Taye Diggs, Daniel Ezra Returns Explained

[This story contains major spoilers from the All American series finale, “To Live and Die in L.A.”]

At the American Black Film Festival in May, key members of the All American cast joined showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll for a moderated conversation about the show’s eighth and final season: Greta Onieogou (Layla), Bre-Z (Coop), Kareem J. Grimes (Preach), Michael Evans Behling (who became No. 1 on the call sheet as Jordan Baker over the last two seasons), Taye Diggs (who anchored the series as Billy Baker) and surprise guest Daniel Ezra, who starred as Spencer James.

This was the OG crew without Samantha Logan, better known for her role as Jordan’s twin sister Olivia, and a few others. The CW series premiered on Oct. 10, 2018, and its future looked shaky. Landing on Netflix in the age of streaming, however, secured its place among the pantheon of great YA shows.

Spencer James (Ezra) going from Crenshaw in L.A. to play football for Coach Billy Baker (Diggs), a Crenshaw High School legend who made it pro, at Beverly Hills High School became about way more than sports. After a stint in Beverly Hills pursuing his pro football aspirations, All American moved back to Crenshaw, creating the rivalry between the two schools that lived on in the just concluded eighth and final season.

The series tackled every hot-button issue from gun violence, drug addiction, unequal schooling, early pregnancy, young marriage, extramarital affairs, past secrets and normalized lesbian love, along with conflict resolution and more. All American became so full that it lasted three seasons after Diggs’ character Billy Baker died tragically in a shock sendoff, and two seasons after Ezra’s Spencer James got drafted, taking him and Olivia to the East Coast in another show shift.

Okoro Carroll, the Ivy League grad from West Africa who traded in a career as an economist to pick up her pen, tells The Hollywood Reporter how watching the All American pilot backed by Greg Berlanti, whom she had on her vision board, blew her mind.

“By the end of the pilot, I was literally sitting in the screening room at Greg’s offices in tears. My mind is racing because I’m like, Oh my gosh, we finally have a show that I was looking for when I grew up on the original Beverly Hills, 90210,” she shares. “I suddenly saw the potential, but the characters looked like me and my children and my friends, and immediately my mind went to a hundred places of where we could take the show, the stories we could tell and the breadth of the universe we could create.”

Now 132 episodes later, Okoro Carroll signs off on a show where her mission was to make sure young adults, especially Black youth, felt both seen and heard. She even launched a Black College spinoff in All American: Homecoming that lasted three seasons.

“Completion” is the word Behling chose to sum up the show’s finale back in May. “I think the ending for season eight is completion for all of us.”

Okoro Carroll spoke with THR about the final season while also highlighting some key moments throughout the show’s journey. She explained her approach going into the finale and what it meant to her personally to have both Diggs and Ezra both return, and how Ezra directing the finale episode was a “no-brainer.” She pointed out Easter eggs from earlier seasons included in the final season and shared a little about Spencer Paysinger whose life inspired the series.

She also spoke about making room for her next generation characters KJ (Nathaniel Logan McIntyre, Cassius (Osy Ikhile), Amina (Alexis Chikaeze), Khalil (Antonio J. Bell), Tori (Lauryn Hardy) and others, as well as tackling ICE, and finding that story that connected the day ones and the latest ones to the great, big family she and her team brought to life.

***

What was your approach going into this final season, especially with a series with so much history?

It is a tough, tough thing. Lena Waithe was also going into the final, eighth season of The Chi [and] we talked about this so much. We’re like, Oh my God, we’re both going into the eighth and final seasons of our show.. how do you wrap up shows that have gone on for that long and had that kind of impact, and feel like you’re doing those characters justice? It’s something Lena and I talked about a lot.

Truthfully, these characters are like my family, my children, my best friends, my siblings. I have lived with their voices inside my head in surround sound for years. All American, the All American universe, has been such a huge chapter of my life. So it really was, How do you sit down and say goodbye? And I realized that you can’t. Not any more than I could say goodbye to my son, who was leaving for college at the exact same time.

I was going through these huge transitions in my life at the exact same time with my characters on the show [and] my family in real life. The consensus across the board was the same, which is, I cannot say goodbye. But what I can say is, I’ll see you soon. And so, what does “I’ll see you soon” look like for these characters? And that is how we came up with what we wanted to do in the final season.

And that is?

For our OG cast, it was to really see their dreams realized and launch them into a new chapter of life, when the thing you’ve been chasing your whole life you finally catch. And for our new characters, it was about finally giving them that big step forward towards their dreams and the possibilities for their future. That was how I approached it, [along with] really wanting to honor an eight-year legacy of the show by bringing stories full circle.

How did you do that?

