The Cast and Creator Of ‘Power’ On The Sixth And Final Season On Starz: “Who *Isn’t* Going To Die?”

The sixth and final season of Power on Starz premieres this Sunday, August 25 on Starz, and according to showrunner Courtney Kemp, the only question viewers should be asking this time around is, “Who isn’t going to die?”

“The whole season is really intense,” Kemp told Decider ahead of the show’s final batch of episodes. “Because we’re getting to the end, the stakes are so much higher and the people in the crosshairs are the people you’ve really grown to care about over the six seasons. It’s scary.”

So scary, in fact, that due to all the character deaths ahead, as Kemp continued to plot out the season, “I started running out of cast,” she stated. “I started running out of people to do stuff. Our table reads started getting smaller and smaller. It got very small towards the end.”

And Kemp is insistent that from a storytelling perspective it’s not easy or hard to kill off characters from the show. For her, it’s simply about, “What actors do you miss having around? You miss your coworkers, that’s really the experience.” She also explained that, over the course of the drama’s six seasons, “Some of those bigger, juicer guest stars, we had to write them off the show because we couldn’t schedule them,” as they landed series regular roles or were committed to other projects, including Enrique Murciano who played Felipes Lobos and Anika Noni Rose who played Jukebox.

“Courtney has always said from the beginning that this is a crime drama and a love tragedy,” Lela Loren said, which is how she accounts for the many deaths this show has and will see before its completion. Joseph Sikora added, “It’s a real credit to our writers, definitely the actors portraying the characters as well, but that the writers have allowed for the characters to be developed enough that people have such a place in their hearts for them, so much that they don’t want them to die at the end.” Well, it’s going to be a rough season for those people.

Season 6 picks up just moments after Season 5 left off, [SPOILERS!] when Tommy shot Angela instead of Ghost in the stairway of their old high school. Angela’s fate will be revealed at the top of the show, as will the promise that this season is going to be exceptional.

For Naturi Naughton, that meant, “I got the chance to do some more stunts and I have fight scenes and shoot a gun in a real way. That was really scary, but I killed it. I was a boss. I became a lot more gangster this year.” As for where we’ll see Tasha by the end of this season, Naughton could only tease, “I love her storyline. It’s not ideal as far as what happens to Tasha and the end of the story is going to be heartbreaking for most and it’s heartbreaking for me too. The story itself is beautiful work and I’m proud of it.”

La La Anthony told us of her character, Keisha, “I worry about her.” As her relationship with Tommy gets deeper, and therefore more complicated, so does her role as a mother to son Cash, who viewers will get to see a lot more of this season. “She’s definitely stepping into her own,” Anthony said of her character. “I think that she genuinely loves Tommy and wants to prove that she’s this down for whatever, ride or die chick, but that comes with consequences. She gets involved in a world that she doesn’t really know the pros and cons of, and a lot comes with that.”

And then there’s Tommy’s other soulmate. “There is one moment in this season that Ghost and Tommy are on the same side but it doesn’t last,” Kemp teased of the show’s central friendship, which finds the two men as bitter rivals for most of this season. “They are yin and yang, they’re two halves of a whole, I think they belong together. There’s a strong bromance in our show, and I think that the audience feels a level of comfort when they’re together that’s real and we tried to pay good homage to that,” she continued. As for Sikora, he admits that for him, it’s “more fun to be on the same team because that’s closer to who I am. I definitely am supportive and loyal to a fault in my life and I’ve learned to delegate my emotions a little bit better but I’m a late bloomer.” But on the other hand, “It’s also fun to fight Ghost as Tommy because that is Tommy becoming his own man in a lot of ways and taking Ghost to task for all of the trouble that he’s caused. Now, people have said he was ultimately looking out for Tommy. I think that’s a big lesson of the Ghost/Tommy relationship: this man is my soulmate, I love him above and beyond any other person on the Earth. But if I’m not communicated to, and I’m not taking this ride with you, then you are ultimately doing this alone.”

Luckily, Sikora as an actor had no problem with communicating with the director of this season’s third episode, none other than fellow actor and the show’s executive producer, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, who saw his character, Kanan, killed off on the show last season. “He’s really a master storyteller and because this is a world that he is so familiar with, his notes were very specific,” Sikora said. “I would do a scene and he would just be like, ‘Joe, this is the time to be Tommy. Like, you hate this, let it go,’ and I’m like, wow permission to be even bigger? I’ll take it. He had a vision and to ultimately serve his vision was a real honor. I would be directed by 50 again for sure.”

“They worked really well together,” Kemp confirmed of the duo. “[50] did a great job. We gave him a really big episode and he came through. He’s so great with actors because he is an actor.”

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I can’t even call this work. We are have’n fun make’n these power moves. @50cent is on the top of his game. You’ll see…🔥

A post shared by Joseph Sikora (@josephsikora4) on Oct 24, 2018 at 5:48pm PDT

“That was fun!” 50 said, perking up when I asked him about the opportunity. “A big part of directing is communicating to the talent and because we have relationships that have developed over six years, it was easy for me to talk to them. In fact, they felt more comfortable talking to me before they would be talking to any other executives involved.” He said it was due to the fact that he’s a fellow actor, but it’s also because “I can troubleshoot things and get it out of the way.”

The experience also changed his perspective on the whole process once he was sitting in the director’s chair. “[Before], I would read the script when I got it because it comes through to me early on the executive production side of things, and then I would read it again when we are at table reads, and I would only focus on my portion of the script, the stuff that I had to perform. Directing made me look at the whole script as 30 scenes and looking at the emotions and the feelings for each one of the actual characters.” He also recalled being as efficient as possible on the set, noting that when he saw what he liked, it was on to the next scene without wasting anyone’s time. “When I say I got it, that was it, we got it, we moving. I don’t want to keep shooting the same thing, I want to move to the next scene.”

