It didn’t take much to convince Oscar nominee Andrew Garfield to star as a Latter-day Saint police detective in the TV miniseries “Under the Banner of Heaven.” He said it was a role he’d been waiting years to play.
“To be honest, I’ve been a fan of this book by Jon Krakauer since it came out,” said the 38-year-old actor. “I read it kind of so hungrily, and I found it so deeply fascinating. The themes, the story itself, how thrilling the story was, but also how horrifying it was.”
Krakauer’s book, published in 2003, recounts the murders of Brenda Laffery and her 15-month-old daughter, Erica, in American Fork in 1984. Her brothers-in-law, Ron and Dan Lafferty, were eventually convicted of the crimes.
Reading the book as a young man, Garfield said he “thought, ‘Well, who’s going to make this into a film or a television show,’ because it has to be made. And then, cut to 10 years later and I get a call” from showrunner Dustin Lance Black and producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer.
In the miniseries, Garfield (familiar for his roles in “tick, tick...BOOM” and “The Amazing Spider-Man”) plays a fictional character — “Mormon” police detective Jeb Pyre, whose investigation into the murders causes him to question his own faith. (The miniseries is set in the 1980s and earlier, so the word “Mormon” — a term discouraged by the church’s current leader, President Russell M. Nelson — is used throughout the miniseries.)
Black created the character “to kind of help frame this very tragic, true crime story,” Garfield told TV critics in a video conference. “I was kind of convinced right away that this was just an incredible group of creative people that were going to not only honor what Jon Krakauer wrote, but also honor Brenda Lafferty and Erica Lafferty.”
The miniseries uncovers “the rot at the core of what enabled such evil to take place,” Garfield said, but it does not “sensationalize anything.”
However, the eight-part miniseries, which starts streaming April 28 on Hulu, will flash back to early LDS history and build the same narrative Krakauer built in the book — that violence in the church’s history led to the murders committed by the Lafferty brothers.
Black, who won a screenwriting Oscar for the 2008 film “Milk,” was raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And he did additional research of his own to build on Krakauer’s book. And, he said, “Under the Banner of Heaven” makes it clear that Ron and Dan Lafferty left The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and embraced Mormon fundamentalism.
“We tried incredibly hard to make the distinctions between cultural Mormons, between modern and contemporary Mormons and fundamentalist Mormons,” he said. “The show, I do believe, makes those distinctions clear.”
The series will features flashbacks to everything from Joseph Smith’s “First Vision” to the Mountain Meadows Massacre. And Allen Lafferty, the husband of Brenda and father of Erica, tells Garfield’s character that the LDS faith “breeds dangerous men.”
“If you do a deep dive into any religion — but I think particularly the Mormon religion — there’s only two ways to go,” Black said. “It’s either going to become a musical comedy, or it’s going to turn to terror and horror. And there are things that need to be changed in this church. … And this show presents some of those things that need to be changed.”
Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.
