Cheo Hodari Coker (right) with Luke Cage cast member Frankie Faison and script supervisor Rebecca Schwab

Myles Aronowitz/Netflix
September 20, 2016
In The Mix

Playing to His Strengths

Sarah Hirsch

Before he was a showrunner, a screenwriter, a biographer and a journalist, Cheo Hodari Coker was a college kid crazy for rap.

So, lured by the chance to speak with his favorite singers and musicians, the creator–executive producer of Marvel’s Luke Cage — then an English major at Stanford — began interviewing rappers like Ice Cube and Ice-T for the college paper.

“I would skip classes and go on assignment. It was like Almost Famous,” Coker says, alluding to director Cameron Crowe, who as a teen followed bands for Rolling Stone, then made a film about his experience. One time, Coker recalls, he had to choose between writing a paper on Shakespeare or an article for Vibe magazine.

He chose the latter. “It paid for my class ring.”

After graduating, he landed at the Los Angeles Times, where, two years later, he would cowrite a front-page story on the murder of rapper Notorious B.I.G., aka Biggie Smalls.

His interviews with Smalls, and his knowledge of the artist, led to his penning a biography, Unbelievable: The Life, Death and Afterlife of the Notorious B.I.G.

That, in turn, led to his screenplay for the 2009 film Notorious. Moving into television, Coker wrote and produced episodes of Southland, NCIS:Los Angeles and Ray Donovan. Then came the opportunity to pitch Cage, a series based on Marvel’s black comic-book hero with super strength and unbreakable skin.

“I wanted to give a white audience some inside baseball into black culture,” Coker says of his approach to the show, premiering September 30 on Netflix. “If you look at black heroes from the past, it’s like black is the afterthought. It’s a paint job, as opposed to being a part of somebody’s consciousness.”

And, on Luke Cage , he can at last put some personal spin on his project: a Biggie portrait looms large in the background of one set, and scenes in a nightclub feature current artists like Raphael Saadiq, once one of Coker’s interviewees.

“It’s my first Marvel production, but I’ve always been an every-Wednesday kind of comic-book fanboy,” he says, referring to the day that new issues are released. “So for most of my life, Marvel’s been a part of my life.”

Now he’s very much a part of Marvel’s.


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 8, 2016

Browser Requirements
The TelevisionAcademy.com sites look and perform best when using a modern browser.

We suggest you use the latest version of any of these browsers:

Chrome
Firefox
Safari


Visiting the site with Internet Explorer or other browsers may not provide the best viewing experience.

Close Window