[This story contains spoilers from Netflix‘s Dead Boy Detectives.]
Dead Boy Detectives star George Rexstrew is quick to describe his first in-person encounter with his co-stars ahead of filming the pilot: “Love at first sight.”
Up to that point, interactions between the leads of the Netflix series that released April 25 had taken place during chemistry reads through computer screens. But with filming commencing, Rexstrew would meet Jayden Revri at Heathrow Airport where they flew from London to Vancouver. A day later, Kassius Nelson would join them.
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“We built such an incredible relationship before we even read a script,” Revri tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We were just so open and we really helped each other. We had the most beautiful relationship, us four together.”
Those four are Revri, Rexstrew, Nelson and Yuyu Kitamura, the latter who says she was exposed to her costars “British charm” on the Vancouver set for only a few hours during the pilot, arriving about a month into the trio’s filming. “Like [my character] Niko, I really felt like I was coming into this group — this detective agency — because they had a much longer time to film and get to know each other,” she tells THR. “So it was almost fitting that Niko and Yuyu came into the threesome and was like, ‘Hey, it’s me!’”
The actors — all of whom are leading a major U.S. series for the first time — would bond over months of shooting, regularly serving as each other’s on-set support. “Everyone has a day where you’re not feeling too great or you’re tired. But the beauty of us was if one of us was feeling that way, the other three would work 10 times harder to bring the other person back up,” says Revri.
Offscreen, the cast lived in the same housing complex, frequently going between one another’s places to run lines, watch TV, cook for one another or “be very British and have a cup of tea and decompress,” says Nelson. “We all have a sense of humor that really helped to bind us together.”
Rexstrew points to their shared experience of filming around a global pandemic as another source of their instantaneous closeness. “On top of the fear, to speak frankly, of leading a massive show halfway across the world, this was during real hard COVID times. So I think all of us, in terms of our capacity for putting ourselves out there into the world, were definitely compromised to a certain extent,” Rexstrew explains. “There was something about having two people come with me from home. It felt like we were all in this together.”
Kitamura adds, “There’s so much strength in coming together; there’s always going to be someone out there for you if you put yourself out there. Everybody is so uniquely different and brings whatever they bring, but together we form this beautiful puzzle.”
That puzzle was pieced together by the writing team of Dead Boy Detectives, which includes creator and co-showrunner Steve Yockey. While in high school, he also quickly “fell in love,” connecting instantly with the characters of Charles Rowland (Revri), Edwin Payne (Rexstrew), and Crystal Palace (Nelson) after reading Issue 25, “Season of Mists.”
Created by writer Neil Gaiman and artist Matt Wagner, Yockey’s adaptation of the characters follows aged-up versions of the duo, whose lives are cut short at the hands of cruel classmates. Upon discovering each other in the afterlife, the Dead Boys make the decision not to move on and instead work together to help other ghosts resolve their unfinished business.
Yockey describes Charles as “an excited Labrador Retriever” who avoids having “to face the bad things that happened in his life.” Edwin, meanwhile, is uptight and pinned up, “like he’s got a Jacobean coat that he just keeps pulling tighter and tighter” so his emotions don’t show. “It’s because any vulnerability was seen as weakness when they were kids and they have things to hide — or at least, they think they do.”
Meanwhile, Edwin “enters the pilot with two main facts: I’m the world’s greatest detective and Charles Rowland is my best friend. That’s been my existence for 30 years,” says Rexstrew of his characterization. “It’s a ritual that is quite prescriptive at that point.”
Revri says of his own performance, “The word I use the most for Charles is ‘charming.’ I really wanted to showcase the contrast between being chipper and upbeat, and hiding things below the surface.”
They are an “opposites attract” situation, says co-showrunner Beth Schwartz, with their differences being their point of connection. “For Edwin, Charles is the type of friend that when he was living, he would never have had. That’s exciting for him,” she explains. “For Charles, he likes everyone and everyone likes him — he loves life, he’s friendly, he’s flirty, he’s funny. He sees Edwin differently than maybe other people would have seen him, and the way that Edwin treats Charles is different than he was ever treated by anyone else.”
After several decades together, the duo meet Crystal, a teen medium who loses her memories after the boys seemingly free her from a demon’s twisted grip. She agrees to stay with them — to Charles’ delight, and to the chagrin of Edwin — joining them on a case of a missing young girl. Traveling from London to Port Townsend, they eventually meet Niko, another teen who, along with a recent family death, has a brush with demonic possession.
“There’s something bright, endearing and really optimistic about Niko. She hasn’t really been harmed by the world. She’s the character who does represent love, but also a sense of openness and purity. She has an inner, quiet confidence,” says Kitamura. “Crystal really has this boldness of confidence and angst, and she is so open about it. To lose your identity, it’s a feeling that I can’t even understand, but her character is struggling with finding that center and that core, which is something I think Niko understands.”
Nelson adds, “There are points where we’ve all been not sure of who we are or where we fit in the world, or are coming to terms with ourselves or having set things about ourselves that we didn’t like or wouldn’t do now.”