There were so many Easter eggs we planted in earlier seasons that we were able to pay off. I’m grateful for the fact that so many of the same crew members have been part of this since season one. We’ve had people come up in our writers room. We’ve had assistants become writers and producers. We’ve had assistants become directors. This family has been together for such a long time. There’s such a shared history here that we were really able to tap into in this final season, wanting to truly honor and say goodbye to not just these characters, but also to these important relationships.

That’s why we had episodes centered on Layla and Olivia’s relationship; Jordan and Layla’s relationship; Spencer’s and Olivia’s. I know the fans are anxious [but] we really want[ed] to take time to say goodbye or say “see you soon” to these relationships and characters who have meant so much to so many of us.

You mentioned Easter eggs. What are some of the bigger ones? Give us one or two.

Back in season four, we did the time capsule where all our series regulars recorded this video of where they thought they would be in the future. We did that on purpose because we were like, if we’re blessed to be a long-running season, we want to see these dreams come true. So when we got to the final season, one of the first things we did was pull up the capsules and rewatch them. How much of this can we really honor and revisit? And and truthfully, there was a significant chunk of it that we were able to honor and revisit, which felt really great to know that we kept their North star true in their journey on this show.

One of them is with Shawn and his mom [Ruth] and Coop. When Shawn passed away and his mother finally turned herself in for shooting Tyrone [in season two], our hope and prayer was that we would be on the air long enough to bring that [storyline] full circle so that she wasn’t just forgotten in prison, but that her and Shawn really continued to have an impact in Coop’s life. Bringing it full circle for Coop as she’s going through this existential crisis of her own [and] bringing it back to Shawn [felt right]. For [Coop] to go visit his mom in prison and be like, “I haven’t forgotten you, and I made you a promise. And part of that promise is: ‘I will one day get you out of here.’” And then to have Shawn’s mom be present when Coop is being sworn in as a lawyer [to show] she didn’t forget that promise.

Things like that that were planted in earlier seasons with the hope that we would be on the air long enough to bring it full circle. And there are so many more … Layla has always wanted to be a mom. Her relationship with her mother, the mental health struggles that she inherited from her mother, so much of that has been such a part of her that we knew we could not complete Layla’s story without taking it full circle into motherhood for her. That was very much by design on the path we led her on this season.

Talk about the savvy ways in which you incorporate Taye Diggs through his character Billy Baker, especially since his death in season five.

My father passed away when I was 25. That was 24 years ago [but] you never fully, truly get over that, especially when they’re taken from you unexpectedly. You learn to sort of live with it, and [that presence] manifests in interesting ways in your life. And so, for us, as long as Taye was happy to return to the show in different capacities, that was something, even after the character passed away, that we always wanted. Billy didn’t just disappear off the radar. He stays very present in his kids’ lives, in their decision-making. We had the “letters” episode [“Kids See Ghosts,” S6, E8] where Billy was the representation of the letters he’d written for his kids and in the journal he left for Spencer. That was a great way for us to be able to bring him back and have these interactions, even though he wasn’t really in the room with his children.

Why did you have to have Billy Baker in the finale?

It felt like there was no way to complete the series without bringing it back full circle to Coach Billy who’d had an impact on all these kids’ lives, and especially Jordan and Spencer, who was like a surrogate son and now son-in-law. There was no version of a final scene of the series that wasn’t going to include Billy. The question was just in Taye’s busy schedule: Are we going to be able to get him back?

Shout out to Taye Diggs, because that might have been the easiest phone call booking. I don’t think I’d even finish saying the words [before] Taye was like, “I’m in. You just tell me the day you need me. I’m gonna tell my team to black it out. I don’t care when it shoots. I will make it work. I will be there. I will make myself available to you.”

How was this process for you?

Writing that scene was very tough. Shooting that scene was both heartbreaking, because the actors wouldn’t stop crying, and also truly one of my favorite moments in the history of the show — all of us being on set for that moment of Billy watching his boys having to grown up into men, and for Taye very much watching Michael and Daniel, who grew up on the show; everyone was babies when they started.

For Taye, it was very much like watching his sons graduate into this new chapter of life. And we were grateful that we were able to incorporate it because it’s this idea that as they’re moving into these next chapters of their lives as fathers that Billy will always be watching over them, and he will always be there, and never left. That’s what that final moment is.

So why did you feel Daniel Ezra had to direct the finale and not just be in it?

This whole thing started with Spencer’s journey, and it felt like to bring it full circle, it needed to end with Spencer’s journey. But not only that, Daniel Ezra had been such a huge part of the show and had been such the heart of the show for so long, it just felt right.

