FX’s Snowfall held a black carpet event for the sixth and final season premiere on Wednesday Night. The cast went to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to view a screening of the first episode. Michael Hyatt (Cissy Saint) and Carter Hudson (Teddy McDonald) reflected on the legacy of the series’ co-creator, John Singleton. Singleton passed away from a stroke in April 2019 at the age of 51. He was the first Black writer-director to score an Oscar nomination for best director with Boyz n the Hood.
Historically, Hyatt started playing Cissy Saint during Season 1 of the show. Cissy is the mother of Franklin Saint, one of Los Angeles’ to-be-famous drug dealers. Hyatt’s character is a maternal figure on the show. She wants to save her neighborhood from the 1980s chaos of drugs and gang violence. She focuses on protecting her son. In an emotional interview with Variety, Hyatt said, “John taught me to use my voice in ways that I had not given myself permission to use my voice in my career, in my life. Because of his presence in my life and the time that I had to spend with him, he empowered me to use that voice. And even though he’s dead, when I come to work, I make sure that what I’m saying represents him.”
John Singleton Remembered
According to Hudson, the cast did “acts of conjuring” to “keep him alive” in their hearts. For instance, they left his director’s chair in the room and continued the series with his goals in mind. Hudson went on that, “He used to always say that you wanted this show to end on the day that ‘Boyz n the Hood’ started and that he always kind of saw this in his mind as a prequel to that. It feels like you were part of a bigger story that he was working on telling.” The show is honoring Singleton’s memory in the series finale, which is dedicated to him. At the event, FX president John Landgraf also announced that a room in the network’s office will be named after Singleton.
Hudson continued, saying that “The world that he was trying to talk about was a world that, when he started, hadn’t been shown. He pioneered that, and this is about saying, ‘How did that world come to be?’ It really works to answer these bigger questions about how the whole globe played a part in what happened in one neighborhood and the lives that were being lived there.” Additionally, he said that Singleton and the show’s legacy is about “giving that neighborhood a context within history and geopolitics.” He insisted, “We talked about him. He’s present. He didn’t leave us.” Snowfall returns for its final season on February 22, 2023.
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