Take the classic cops-and-robbers story, light it on fire, and send it careening down the freeway, and you’ve got a good sense of Netflix’s new crime thriller, “Nemesis.”
The series, which is now streaming, hails from “Power” creator Courtney A. Kemp and Tani Marole. The pair had been dating for a while when “we were having conversations about what wasn’t out there in the marketplace, and things we like to watch that had just kind of disappeared,” Kemp, who is now engaged to Marole, tells TVLine. “There’s a certain kind of ’90s style storytelling that has disappeared.
“The genesis of the show,” she adds, “was those conversations.”
“Nemesis” follows two men: Los Angeles Police Department Det. Isaiah Stiles (played by Matthew Law, “Abbott Elementary”) and professional thief Coltrane Wilder (Y’lan Noel, “Insecure”). Wilder wants to pull off one more giant heist before he retires from the game for good. Stiles is obsessed with dismantling the slick robbery ring that Wilder runs.
The two characters were conceived at the same time — “They were always there to diametrically oppose each other,” Marole recalls. Kemp adds that Noel was cast first. “Coltrane has this really great moral center, right?” she says. “He’s really very fixed, in terms of his moral center, which is something that Y’lan came in and gave this great masculinity and manhood to that.” The right actor for Stiles was harder to find; counterintuitively, Law’s background as a comedic performer became the thing that helped him land the role. “He’s loose. He’s able to adapt in this way where you have this really firm, centered energy with Y’lan, and then you have this fluid energy with Matt,” Kemp says.
In chemistry tests, “It was Matt’s energy that changed Y’lan in a way that was really exciting and made us lean in,” she adds. “Matt can stick and move in different ways as a performer.” She laughs. “I mean, obviously: You see that on ‘Abbott Elementary.’ He’s able to handle all that Ava energy, right?”
Law says he found out that Kemp was getting a new show together, and his first thought was: “I want to be there. I want to be involved. She’s a visionary.” At the same time, Law immediately connected with his character. “I saw a human being that was hidden underneath all of this scar tissue,” he says. He remembers thinking: “I know exactly who this guy is, and I have something to bring for him.”
Noel didn’t immediately clock who Coltrane was… but when he did lock in, the analysis was slightly unsettling. “Whether I like to believe it or not, the thing that we do share a little bit, what I’ve learned from him, is how control needs to be monitored,” he says. “I say that because I do have a relationship with control that is a little bit too tight… I’m learning to let that go a little bit and witness all the miracles that happen when I do that.”
I sat down with Noel and Law — and got input from Kemp and Marole — to go deep on the series’ central characters and what makes them who they are. Read on to see what they had to say.
