Exclusive: Catching Up With P-Valley’s Brandee Evans and Nicco Annan
BlackFilmandTV.com's Wilson Morales recently caught with actors Brandee Evans and Nicco Annan about their Starz series P-Valley as they reflect on Season 1 before the second season gets a premiere date.
Based on her play Pussy Valley, creator Katori Hall (The Mountaintop, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical) serves as showrunner as well as executive producer.
Down deep in the Mississippi Delta lies an oasis of grit and glitter in a rough patch of human existence where beauty can be hard to find. This southern-fried, hour-long drama tells the kaleidoscopic story of a little-strip-club-that-could and the big characters who come through its doors—the hopeful, the lost, the broken, the ballers, the beautiful, and the damned. Trap music meets film noir in this lyrical and atmospheric series that dares to ask what happens when small-town folk dream beyond the boundaries of the Piggly Wiggly and the pawnshop.
“P-Valley” stars Brandee Evans (“The Bobby Brown Story”) as Mercedes, Nicco Annan (“This is Us”) as Uncle Clifford, Shannon Thornton (“Power”) as Miss Mississippi, Elarica Johnson (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) as Autumn Night, Skyler Joy (Ma) as Gidget, J. Alphonse Nicholson (“Chicago P.D.”) as Lil’ Murda, Parker Sawyers (Southside With You) as Andre, Harriet D. Foy(“Elementary”) as Pastor Woodbine, Tyler Lepley (“The Haves and the Have Nots”) as Diamond, and Dan J. Johnson (“Underemployed”) as Tyler.
Fierce and ambitious, Mercedes is a true boss. After a long reign as the queen of the Pynk, this enterprising hustler is ready to hang up her Lucites and start anew. Determined to parlay her side hustle as a youth dance-team coach into a viable career, she wrestles daily with the respectability politics that demand she feel ashamed of her floss-filled past. As quick with an insult as she is with a prayer, this emotional gangster is fueled by the gift of intuition and a child-like optimism despite seeing the worst of the world. When unforeseen obstacles threaten to derail her retirement, she’s forced to reckon with her own deep-seated fear of failure, a manipulative mother and a new competitor for her Pynk throne.
Sharp-tongued, wise and always serving us with a side of “extra extra,” the owner of the finest “shake junt” in the Dirty Delta is a gender-fluid hustler with a heart of gold plating. Masculine and feminine in equal measure, she doesn't just make the rules — she enforces them with a set of perfectly manicured talons. Armed with little but her razor-sharp wit and a face “beat for the gawds,” she'll stop at nothing to protect her club and her girls from impending doom. A realist who takes her romance like a pinch of salt in cornbread, Uncle Clifford’s rarely taken for a ride. But a longing for love exposes a vulnerability that proves to be a strength as she learns — for the first time in her life — to risk it all.