‘Mrs. Davis’ Director Owen Harris On Grappling With the Necessary Evils of Technology and Working With Emmy-Nominee Betty Gilpin

Owen Harris likely directed your favorite episodes of Netflix’s Black Mirror.

At least, he directed two of my favorite episodes: “San Junipero” and “Striking Vipers.” Both episodes thematically deal with the connection between the human experience and technology. That connection carries over to his latest work, the Peacock limited series Mrs. Davis. In the Betty Gilpin-led project, “Mrs. Davis” is an internationally renown artificial intelligence (AI) being who asks humans for specific favors in order to earn their wings. Imagine if Twitter asked you to go down the street and tell your neighbor to check their email for a message from “Mrs. Davis” in exchange for a blue check, and you’ll get the general idea. Gilpin plays Simone, a nun dead-set on ridding the world of the AI being through a quest to find the Holy Grail. It’s a whole thing.

Despite a technology-heavy resume, Harris isn’t really all that different from the rest of us when it comes to his interactions with technology. To him, it has its plusses and minuses just like everything else, but it’s also a bit of a Pandora’s Box.

“It’s incredibly useful. I am accepting of it because it’s there, and it makes my life easy. Obviously, when you have children, you see how much their upbringing differs from your own upbringing because of technology, and that’s something we’re trying to figure out as we go,” Harris remarked. “I’m super aware of it and aware that I need to be checking myself a little bit. This is a big part of the tale that Mrs. Davis tells. It’s this open conversation about what we want from technology. It feels, at the moment, we are sort of being led by it without really knowing where it’s going to end up?”

That’s also part of the brilliance of Mrs. Davis. As you navigate the twists and turns of the limited series, you’re hardly aware of where you’re going to end up. Predictability is not one of its attributes, and Harris needed to pay special attention to the series’s pacing as it navigates the immense amount of information series creators Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof dole out. Despite introducing dozens of variables, Hernandez and Lindelof never wavered from their personal voices and always provided a stable center from which the project would spring organically, Harris said.

At its core, Mrs. Davis is a story about humanity, according to Harris. Amongst all of the technology and globe-trotting adventures, the characters and their unmistakeable humanity connected him to the material. He wanted the audience to go on that same journey through the, at times, wild and crazy material.

“As soon as Simone appears in the pilot and then we reveal her world and this convent life, I felt an immediate connection with someone who I knew had some sort of important life story or life force going on. Then, we embarked on a slow drip of who she is and what she wishes for,” Harris explained. “My job then was to start to build a team and to build a world that would allow us to encompass all of this world that Mrs. Davis was going to cover. I was then figuring out how to solve these creative challenges and put them on screen. It was a lot of fun doing it.”

Visually, the series stemmed from a compelling mixture of cinematic Westerns and old Warner Brothers cartoons.

“I think Betty coined the phrase ‘No Country for Old Looney Tunes’ to give you an understanding of the sandbox we were playing in,” Harris laughed.

Harris and team looked to the Coen Brothers cinematic palette to reflect their balance of human stories on an absurd scale. Their films are, of course, cinematic and beautiful, but they’re grounded in story, regardless of the absurdity of the plot. They also leveraged a pastel-based color palette inspired by the 1950s-era Chuck Jones Looney Tunes cartoons.

it was a combination that appealed immensely to Emmy-nominated actress Betty Gilpin (Glow) who, according to Harris, walked on set with a complete understanding of the character. She also leveraged her innate ability to pull off the huge tonal shifts into absurdist humor, something Gilpin naturally excels at. Her professionalism and full-on dedication to the character allowed Harris to enhance focus on other aspects of the series, resulting in the critically acclaimed final product.

“She just embodied that character and never wavered from the path, and it gives the piece so much confidence when you have a lead like that because you feel utterly and totally invested in their story,” Harris said. “They feel like they’re in control of the role, and even when they’re out of control, you want to see them out of control because you just want to see what that character is going to do. She was brilliant.”

Mrs. Davis streams exclusively on Peacock.