This post contains spoilers from the premiere of “Fightland.” Proceed accordingly.
In the first few minutes of Starz’s “Fightland,” which premieres today, Maduka “Duke” Kilroy achieves his greatest dream: with an uppercut that lays his opponent flat, the boxer secures the role of heavyweight champion of the world.
“Duke’s worked his whole life to achieve that,” Howard Charles (“Whitstable Pearl”), who plays the fighter, tells me in the video above. “You become the heavyweight champ, you’re the baddest man on the planet. So yeah, Duke reaches the mountaintop, the summit, the zenith of his attainment. Then, of course, what follows is the tragedy of losing everything.”
In quick succession, we learn that Duke is in love with Joy (played by Deborah Ayorinde, “Them”), but Joy is married to Duke’s very powerful boss, a promoter named Kingsley Marshall (Nicholas Pinnock, “For Life”). Kingsley is a brutal operator — he has his men beat a reporter who dares ask a question about his crime ties — but Duke is undeterred: He dreams that he and Joy will run away and start a new life together the next day.
Then Howard goes to meet his brother, Calvin (Jurell Carter, “Emmerdale Farm”) in a hotel parking garage, and Duke’s fate massively, bloodily changes. He’s attacked by a pair of men who hold him down and take a hammer to his hand. When Calvin shows up and tries to intervene, one of the men stick the sharp back side of the hammer’s head into Cal’s neck. He dies nearly instantly.
Mad with grief, Duke sees one of the attackers running away and catches him, pummeling him until the police pull him off. He winds up in prison for years — before the opening credits even roll!
“Everything you care about, everything that you love, on the same night that you lift the title, everything’s taken away from you,” Charles says, setting up what’s to come in the drama from “Power” executive producer Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. “Snatched away from you.”