Diarra Kilpatrick stars as a school teacher-turned-mystery solver in Diarra from Detroit.

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Diarra Kilpatrick stars as a school teacher-turned-mystery solver in Diarra from Detroit.

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Detroit native Diarra Kilpatrick has always wanted to share her version of the city with the world: “For me, the gems of Detroit have far outweighed some of the more challenging aspects of growing up there,” the actor, writer and producer says.

Kilpatrick’s new BET+ series, Diarra from Detroit, is inspired, in part, by the time she spent as a little girl watching Columbo and Perry Mason with her grandmother. Kilpatrick notes that despite the fact that all the women in her life seemed to be obsessed with murder mystery shows back then, she never saw Black women driving the narrative.

Diarra from Detroit is a dark comedy about a public school teacher going through a divorce who decides to hit the dating scene. When a guy she meets on Tinder ghosts her, Diarra goes on a hunt to find out why — and winds up embroiled in a decades old mystery.

Kilpatrick says she was initially reluctant to use her own first name in the title for the show because she was concerned that the audience would assume she was simply being herself instead of playing a character. But as the show progressed in development, the decision began to feel right.

“It felt like it was like an announcement,” Kilpatrick says. “Almost, like ‘Diarra from Detroit is ready to be seen!’ ”

In addition to working on this latest series, Kilpatrick is an actor, writer and producer who created and starred in the ABC digital original satirical comedy American Koko, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award. She also co-starred for three seasons in the HBO period drama Perry Mason.

Interview Highlights

On her tendency to joke about dark things

My father, the only way to describe him is just a damn fool. He cannot take anything seriously. They say comedy is tragedy plus time. He doesn’t need the time. It’s just … funeral, joke. Someone’s hurt, joke. It’s never too soon, joke. So he just really doesn’t have the ability to take anything seriously. And I think my mom took everything really seriously and had a tremendous amount of depth of feeling and thought and everything. And so I think making sense of the two of those personalities within myself, has kind of been my lot. And I think making sense of comedy and depth is probably a hallmark of my work.

On casting Diarra from Detroit by listening to the actors’ voices

It’s in the voice. I could be playing auditions on the computer and walk away from the computer to get a cup of tea or something, and the voice will drive me back. We’re not really doing the vocal fry thing in the Midwest. We’re not really doing the pitching up thing in the Midwest. Detroit is a southern town up north for me. And so it’s that bit of southern in the voice, it’s that bit of bass in the voice. Assuredness in the voice. I could tell it immediately.

On learning to drop her Detroit accent in acting school, but then using it to get roles afterward

I went to theater school, too, and they beat me up pretty good when I first got there. … They were like, “Ma’am, what is this accent that you have? Your vowels are all over the place. You sound a hot mess.” … Even though I did love being at Tisch and that training, I didn’t love the kind of judgment that I felt about my accent and being the only Black girl in studio. It was like, “We got to fix that!” Because as soon as you graduate, no one’s asking you to speak the King’s English. As a dark skinned, Black, 20-something actress, they want your regional dialect. A lot of times you’re going out for Prostitute No. 4. They don’t need you to sound like you’re doing a Shakespearean play. So that part of it was interesting to kind of lose it and then kind of learn to regain it, because that’s what the industry was requiring of me. And I did wish that it had been framed that way for me in school. Like, there’s nothing wrong with your accent. In fact, you’re probably going to work more with your regional dialect and without it.

On seeing the beauty in her Detroit childhood

I grew up in the city. When I was really young, we didn’t have a lot of money. My mom and I lived in Section 8. We lived in Calumet Townhomes right off the Lodge Freeway. … I had a very idyllic childhood. I have a very pristine idea of what it was to grow up in that Section 8 housing community. And I think it was in part my imagination.

It’s not there now, but there used to be, right across from where I grew up, this big field. It was an empty field, and I would cut across that field to get to the corner store whenever my mother would bless me with a couple dollars to go get ice cream or whatever. And that field, in my imagination, in my mind, was honestly like Maria von Trapp, like The Sound of Music, like Austrian vistas and mountains. The grass was so high. I would go in that field and pick flowers for my mother. I would sing and dance and get lost in that field. And it wasn’t until I was much older that I was like, “That was an empty lot. The grass was mad high because it should have been cut. Those were dandelions. They’re not flowers.” There was a church bell that would ring. I was always like, this is magic, because I guess that’s just the love that I felt. And that’s just something about me.

So I do realize not everybody has that point of view on it. I’m able to see the beauty of it. I also am able to recognize that there are challenges and there are things there that need to be fixed. So I feel like I can make room for both.

