Iantha Richardson stars in ABCs critically acclaimed series Will Trent as Faith Mitchell. Now in it’s second season (which debuted February 20), the series is among one of the most watched on television.
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We were super excited to chat with Richardson, particularly because of what seems to be a blossoming romance between her character Faith and new love interest Luke, played by Ser’Darius Blain.
“We’ll definitely get to see more of her romantic life and I think that is a big highlight for the season, just her navigating, she’s an empty nester currently, her son is newly off to college,” Richardson told BOSSIP. “So she’s like, ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ So I think that is the B/C storyline you’ll get to see with Faith and there is a lot more Luke and Faith and their love affair and how it translates to her workplace as well.”
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When we first met Richardson’s character Faith Mitchell in the first season of Will Trent we learned that she was a single mom raising a teenage son. With her youthful appearance, we teased Richardson that it’s hard to believe she could have a college age child.
“She’s 33, I’m 33,” Richardson revealed. “She had her child at 15, which is a rarity but also possible and that is a part of her resilience, her life story, and all the things that she’s gone through. I have a friend who has a very similar story — not 15, but still very young and it’s definitely more of a brother/sister dynamic, but still like — ‘That’s your kid!’ It’s really very interesting.”
In terms of getting into that mindset of playing a mom, Richardson says she’s relied on her memories with her own mother.
“It’s been a lot of me cycling back to my mom and her ideals, ways of parenting,” Richardson recalled. “It’s been very nostalgic. I actually lost my mom in 2019, but it’s been very lovely to be able to tap back into her mindset on a lot of things. It’s brought up a lot of gratitude, as well as just help me get to the mental space, because I’m not a parent myself. You can only imagine for yourself what it would be like to be a parent. I have a lot of friends who are new parents currently, so I’ve also been relying on what I see. It’s like Auntie I on this side, or as a godmother, but it’s been really fun and cool and I am excited to be a parent one day. Not right now, but at some point.”
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For the OG Will Trent fans, this season has definitely meant for a better rapport between Trent and Mitchell as partners in the GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) so we had to ask Richardson about the evolution of their relationship.
“Right now we see Faith step up from this role of like intern or having to prove herself as as a partner into being a partner, being that person that Will can rely on, that people can rely on and and not having to show that she knows how to do her job, but just doing it,” Richardson told BOSSIP. “There is a little bit of trust in the sense of, she gets Will more now, she’s not as, although he is irritating to her, not as irritated with his strange personality traits or just him in general. She’s like, ‘OK I get you. I’m gonna let you do you, let me do me and we’ll work good,’ so there is a settling in that this season brings that’s really lovely as well.”
We literally LOVE to see it!
One of the things that makes Will Trent’s character special is that he has dyslexia, so the way he approaches work and his crime scenes is different from how others might. Ironically, Richardson can relate to Trent when it comes to his learning disorder.
“I actually do have dyslexia,” Richardson revealed. “Not to the extent that he does but I do understand the frustration of specifically being an actor and having to do a table read and reading things on the spot and being like, ‘Dang let me go and try to read it first so I can make sure that I’m not fumbling so much in that space’ so I empathize with that character a lot in certain ways. When I was younger, I’m also grateful to my parents, the school that I was in was Montessori and so I was allowed to do like one-on-one sessions with one of the teachers and sit for hours in the middle of the day and learn to sight read, so there’s a lot of memorization for words, but when it comes to like newer words and having to deal with those, that’s when the struggle comes in. Words that aren’t like automatically in the back of my head. It’s an interesting journey for sure.”
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Iantha also appeared as adult ’Tess’ in 10 episodes of This Is Us, so we wanted to know what it was like for her reuniting with TV mom Susan Kelechi Watson, who made a guest appearance in the first episode of the new season.
“It was so doggone lovely,” Richardson told BOSSIP. “I’m so grateful that they did that. She and sterling were the two people that I worked with the most on that show and being able to have her on a show that I’m leading, just that full circle experience was really lovely. We reminisced a lot about what This Is Us was and how we didn’t realize certain things don’t always translate to other sets and how they do translate to other sets, but it was really, really, really lovely having her around and everybody else loved her energy too. On top of the fact that she is a phenomenal actress, everyone’s like, ‘She has to go?’ She’s a literal light. She just brightens up the screen.”
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For folks who may not be aware, Will Trent is adapted from the Karin Slaughter book series, so we wanted to know if Mitchell had gotten any feedback from fans of the books about her looking differently from the character in the series, who is white.
“When we first started there were a couple of comments, specifically on Instagram that were targeted towards like, the cast that didn’t look like what they envisioned in the book,” Richardson recalled. “To me it’s like a Little Mermaid situation — these are fictional characters they can do what they want. Karin Slaughter is a very active part of our set and the story that’s being told, and thank God I wasn’t too phased. You want people who have invested their time and energy in the books to be happy as it carried over into television world and I think that the majority of the feedback once it came out was positive. There were only like trickles at the beginning, before they actually saw the show.”
Richardson will next be seen in BET’s remake of Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead.
Will Trent airs Tuesdays at 8pm EST on ABC
