, Lemire has been involved in every aspect of the series, from location scouting and casting, to writing and pre-production, to shooting and post-production.

“ ‘Sweet Tooth’ was fun in that I got to enjoy it as a spectator and then go home and go back to making comics, whereas this one was put everything in my life on hold for two years and completely immerse myself in this world.”

And it’s a beautiful, poignant world.

Like the novels, the series is set in a fictional version of Essex County, the rural area of Ontario that Lemire grew up in.

The key protagonists are Lester (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong), an 11-year-old boy forced to move in with his Uncle Ken (Brian J. Smith) when his mother dies of cancer, and Lou (Stephen McHattie), an isolated senior citizen who spends more and more of his days revisiting the past, when he and his brother Vince (Ryan Bruce) were hotshot hockey players.

The other main character is Anne (Molly Parker), a travelling nurse, niece to Lou and aunt to Lester through his estranged father Jimmy (Kevin Durand), another former hockey player.

You can’t help but see Lemire in Lester, the boy who mostly prefers to spend time alone drawing cartoons in his notebooks, or donning his Superman cape and pretending he can fly. And Lemire, who’s about to turn 47, acknowledged Lester was “kind of me as a boy” when he first started drawing the graphic novels (although Lemire didn’t lose his mom as a child).

Now, he sees Lester from the point of view of a parent to a pre-adolescent boy. He has also become more sympathetic to Ken, in the books “the stern father figure who was kind of cold and couldn’t connect with the child. We were really able to get into his point of view and his struggle to connect with this boy in a way that was very satisfying for me,” Lemire said.

The “we” in that sentence refers to Eilis Kirwan (“The Whistleblower”), an Irish-born writer and director now living in Canada who was brought into the project to help Lemire with the adaptation.

“I love to do really beautiful, emotional, magical stories about ordinary people,” Kirwan said in the same Zoom interview. “That’s what this book is.

“I loved the magic realism,” she added. “I just loved that aspect of translating memory and yearning and grief into something magical on the screen.”

That magic does not lie just in the scenes where Lester is flying or Lou walks from his living room into his past.

There’s magic in the gorgeous cinematography captured in and around North Bay, Ont.; in the superb acting; in those looks, gestures and pauses that fill in the spaces between words, giving glimpses of the inner lives of the characters and the secrets beneath the ordinary rhythms of their ordinary lives.

Developing those characters to fill five episodes of television while still staying true to the book was the most challenging part of the adaptation for Lemire.

Whereas “the characters of Lou and Lester really truly have always seemed to translate very easily to cinema … the character of Anne from the graphic novel, the character of Ken from the graphic novel, there just wasn’t enough there to make them real walking, talking people onscreen.”

Kirwan, he said, “was able to bring a new voice to those characters and help me develop them more. It was a mixture, really, of keeping all the things about the book that we loved and that translated well, but then building it out in ways that felt complimentary and still part of the world.”

Ken, a closeted gay farmer in the TV series, was a point of connection for Kirwan as a gay woman, but she also identified with Anne, “this woman at a crossroads in her own life story.”

Ken tries the best he can to bridge the chasm between himself and Lester, but it’s also a burden he was unprepared for, one bequeathed to him by a sister he’s still mourning.

Anne, like Lester, lost her mother at a young age, has just become an empty nester and has a strained relationship with her husband, Doug (Rossif Sutherland). And she’s about to learn something from her uncle Lou that will undermine her memories of that beloved mother.

Solitary Lou, meanwhile, is cantankerous and distrustful, unwilling to stop drinking or follow doctor’s orders, and confused by the scenes of the past that intrude on his daily life, often while he’s sitting watching the hockey game.

“It took a long time to cast the show because we were so careful about finding the right people,” Lemire said. “There were certain people like Kevin Durand who once you thought of him as Jimmy, that was it (but) there were so many different directions you could go for Anne or for Lou.

“We are so thrilled with where we landed for sure.”

Kirwan recalled what it was like watching Parker, a prolific Canadian actor who has played everything from a necrophiliac in the movie “Kissed” to a widow navigating a corrupt gold rush town in “Deadwood” to a backstabbing congresswoman in “House of Cards.”

“Anne is a character I was pretty invested in. And then Molly started doing her thing and, sitting watching the monitor, I was pretty emotional,” said Kirwan. “I mean, she’s just so, so brilliant.”

At the time of the interview in early March, Lemire was still wrapping his head around what he and Kirwan and the rest of the team had wrought.

“Being involved with the edit, you’re watching each episode so many times and you’re so detail focused,” he said. “It wasn’t until we started doing the sound mixes the last week or two where … you see it as a piece of work rather than focusing on every little detail … I’m really proud of the work we did together on it for sure.”

“It’s just very moving to me what a huge group of people ended up coming together to make, this very personal story that started with Jeff’s book,” added Kirwan.

“I feel very lucky to be part of something like that.”

Debra Yeo is a deputy editor and a contributor to the Star’s Entertainment section. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @realityeo

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