If Chris Pine is the night, then call me a lamp post and sign me up for some all-night eerie street corners!
Kidding aside, Pine will move to TV in short order, appearing in the TNT miniseries I Am The Night, created by Sam Sheridan and directed in part by Wonder Woman's Patty Jenkins. In the series, Pine, fresh off his movie Outlaw King, plays reporter Jay Singletary, who finds disgrace while pursuing a story about Dr. George Hodel (Jefferson Mays), a Hollywood doctor who was suspected of being the Black Dahlia's killer. Jay returns to the case when he hears about a young woman named Fauna Hodel (India Eisley), who is being raised by her adoptive mother Jimmy Lee (played by Golden Brooks) in Reno, Nevada. Fauna happens to be the granddaughter of the very doctor who derailed Jay's journalism career.
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The newest trailer — which you can watch below, exclusively on Refinery29 — focuses more on Fauna, who is both the show's catalyst and the show's central mystery.
"Who is Fauna Hodel, Mama?" Fauna asks her mother in the trailer. That's a complicated question. (It could also be an alternate title for the series.) Fauna is based on a real person, also named Fauna Hodel, who wrote a tell-all memoir in 2008 called One Day She'll Darken. Fauna's mother Tamar Hodel gave up her daughter immediately after Fauna was born, claiming that Fauna's father was Black, which made Fauna a disgrace to the family. She was then shipped to Reno, Nevada, where maid Jimmy Lee, who was Black, raised the apparently mixed race girl.
The real villain of the story, though, is Dr. Hodel. Hodel became a prime suspect in the murder of the Black Dahlia in 1949 after he was accused of molesting his teenaged daughter Tamar. Amid these accusations, Tamar claimed that her father murdered Elizabeth Short, the so-called Black Dahlia. Fauna's 2008 memoir, which inspired the TNT series, added some dimension to the ongoing question of the Black Dahlia murder. Who is Fauna Hodel? She's the key to a lot of very important information, as Jay might say.
Watch the full trailer for I Am The Night, below. The show premieres at 9 p.m. EST on January 28.
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