Interview: Lauren E. Banks On Season 2 Of Showtime's 'City On A Hill', Kevin Bacon, Aldis Hodge
(CBS Local)- "City on a Hill" is coming back to Showtime, and season two of the series starring Kevin Bacon & Aldis Hodge premieres on Sunday, March 28 at 10 pm EST/PST. The show takes place in Boston during the early 1990s and tells the unlikely working relationship between Hodge's character Assistant DA Decourcy Ward and Bacon's character FBI veteran Jackie Rohr.
The series features many great actors and Bacon and Hodge, like Lauren E. Banks, who plays Siobhan Quays, an ambitious private attorney married to Ward. CBS Local caught up with Banks to preview season two, discuss the layers of Quays and how the conversations about racial injustice in 2020 impacted this show.
"The first season was a lot of fun, and it was my first big gig out of grad school," said Banks, in an interview with CBS Local's DJ Sixsmith. "I didn't have anything to compare it to or anything to expect, so I was happy they gave my character so much to dig into. Siobhan is from Cambridge and has parents in the fight and the struggle in Boston in the 60s. She grew up in a certain amount of privilege related to her proximity with the struggle, but of course, she didn't have to inherit any of the burdens. We watch Siobhan navigate doing things to have a career and be ambitious, and we saw a turning point for her after the very gruesome experience of the shooting at the church."
Banks love how the show provides the runway for her and Hodge to explore the depth of the relationship between Siobhan and Decourcy. The actor admires that her character is self-determined and how she values her own mind. While the show takes place in the 1990s, many of the conversations going on in this country during the past year about racial injustice have informed the way Banks and the rest of her colleagues act in this show.
"It's been a little over a year since we started shooting season two," said Banks. "We started in February 2020, and by March 2020, we were all packing our bags and going home for a hiatus. The pandemic hits hard, and so does a lot of social warfare. It hits very close to home. Then to come back in September and shoot a show that deals with the misconduct of law enforcement and people figuring out creative ways to infiltrate a system or to change a system or to hold a system accountable. I was very thankful that I was in a vehicle that allowed me as an artist and a person to express some of the sentiments that I might have expressed during the summer through my character. I was proud of the work we were portraying."
Watch "City On A Hill" on Showtime and the Showtime app.