With her appearance, Crystal “completely disrupts the dynamic” between the Dead Boys, becoming the focus of Charles’ charming affections and a target of Edwin’s ire as he grapples with the fear of losing his friend to someone else. “Her arrival forces Edwin to hold a mirror to himself for the first time and, because Edwin has been in the company of really just Charles for three decades, he gets a little bit possessive and jealous,” says Rexstrew.
“I don’t really think anyone challenges Edwin the way that Crystal does. She’ll call him out on things. If he slips up, she won’t let it slide,” Nelson says. “I weirdly think that’s something Edwin comes to love about her, and sometimes friendships start that way.”
In a highly stylized young adult series set in the genre-rich universe of Gaiman — where charming characters (played by equally charming actors) are facing a bevy of spectral shenanigans — it would be easy for character development to get reduced to couplings or buried under monstrous plots.
Instead, the show’s first season rides on the journey of each teen (living or dead), the ways they become inextricably entwined with each other, and how their new relationships create both friction and new possibility through confronting forms of grief — the loss of family, a sense of self, of time and of experiences.
“Niko just wants to be there for people in the way that I think she wants someone to be there for her, especially as her father passes away,” says Kitamura. “For her to lose love or to lose someone who is so integral to her, she is also yearning for the same kind of connection with people. There is something important about being an ally or being there for people, and when someone gives her the space to exist, I think she mirrors the same.”
Rexstrew adds, “Niko arrives and becomes an external aid in Edwin’s journey muddling through love. What’s so wonderful about Edwin and Niko’s relationship is how gentle and sensitive she is, but also blissfully unaware in terms of helping Edwin navigate through this tough journey.”
For Crystal and Charles, whose friendship teeters on the edge of something more, Nelson describes them as both lost in their own individual ways. They “find a sense of belonging in each other different to their connections with Edwin. There’s a softness, an unspoken understanding Crystal and Charles have. They’re hurting in a very similar way but they deal with it very differently and they can see through each other’s facade. It’s easier for [Edwin and Charles] to mask with each other, but Crystal and Charles are not able to do that.”
Meanwhile, Crystal and Niko not only mirror Edwin and Charles’ opposites-attract dynamic, but like the boys, underscore the significance of the teens’ choice to stay with one another — beyond insecurity, doubt or difference — and find their place and completeness they’ve been seeking in life (and death).
“You would think that your parents might be the backbone. Family might be something to fall back on. But what these girls have created is their own family and their own sense of support,” says Kitamura. “Family is important, but what we’re saying is also that your chosen family is important and will play a vital role in who you become. The girls have chosen each other and chosen this detective agency.”
With this lead ensemble blossoms a love square of sorts — though there is a particular dynamic between Edwin, Charles and Crystal that Schwartz tells THR was fun to explore.
“We get to play around with love triangles that you see in shows with teenage characters. But in this one, we get the added element that one of the people involved is a psychic teenage girl who lost her memories and is being stalked by her ex-demon.” The other two, she adds, are ghosts who died in the early 1900s and the ‘80s who are detectives. “You have lots of complications there that are more than just your average love triangle.”
Those complications, at one point, take both boys literally to hell and back, resulting in mutual heartfelt and vulnerable confessions. It’s true to the spirit of love present within the series and its characters, but is also something that hasn’t always been explored with such unflinching sincerity on TV.
“To the end of the series, Charles is dealing with the things and overcoming them. But in doing so, he has to face the problems head on,” Revri says. “So I didn’t want to half do it with that scene. I took myself to that place that Charles would have been: open to situations.”
Rexstrew talks about how he approached Edwin revealing his feelings for Charles. “In that moment,” he says, “the character has nothing to lose, and so I tried that. But it was definitely one of the hardest scenes to film for me, because it felt like there were a lot of stakes. They put a lot of trust and faith in us as actors to convey the story as truthfully as possible.”
All the love viewers may feel between the show’s leading characters is “an intrinsic part of the show,” says Yockey. “You want the show to have stakes and you want it to feel emotionally satisfying, but also emotionally confusing because you are rooting for different things from week to week.”
“We came up with this really great tone — bittersweet — that connects us back in every episode. We make sure that every scene, every storyline, you get the bittersweetness of the show,” Schwartz adds. “[Dead Boy Detectives] is a coming-of-age story, but it’s a coming-of-age story after its main characters are already dead. You have all the fun angst of figuring out who you are, but the context is so different. It’s a tragedy. It’s tragic. They died as teenagers and you kind of forget that, because they’re so fun and living their best afterlife.”
For Rexstrew, Dead Boy Detectives is the kind of love story made for this moment. “I think there have been other big franchises in the past as we grew up where that main takeaway is love,” he tells THR. “It’s really exciting to be part of a show where that is the same prominent message. But it feels like it belongs in 2024.”
Dead Boy Detectives is now streaming on Netflix. Read more from the showrunners unpacking the season finale.
