‘I had nightmares for a month’: Damson Idris reveals the traumatic experience behind filming ‘Snowfall’

Damson Idris portrays drug kingpin Franklin Saint with such a nuance that leaves the industry with little doubt during the awards season, but according to what the actor has recently revealed, that level of character immersion comes at a terrible cost.

Snowfall is a prologue to the acclaimed 1991 flick, Boyz n the Hood, and so attempts to depict the harsher reality of the criminal underworld we unwittingly brush up against every day. The show is set in the ’80s and depicts Los Angeles as you’ve never seen it before — a city in the grip of a drug epidemic. At the center of this story is a young up-and-coming crime boss called Franklin Saint and portrayed by Damson Idris, who has spearheaded the series.

Idris recently appeared alongside some of his fellow thespians for the Hollywood Reporter‘s Drama Actor Roundtable and revealed why this latest season of Snowfall pushed him over the edge.

“We do ten episodes [per season] for my show and this last season, I was hitting a block. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not doing it right.’ So I went to the corner and I was looking at the wall and I was like, ‘Come on, devil. Come on, devil. Come to me,’ because I had to do something crazy. I had nightmares for a month. I had nightmares every day, and I just felt that energy. I had to pray and do all this stuff to get rid of it. You know, you call your mom up and you’re like, ‘Bring me back to life.’ That stuff is real.”

That’s definitely one side of acting that goes over our heads when we sit down to watch some of these darker stories. A lot of performers have no qualms about undermining the credibility of “method acting,” but I don’t suppose they could rightly deny what some of these scenes do to them when they’re on set and really immersed in the role and finding their way through it all playing opposite other actors.

For Damson Idris, that involves role-playing a lot of wicked and cruel acts as Franklin Saint, so now that we know what it’s done to him, we’ll definitely appreciate it even more when we go through the final season of Snowfall.