Deborah Ayorinde Opens Up About Being Little Marvin’s Muse

Have you tuned in to the new season of THEM yet?

In the latest iteration of Little Marvin’s Prime Video anthology series, THEM: THE SCARE is once again set in Los Angeles (the first installment, subtitled Covenant, took place in Compton circa 1952). In this season the series moves the time frame forward to 1991. The story centers on LAPD Homicide Detective Dawn Reeve (Deborah Ayorinde), who is assigned to a new case: the gruesome murder of a foster home mother that has left even the most hardened detectives shaken. Navigating a tumultuous time in Los Angeles, with a city on the razor’s edge of chaos, Dawn is determined to stop the killer. But as she draws closer to the truth, something ominous and malevolent grips her and her family…

BOSSIP spoke with THEM: The Scare star Deborah Ayorinde about channeling ’90’s it girl style for the role of Detective Dawn Reeve.

“It was a dream come true because I love that time period, and the hair and fashion and makeup,” Ayorinde told BOSSIP. “Like literally in my real life that is one of my favorite time periods, so I was very much so involved in a lot of the the costumes. I would literally hound Lynn Falconer who’s our amazing costume designer, I was like ‘Please source this, source this, source this!’ I remember just being so in love with the style of that time period. I was a kid, but I was still like, ‘Oh my God when I get older I’m gonna dress like this and dress like that,’ so I really wanted that to show through so it felt like truth, when people watched it they felt that nostalgia. And Janet Jackson– I mean come on! She was everything, you know and so I definitely wanted to put her in there and just have that that like hazy 90’s movie feel. I just wanted it to feel true for that time.”

Now in her second season of THEM, we asked Ayorinde about becoming Little Marvin’s muse and embodying THEM leads who are both strong AND feminine.

“He’s just such a genius and it’s such an honor honestly, it really is,” Ayorinde said, in response to her LM muse status. “What I love about the way that LM wrote both Lucky and Dawn is that — and it helped my performance — he writes these strong female characters that don’t compromise their femininity to hold on to the strength.”

Sometimes when women are written in in media they’re written either feminine or strong as if femininity and strength can’t exist in the same thing, as if strength is masculine by nature, and it’s not, you know,” Ayorinde added. “So what I love is that Dawn and Lucky they’re both strong women and they’re both still feminine so she stands up to the best of them. She will argue with these men yeah is a very feminine woman at the same time and it shows that they are not separate from each other you know and I love that so much.”

All eight episodes of THEM: The Scare are now streaming on Prime Video.