HBO’s new suspense miniseries DTF St. Louis turns surburban life on its head. We had the opportunity to speak with creator Steven Conrad and actors Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday about bringing this show to life.
Season spoilers have been removed from our conversation.
DTF St. Louis leans fully into its title, while simultaneously upping the stakes with a murder mystery. With a unique plot that leaves you guessing who’s good, bad, or something in-between, this new miniseries delivers just enough mystery to keep you hooked for a thrilling good time.
Created by Steven Conrad, we had the chance to watch the first four episodes and learn more about how this show came to life. Actors Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday deliver intriguing performances as a crime-solving duo who definitely hold more than meets the eye. In our conversations, we were able to hear from them directly about their experiences. Conrad gave us a deep dive into his approach to bringing this world to our screens:
Conrad: You really can’t choose what you’re entertained by. It just occurs to you what you’re entertained by… I fell in love with suspense and the mystery very early. And it was simultaneous to starting to love filmmaking. So when I was trying to learn about it, it was the genre that was teaching me. I wanted to stay in the genre… where is tension? You can find it — it’s everywhere. It’s behind every door. These struggles that are in people’s lives, every person you’ll ever meet. There’s desperation one way or another: bad partner, tax debt, bad news, bad health. Struggling, struggling, struggling leads to desperation, leads to bad decision-making. And I thought, “What do I have around me now, how can I make this kind of clear?” You want to say Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock, you want to go “Oh two people met and all hell broke loose.” I had been trying to find a title that said there’s going to be trouble. And the promise of the DTF version of your dating life, your intimacy, it’s saying this to grown ups: you have your married life. This person has their married life. You meet and you give each other this excitement, and you go back to your married lives and there are no consequences… So the title was hanging there waiting to be built on, explored, discovered. And then I had David. David and I were dead set on doing suspense this year. And starting to figure out who could David play that would surprise you and lead you as the victim, but maybe not.
When asked about their approach to bring their characters to life, Jenkins and Sunday were very open about how they allowed the process to naturally unfold:
Jenkins: I try not to map out how this is going to happen. I just try to let it just happen, see where it goes. When you try to control it, sometimes it gets too one note or it’s not really human. And so I think we were probably as surprised as anybody about where it went
Sunday: I think in our dynamic, that was always a surprise. I couldn’t plan how I would respond or what I would bring out. But it’s funny because Richard definitely is very, you know, let it reveal itself in just in the way that we’re going through the story. But because we were filming all the episodes kind of at the same time, sometimes several in a day, I kind of created a mind map so I could make sure I could keep track of what I knew at certain points. Kind of like a detective would, to make sure that it made sense where I was emotionally with the case at whatever point we were filming. Just so that I wouldn’t get my wires crossed throughout it all. But, as Richard said, as far as actually being in the scene and being in the world, you can’t plan it out, you kind of just have to live in the moment.
Watch our full conversation here:
You can catch new episodes of DTF St. Louis on HBO Sunday’s at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT, and it will be available to stream on HBO Max. The series finale will air on Sunday, April 12 at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT, ahead of the Season 3 premiere of Euphoria.