He also revealed that while the show had its big Season 6 premiere at Madison Square Garden in New York City this year, 50 actually pitched the idea for that event last year. “The compromise was, let’s do Radio City Music Hall and it was the biggest turnout that they’ve seen for a television show. That was last year. And then Game of Thrones followed us there. That was their first time filling up Radio City Music Hall, I do it all the time.”

But 50 was careful to be certain that he wasn’t following the HBO drama with his show’s final season. “I’ve made sure that there’s no Starbucks cups,” he said with a laugh.

Though his work isn’t done yet. Next, 50 and Kemp will continue working together on Power spinoffs, the first of which Power Book II: Ghost, was announced earlier this summer and will star Mary J. Blige. “She is so dope. She texted me yesterday and do you know how crazy it is when her number pops up on your phone?” Kemp said excitedly, declining to tell me what name she stores Blige as in her phone — including if it’s under her future character’s name. While Kemp was working on the second outline of that show on the plane ride to New York, she hopes to eventually see four total Power spinoffs come to life.

That’s…kind of a lot for one person to be involved with, no? “I just do the thing that’s in front of me,” Kemp shared. “I’m trying to do everything one beat at a time. You just do what’s next. I’m also developing a show for HBO so that’s really what is the next focus,” she said, referring to the project that will have her reteaming with Power actor Jerry Ferrara.

In the brief moments when she even has the time to reflect on the original Power series ending, she reminds herself, “You decided this so now live with it,” revealing that the final scene of the series is the one she’s always had planned all along. “Even though we stopped shooting, we’re still editing. It’s not over for me yet.” She also admitted it was hard to say goodbye to some of the crew that worked on the show but hopes to bring them back for the first spinoff, which is planning to shoot in New York as well — and caused a bit of a stir on set before anything was finalized.

When asked if actors were more understanding about being killed off later in the series, Kemp said, “More people were like, I get it, but I think there was some tension about who was gonna be on the spinoffs and who wasn’t, as the spinoff talk had already started. So there were some people that were like, oh I guess I’m not in the spinoff and they might be wrong you never know, depending on where in the time spectrum the spinoff takes place.” Sikora was one of the actors who confirmed that as his days of playing Tommy came to an end, he felt as though he wanted to do more. “I think the audience wants more, too,” he offered.

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But first, there’s the big final season for viewers to still watch, split into the first 10 episodes, and then the last five airing in early 2020, which Sikora says are “It’s own thing. It further explores the world that we already know.”

“Being able to continue Power, chances are we won’t lose any audience coming back, it’s gonna get bigger,” 50 predicted. “I told Mary to watch even the growth this season because with so much messaging that Mary J. Blige is coming to Power, they’re not gonna not watch now. Her audience is gonna start tuning in now.”

And let’s hope that includes people in the TV industry that still aren’t aware of what Kemp & Co. have achieved. “I still have a lot of people that are like, ‘Oh, you’re a showruner? What show? Power, oh I’ve never heard of it.’ So many people in my industry have never heard of our show. I just say we’ve been the biggest show on Starz for almost the entire run of the series.” Mic drop.

Of course, it’s the ones that have heard of it that matter, including this season’s impressive lineup of guest stars, including Cedric the Entertainer, Evan Handler, and Debi Mazar. “That would never have been possible if the show had not done well,” Kemp admits.

If you have yet to get hooked on Power, you should know that Kemp has employed many of the lessons she learned from her time on The Good Wife to the storytelling of this show, by “interweaving all these different chapters and the novelistic approach that Robert King and Michelle King taught me.”

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#PowerMoves ❤️🔥

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The actors in the show have also felt its impact in many ways. “There’s nowhere I can go where the people I’m around aren’t watching it and invested and know more about the show than I do,” Anthony said. “It’s great to be a part of the energy of it all and you do realize how big it is. I was in Paris recently for Fashion Week and people are just, ‘I love Power.’ It’s transcended and it’s great to be a part of it.”

“The impact is beyond my expectations,” Naughton agreed. “It’s really powerful. Walking down the street and people really feeling connected to you like, ‘Oh my God, Tasha you my girl!’ They’re really committed. It’s really shocking at first. People show up. They buy Starz. People are paying extra on their cable bill, which is a commitment, just to watch our show. So I guess it’s starting to hit me how much this show has changed the culture, similar to The Wire, The Sopranos. People will still say, oh remember Power? Power changed the game. And that’s all that you could ever hope for.”

It’s even changed the game in her own life, gifting her beautiful friendships with her fellow actors. “No matter where we are in the storyline we still will go hang out and have a drink or go eat. We’re friends, and that’s the joy of coming to work,” Naughton said.

“It’s influenced culture and I’m really proud to be part of something that’s that significant,” Sikora said. “Lela brought up an interesting point before, that it’s such an intergenerational show.”

“It’s this mashup between a crime drama, a love story, a procedural,” Loren explained. “You have stuff for the girls, stuff for the boys, it’s really interesting not just the scope of age rage but gender. There really is something for everyone.” Oh, and she means everyone. “I was at a play a while back and this little Upper West Side, 86-year-old woman with an oxygen tank and the kind of jewelry that I don’t know how she’s holding, said, ‘You’re fabulous and that Omari Hardwick, his ass is just amazing.'”

“He obviously keeps his squat game up,” Sikora offered.

“And I also had a rabbi tell me I did great work,” Loren continued.

“L’chaim!” Sikora replied.

“It’s truly a New York show,” Loren said proudly.

Power premieres this Sunday, August 25 on Starz. 

Where to stream Power