“People thought I was out of my mind but I’d created all this material, and then Mimi O’Donnell, who produced the play, moved to Gimlet Media and was looking for a scripted horror podcast. She knew I had done all this work for a serialized version of Dolores’s story and brought the project in.”
The off-Broadway play was primarily a monologue, making adapting it to audio relatively straightforward. It was four hours long, rather than 80 minutes, and the cast of characters grew, but Daphne Rubin-Vega was still in the title role, and Mark describes the podcast as essentially the same piece with a few key changes. The move to TV was a much bigger step.
“Adapting it to television required more rethinking because it’s a totally different media,” Mark says. “Audio and stage are different media but the play is a monologue play so with only a couple of exceptions it doesn’t depict the violence in front of you. The audio version operated under the same principle of engaging the imagination, with the listener or the audience creating the imagery in their own minds. For television it required a more radical reapproach, knowing that when you take something in via the eyes rather than the ears it’s a wildly different experience.”
Perhaps the biggest change for the TV series, however, was that Dolores Roach would no longer be portrayed by Daphne Rubin-Vega, with that role going to Justina Machado, who horror fans will recognize from The Purge: Anarchy.
“Any opportunity I have I want to sing Justina’s praises,” Mark says. “Daphne is such a part of this and I always talk about Daphne’s role in our development, and she is a brilliant storyteller and a writer and producer on the show, thrillingly. So I always have that opportunity to talk about Daphne. But Justina is extraordinary and gives a performance unlike anything we’ve seen on television before. She walks that line, she invites the viewer in. We like Justina. We trust Justina, and I think she allows us to be right there with her as she’s grappling with what she’s doing.”
The Horror of Dolores Roach drops soon, and Mark already has plans for where he would like to take a second series, but much like Sweeny Todd before it, there are still other venues for the story to be retold.
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