On the “angry Black woman” stereotype

It is a trap. They have made us afraid of our anger. … But at the end of the day, anger is so beautiful and so powerful to me. Nothing changes unless someone gets angry. Obviously you don’t just want to aim a bunch of unwieldy anger all over the place. That’s not going to be constructive either. But there is great information in your anger. There’s great direction in your anger. And, of course, there’s great change that comes out of somebody being like, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” … I think that when Black women are afraid of it, it will siphon off some of your power and your intuition and your drive.

On seeing a mural for the show in Detroit

I got a chance to go to Detroit with my husband and my baby and my sister and my oldest friend in the world, and we stood out there and took pictures. And it was a beautiful moment. … I was trying to figure out how do I take a brick wall back on the plane with me? But it was a really beautiful moment. And I have to shout out Sydney James, who was a wonderful muralist in Detroit, who created it with her team. And I just try to keep my head down and do my work. I’ll try to listen for my assignment and just follow and be obedient to it. But there are those moments that kind of shake you, like, “Girl, you’re doing it. You’re doing it! Your face is on this whole wall!” That’s crazy. And it was a really touching, lovely moment.

Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

A bag becomes a different thing entirely when worn by different personalities — similar to how no one perfume smells the same on two different people. To test out this idea, we invited four different artists to style the same bag into their personal look and lifestyle for one day, dreaming up places across L.A. where they would wear it. The bag? The Acne Studios rivet wine box bag from the brand’s spring/summer ’24 collection. It felt like a bag tough enough to withstand a long day in L.A. and lightweight enough to not drag you down.

In the third installment of the series, Giselle Lopez, a model, stylist and DJ, takes the bag to Mariachi Plaza, where she sees cumbia sonidera bands play on the weekends with friends. For Lopez, the Acne Studios bag summons her inner emo tween who just won’t quit. “I’ve tried colorful styles. I’ve tried classy or minimalist,” she says. “But I always go back to all black, studs, spikes.”

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m a DJ, a model, stylist and I also run a party with my friend Dante called Discoteka. We go as DT:33. We do them monthly and invite a lot of DJs from Mexico or outside of L.A., just to bring in new music and new sounds to people.

Describe your personal style.

I would say my 12-year-old emo self really won. Everything is always inspired by that. I’ve tried colorful styles. I’ve tried classy or minimalist. But I always go back to all black, studs, spikes. Really into punk as well. That has been the main inspiration.

Talk to me about dreaming up an outfit around this Acne Studios bag.

I think about accessories first because they always make an outfit. So if you want a choker — which is usually what I like to style myself with, I like cross necklaces, spike chokers, all of that — I usually look at my [other] accessories I have to style, which is a bag. From there I go, “Maybe I want to do a dress, a skirt, see what I have in my closet.” I usually search on EBay. EBay is my No. 1 place to shop. I go on my Notes app a lot. I write down, “black halter top, belt, skirt …” and then I go back to it.

How does sense of place inform sense of style? How do you travel through L.A. with style in mind?

The party scene in L.A. has always inspired my fashion ever since I started playing out here. I was a little raver girl five years ago, so just seeing all the colorful looks people wear that are very inspired by Japanese culture, Japanese raver fashion, Fruits magazine and all that. I like to mix it up by doing a little raver in there, but also keep it still very punk and dark. I chose [to bring the bag] to Mariachi Plaza because when I first moved here, I spent a lot of time in Boyle Heights, and this became one of my favorite spots. On weekends, they would have cumbia sonidera bands playing here and I would come and see them with my friends. My grandmother is from Guadalajara and my little brother plays in a mariachi band, so I grew up around a lot of mariachi. Seeing men in their mariachi suits, it’s very special to me. It feels like home.

Producer: Mere Studios
MUA: Andrés Nuñez

Andrew Scott plays Tom Ripley in the new Netflix series, Ripley, drawn from Patricia Highsmith’s novel.

Lorenzo Sisti/Netflix © 2021

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Lorenzo Sisti/Netflix © 2021

Andrew Scott plays Tom Ripley in the new Netflix series, Ripley, drawn from Patricia Highsmith’s novel.

Lorenzo Sisti/Netflix © 2021

For a total psychopath, Tom Ripley is remarkably popular. As we near the 25th anniversary of the acclaimed Oscar-nominated big screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s most infamous creation, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Netflix has released a striking new reimagining, simply titled Ripley. Sinister and visually stunning, the series reminds us why the book continues to influence popular culture.

