A supernatural love story! First Kill is a highly anticipated TV series that showcases a queer couple — with a killer twist.
“When it comes time for teenage vampire Juliette to make her first kill so she can truly become a member of her powerful vampire family, she sets her mind on the new girl in town, Calliope,” the official synopsis for the show, which Emma Roberts is an executive producer on, reads. “But things are about to get complicated, as Juliette discovers that Calliope is a vampire hunter, who hails from a long line of prestigious slayers and is on a quest to kill her first vampire so that she may join her family’s pursuit. The two find that their respective missions and targets are not so simple — and are way too easy to fall for.”
Ahead of the show’s debut, showrunner Felica D. Henderson opened up about how her goddaughter’s coming out experience inspired her interest in the story. “I thought, ‘Boy, this was on when she was 16, how would her life have been different?’” she told Shadow and Act in May 2022. “And I wanted to be part of a world that represented her experience as normal.”
For Henderson, it was a priority to center the Netflix series around underrepresented communities that usually doesn’t get to be the focus.
“To bring representation [and] to be able to be in a genre space with such significant, three-dimensional Black representation and significant, three-dimensional, queer representation that wasn’t about coming out,” the screenwriter explained. “There’ve been lots of amazing stories about coming out, amazing in all kinds of ways from pain to joy, to what it means to those you love. But in a world where we are all just treated like whoever we love is our normal and that’s fine, I love that about it because then we could go on and just explore the relationship and I thought that was important.”
Cast member Dominic Goodman, who plays Calliope’s brother, also praised First Kill for the way it approached its storytelling. “First off, I will say this is a family of monster hunters; while I will say this show has a heavy presence of vampires, we are a family of monster hunters,” he teased to Popternative that same month. “I think it’s going to be pretty exciting to see a full Black family in this world of sci-fi, and obviously, you have some great actors like Elizabeth Mitchell playing a vampire. There’s some cool action.”
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