‘Under the Banner of Heaven’: How Dustin Lance Black, Andrew Garfield, and Gil Birmingham Turned the Best-Seller into a Crime Drama

On July 24, 1984 — a holiday known as “Pioneer Day” for Mormons in Utah — 24-year-old Brenda Wright Lafferty and her 15-month-old baby were brutally slain in their homes. The mystery of who committed the crime, though, wasn’t nearly as disturbing as why. In FX’s new limited series Under the Banner of Heaven, fictional detectives Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield) and Bill Taba (Gil Birmingham) are tasked with unearthing how a sweet, smart, perfect Mormon girl like Brenda (Daisy Edgar-Jones) could meet such a terrible fate.

Under the Banner of Heaven is an adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s best-selling non-fiction book of the same name. That book used Brenda Wright Lafferty and Erica Lafferty’s brutal murders as a starting point to look at the wider sins of polygamous Mormon sects and the bloody history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s a meditation on how faith can be twisted into fundamentalism and narcissism can bloom into violence with the right framework.

So much of Krakauer’s book toggles back and forth between contemporary interviews, details of Brenda Wright Lafferty’s murder, and key moments in Mormon history. Naturally it was going to be a challenge for any writer to adapt this in a way that would feel both honest and dramatically compelling. Under the Banner of Heaven head writer, producer, and director Dustin Lance Black told Decider that he wanted to capture his experience reading Krakauer’s book for the show’s audience.

“The experience of reading the book for me was so unique. I mean, first of all, as a Mormon or someone who grew up Mormon, it was incredibly disturbing and illuminating because this was a history that had been kept from me, that is kept from rank and file Mormons,” Black said. “The experience though, as a reader, was so unique. And I think it’s why people devoured this book and loved this book because the reader is not allowed to be passive. The reader is asked to be active in putting together the connections between the past Mormon history and this crime in 1984. My desire was to create a series where the audience needed to be that active and that engaged. When I was reading the book, it felt like an investigation that I was on side-by-side and shoulder-to-shoulder with Jon Krakauer.”

The obvious solution would be to center the narrative of the series around the murder investigation. There were a few hiccups, though. When Black spoke to one of the investigators who had worked on Brenda and Erica’s case, they made it clear they did not want to be depicted on screen or be forced to relive that time.

“I understood that and that gave me the opportunity to create characters,” Black said. “I looked into the investigation, it was compelling. It did feel like a true crime thriller. It was this ten-day, terrifying quest to figure out: Who did this? Why did they do this? And where are they before they fulfill this list of those to be killed? Classic thriller set up. Now, whose eyes should I be in?”

Black said he believed that both Mormons and non-Mormons read the book, though he said some Mormons wouldn’t admit it. “So I wanted to have a Mormon, a mainstream Mormon. I wanted to be able to see this through that person’s eyes,” Black said, thus describing what inspired Andrew Garfield’s Jeb Pyre, a literal Eagle Scout who is devoted to his wife, mother, and daughters.

When Decider spoke with Andrew Garfield about his character, he said Pyre’s love of the women in his life was “everything.”

“I think he discovers through the course of the story is if his religion, if his faith falls away, the love that remains for his family and for the women in his life is unconditional. It doesn’t shift in any way, shape or form,” Garfield said. “There’s something very, very powerful about that.”

“So actually it’s everything. It’s his soul. It’s like they represent everything that is worth living for for him. I think that was very easy to play because the actors in those roles were so wonderful”

Garfield also revealed that he has “a particular connection” with Sandra Seacat, the actress who plays Pyre’s mother Josie.

“She’s one of the great acting teachers in existence that’s ever lived. She has been my teacher for the last 15 years — her and her daughter Greta — and when I read the scripts, me and Greta said to each other, ‘Well, Sandra has to play this role,'” Garfield said. “So there was no acting required. She’s a mother figure in my life, Sandra, and I love her like a mother and she loves me like a son. So like the cameras were rolling and we were just loving each other. It was beautiful.”

While Pyre would approach the case as someone deeply entrenched in the Mormon faith, Black knew that his partner needed to be a foil: a non-Mormon with extra reason to be skeptical of the Mormon community surrounding him.

“I thought, well, if it’s going to be non-Mormon, let’s make it pertinent to the story. Let’s make this someone whose family is Paiute, meaning they are indigenous to this land. They were here well before the Mormons came and now he finds himself on the outside,” Black said. Thus Bill Taba, Gil Birmingham’s world-weary detective from the big city, was born.

Readers of Krakauer’s book will know that the Paiutes were pulled into many of the early Mormon settlers’ literal battles and often scapegoated by the Mormons for violent crimes against travelers and explorers who crossed their paths. Throughout Under the Banner of Heaven‘s run, Taba is called “Lamanite,” a slur for Native Americans that stems from Joseph Smith’s alternate history of North America. Taba meets these digs by affirming that he not a Lamanite, but a Paiute.

Gil Birmingham told Decider that Taba’s connection to his ancestry was “very important.. in terms of representation for the land that got settled on.”

“I had reached out to several Paiute people, and there’s not a lot of them left, but I had already had some previous encounters in that region doing a play back in St. George, Utah a few years back,” Birmingham said. “The play’s theme was about the Mormons settling in. So I learned some of the history of what the relationship was like with the Paiute and the Mormons at that time.”

“It still resonates for them, you know. There’s still land that was colonized, but there was a terrible event that happened that between the two of them. And you’ll find that out, you know, as episodes go along. But it was critical and I think it was very, very good of [Dustin] Lance [Black] to incorporate that.”

Added Black, “We can have this outsider-coming-in perspective that feels investigatory and we have access to the inside of Pyre’s mind as he’s envisaging these stories about Mormon history that are truly the clues to solving the case. And it puts the audience in a position just like any great detective show to try and stay a step ahead of the investigators.”

Speaking of those snippets of Mormon history, Black decided to have “these stories rubbing shoulders in the way the paragraphs do in the book” to emulate the way Krakauer ekes out key moments, figures, and themes that influenced the Lafferty case. Black decided to give these sequences to Allen Lafferty (Billy Howle), his brothers, and Jeb Pyre.

“I wanted it to feel personal. I wanted to feel very close,” Black said. “I can do all that if I have full access to Pyre’s mind. So why don’t I just set the show inside the mind of this investigator? Which is what I did. It means I can move through whatever history I like whenever I’d like.”

“And frankly, the audience will begin to question, was that vision of Pyre’s, if that piece of history was accurate or not? On a couple of occasions, we learned it wasn’t and he has to have that history corrected or something added to it. In that way, it’s personal. In that way, the history you’re learning, you might not even realize you’re learning because you’re using it to help understand the case and to solve a crime.”

One thing about Pyre and Taba that is easy to understand from the jump is the strange alchemy of their connection. While the two partners initially seem at odds, from the very first episode, Black — and more importantly, Birmingham and Garfield — dropped little clues pointing to their blossoming friendship. Specifically, when Taba offers his Mormon partner an illicit French fry under their desk.

“It was a great, great opportunity,” Birmingham said of that light moment that sparks during an otherwise bleak episode. “Because that was a vulnerable place that Jeb was in.”

“It didn’t get included in the [show], but just prior to that, [Taba] brought in these skates to give to [Pyre’s] daughters because his daughters had a birthday. So that was kind of an opening and an offering already to kind of cross the professional line, somewhat, and move into the personal,” Birmingham said. “And then the fry thing was great because that was kind of an improv thing we did. I mean, it was on the page, but yeah, we we had fun with that.”

The first two episodes of Under the Banner of Heaven are now streaming on Hulu. Future episodes will premiere weekly on Thursdays.