Through seven decades, Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley has grown in allure as a masterwork of American noir, boosted by – but distinct from – its adaptations. The core story is always the same: A wealthy man enlists fraudster Tom Ripley, his son’s distant acquaintance, to travel to Italy and woo his errant, playboy son back to the fold; but rather than returning Dickie to his family, an envious Tom disposes of him and assumes his identity. Other murders follow to cover the first.

This bloody-minded serial killer fantasist and antisocial social climber would become Patricia Highsmith’s best known and best loved creation. She published five Ripley novels in all from 1955 to 1991, the last a few years before her death. Since his debut, her all-American psychopath has inspired six screen adaptations, a play by Phyllis Nagy, and a musical staging. That legacy is a testament to Ripley’s complicated appeal – amoral, unassuming and audacious — and Highsmith’s scalpel-sharp writing. There’s something irresistible about an unapologetic grifter, who seizes the chance at a better life by stealing someone else’s. The text is rich enough to handle wildly different interpretations that feel true to the original and brilliant in their own right.

A window into Ripley’s roots

In the first Ripley novel, one childhood scene is especially vivid. When he was 12, and his parents long dead, Tom’s reluctant guardian Aunt Dottie made him get out of her car and run an errand on foot while stuck in traffic. When the cars started moving again, Tom was forced into “running between huge, inching cars, always about to touch the door of Aunt Dottie’s car and never being quite able to…” Instead of waiting, his aunt “had kept inching along as fast as she could go…” Worse, she taunted him, “yelling, ‘Come on, come on, slowpoke!’ out the window.” The memory ends with Tom in teary frustration and his aunt hurling a slur at him: “Sissy! He’s a sissy from the ground up. Just like his father!”

This story bubbles up into the memory of the adult con man Tom Ripley while he’s lying on a ship deck chair on the way to Europe. Buoyed in body and spirit by the luxury and abundance of his surroundings, Tom starts to plot a brighter future for himself. But he keeps returning to past indignities, and that cruel vignette stands out. Looking back from his comfortable perch, Ripley thinks, “It was a wonder he had emerged from such treatment as well as he had.” This isn’t justification, just a part of Ripley’s essence – Ripley as a vulnerable boy rather than cipher or leech or thief, a man whose emotional and physical deprivations curdle into resentment and violence.

Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley in the Netflix series Ripley.

Philippe Antonello/Netflix © 2023

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That window into Ripley’s roots is one reason I loved re-reading the novel in the lead up to a new adaptation. Highsmith illuminates the inner life of what she recognized as her “psychopath hero” with identification rather than judgment (Highsmith was openly enamored of her creation). That intense interiority is one reason Highsmith is often credited with helping reinvent and popularize the psychological thriller, a genre with roots in the 19th century, and why her influence persists despite a deservedly controversial reputation. Her debut novel became Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) less than a year after publication, and her 1957 novel Deep Water appears on The Atlantic’s list of 100 Great American novels.

With Ripley, the narration lives outside of Tom but close enough for dissection. We learn that he’s a loner but not completely, that he gets antsy around people, only able to sustain a performance of normalcy for so long. He’s caught between a need for independence born of his smothering yet loveless upbringing and an aching desire for other people’s good regard.

In proximity to beauty and privilege but not of it, Tom’s neediness escalates. He’s ruthless and amoral, but human and self-conscious. He sobs! And he yearns.. Scene by masterful scene, sentence by sentence, with each disturbing thought and memory, Highsmith reveals how Ripley’s psyche veers out of bounds, a slow drip punctuated by shocking jumps. When Dickie and Tom give a taxi home to a local girl they bump into, and she thanks them, calling them the nicest Americans she’s ever met, Tom remarks to Dickie, “You know what most crummy Americans would do in a case like that—rape her.” It’s a sharp kick in the midst of banality.

Worse, when real violent thoughts finally result in action, Tom revels like a pig in mud in his stolen persona. Feeling “blameless and free,” he likens his confidence in Dickie’s shoes to how “a fine actor probably feels when he plays an important role on a stage with the conviction that the role he is playing could not be played better by anyone else.” The great beauty of Highsmith’s novel lies in moments like this, illuminating the dark recesses of a psyche spinning out of control.

A story ripe for retelling

A portrait this faceted begs for retelling and reinvention — it’s a dream role for an actor — but the text also defies total capture. Highsmith could make a two-act play out of the domestic symbolism and social psychological dynamics of Dickie purchasing a refrigerator.

The beauty of the 1999 movie and 2024 series interpretations of Ripley, despite this high bar, is that they’re fully formed artworks of their own.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law in the film The Talented Mr. Ripley.

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Netflix’s series has both the text and the sublimely entertaining 1999 movie with its constellation of Hollywood stars to live up to. Matt Damon and Jude Law were at the height of their powers as Tom Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf (Law earned a best supporting actor Oscar nomination), and Gwyneth Paltrow was incandescent and multidimensional as Dickie’s girlfriend Marge. They’re memorably supported by Cate Blanchette and Philip Seymour Hoffman as trust fund-babies abroad. Their production is gorgeously shot in the sun-drenched Amalfi coast and the Oscar nominated soundtrack beautifully amplifies the emotion and story. In Anthony Minghella’s screenplay, when the nastiness and violence emerge from Dickie as well as Tom it’s an arresting aberration against this deliberately effervescent, candy-colored backdrop.

The appeal of Minghella’s acclaimed and popular film has more than endured, but it’s not the only classic iteration of Ripley’s debut. The first significant big screen rendering was the 1960 French thriller Purple Noon, starring Alain Delon as a Ripley with beauty that rivals Dickie’s. There are three less celebrated adaptations of other Ripley novels. 2023’s Saltburn wasn’t a Ripley reimagining but its story of upper class ruin at the hands of an interloper seem to spring from a similar well. Plus, the film’s most audacious interlude reads as an homage to Jude Law and Matt Damon’s homoerotic bathtub scene, and the movie and discourse around added new heat to the Highsmith mystique.

Anthony Minghella, far left, director of the film “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” poses with cast members, from left, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman at the premiere of the film on Dec. 12, 1999, in the Westwood section of Los Angeles.

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Anthony Minghella, far left, director of the film “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” poses with cast members, from left, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman at the premiere of the film on Dec. 12, 1999, in the Westwood section of Los Angeles.

Chris Pizzello/AP

Despite all that history, the pedigreed new Netflix production successfully forges its own haunting vision of Ripley. Written and directed by Steve Zaillian (screenwriter of Schindler’s List and The Irishman), Ripley (mostly) benefits from having more space to breathe than the film – and from Andrew Scott’s unflinching performance.

Leaving the Hot Priest of Fleabag fame behind, Scott gives a harder, colder interpretation of the title role. Though significantly older than Highsmith’s 25-year-old antihero, the 47-year-old BAFTA winner Scott (All of Us Strangers, Sherlock) fully embodies the brooding and seething Ripley. Rather than charming and boyish, Netflix’s Tom Ripley is visibly creased and battered. Instead of Highsmith’s peevish 25-year-old, who notices with pleasure and opportunism physical resemblances with his privileged friend, Ripley and Dickie’s relationship is more clearly grifter and target. Ripley director Zaillan also advances the timeline to 1961, plunging Ripley into a more modern and edgy world.

Scott is well supported by Johnny Flynn (Emma) as a feckless Dickie, and Dakota Fanning, who delivers a mannered and pricklier Marge, the role that Gwyneth Paltrow made famous. If there’s one flaw, it’s that Ripley masters the style and techniques of Hitchcockian noir, without its momentum. This series’ slow deliberate pace and eerie quiet can sometimes feel like a slog.

Still, Ripley‘s performances and striking style elevate the series. Rendered in stark Black and white tones, each shot is as visually arresting as the best still photo. Anthropological and artistic, it’s the opposite of Anthony Minghella’s bright Italian playground presided over by Jude Law as a golden god. This approach transforms even the most ordinary scene —a cat on a bench in a Roman rooming house — into a foreboding tableau. The noirish visuals are the perfect look for this seedier and more cerebral thriller. So too are the peeling paint, decaying edifices, and too many steps on which the camera lingers. All together, the aesthetic looks like something out of an avant-garde European movie like Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête or a painting by Caravaggio. The series significantly expands on what Highsmith wrote about Tom’s relationship with high art, spinning the idea that he had “discovered an interest in paintings” from emulating Dickie into an obsessive identification with a 17th-century Italian painter known for his bloody and brutal canvases, interplay of shadow and light, and for murder. It’s an ingenious representation of Tom’s descent on screen.

With these inspired creative choices, the Anthony Minghella film and the Netflix series stand on their own. But if you have the inclination, the two major screen productions and the novel form a phenomenal triple bill.

A slow runner and fast reader, Carole V. Bell is a cultural critic and communication scholar focusing on media, politics and identity. You can find her on Twitter @BellCV.