He’s a gifted director, and we wanted someone who truly understood the full legacy of the series directing the finale, and so it was sort of a no-brainer that we had that in Daniel as a director, and in Daniel as an actor, and someone who understood the old generation cast as well as the new generation cast, and understood sort of the new direction the show had gone in and would be able to bring those two worlds together.

Well, speaking of Spencer, all of this really started with Mr. Spencer Paysinger, the retired NFL player whose own story inspired the series, right? I don’t know how closely he’s involved in the show now but, in the very beginning, he did interviews and really promoted the show. What has that been like knowing that there are kernels of somebody’s real story in this fictional story?

There are kernels of so many people’s stories in this story, and it all started with Spencer Paysinger. We’re very close, and I tell them all the time, “Thank you for living a life that was inspiring enough that it made us want to tell this story.” The reason it says “inspired by a true story” as opposed to “based on a true story” is because we knew we were going to take liberties. I feel bad because out in the world, people often mistake Spencer James’s history for Spencer Paysinger’s stories and are really shocked when they find out that his dad is still alive [unlike Spencer James’s biological father Corey James who died in season two or his father figure Billy Baker who dies in season five] or that he never got shot [as Spencer James did in a drive-by shooting in season two], and it’s like, y’all, it’s a TV show.

Yes, the kernel of it is inspired by his life. But of course, we were going to take liberties in dramatic effect, and ultimately morph into a story that really was about not just Spencer’s journey, but that full ensemble that really spoke to not just Black teens in America, but to families raising these teens in America, the village, what that looked like, and what pursuing a dream under that context looks like — a dream that many people think is impossible

It was so amazing to have Spencer around. He was always ducking in and out of the writers room. My rule was always “your life inspired this show, you are always welcome here. If you want to sit in on the writers room, if you want to come sit in on set.” He was always a phone call away if we had questions about something that had really happened and wanted to make sure we were authentically portraying it on the show. He always made himself available, and also had a wonderful understanding that “this is a TV show that is inspired by my life, but is not my life.” Spencer always understood how all of that came into the jumbo pot to create the show.

Speaking of a jumbo pot, how did you decide to bring in Cassius and KJ, and then link them to this Baker lineage as well as the whole next generation All American cast?

See Also

Matt Friend to Host Oscar Red Carpet for ‘Live With Kelly and Mark’

I knew I wanted to bring in a new generation and bring it back to Beverly and Crenshaw High Schools. I knew I was going to make Jordan a coach. One of the things that has always been part of the show, in addition to football and the soapy love triangles and everything else, is there’s always been some kind of mystery [of paternity] involved in the early seasons. “Is Billy Spencer’s father?” Then it was, “Okay, wait, is he Dylan’s father?” There’s always been some sort of mystery that tied to family, so as we were looking in and bringing in the new generation, I was exploring where we could find a connection to our existing James and Baker families that would feel organic [and] give us a little bit of that mystery, but also stay true to the heart of the show, which is “family is complicated, but, at the end of the day, nothing is more important than family, even if it takes us on a whole journey to get there.”

Then we started realizing we had something in the idea that Grandma Mary wasn’t perfect, and that is something we talked about on the show before. And with Grandpa Willie still being part of the show, we started to realize what if it is something from their past, and what if it ties to Billy in that way? Because they’d lost Billy, the Bakers, especially Jordan, would be so invested in finding new additional family members because they, more than anyone, know how short and precious life is. Having lost Billy, they would have an extra motivated interest in figuring out if they had other family out there, especially family that came from Billy’s side.

That was how we ended up coming up with Cassius and the whole idea of Billy having a half-brother that had been given up for adoption. And because of the things he didn’t know had happened, he was raised with a grudge that the Bakers had the life he should have had and raised a child to believe that as well. And, what does that look like when those two families collide? So it’s the sins of the fathers sort of being revisited on the next generation, and how do they heal generational wounds?

Even in the eighth and final season, you still gave the newer cast their own stories, with KJ, Khalil and especially Amina, with Tori sandwiched in between. Why was that important?

We brought in new characters to be the next generation of the show. Not just to service, Jordan, Layla and Coop storylines, but to be legitimate new leads, the new generation. That meant that, in addition to the storylines that supported Jordan’s as our lead of the show and Layla’s and Coop’s, we wanted people to feel like they were getting to know this new generation and could pick sides. I don’t know that I expected them to pick sides in the love triangle so quickly. God bless the KJ and Amina shippers, and the Khalil and Amina shippers out there, and the Khalil and Tori shippers. I love you guys for being so invested in their journeys.

We wanted to bring them in not just as supporting characters, but also as characters worthy of their own storylines and their own journeys. They’re such incredible human beings. Incredible actors. Nate McIntyre [Nathaniel Logan McIntyre] who plays KJ, I said it in his audition and I say it again today, that boy’s a star. He’s going to have a tremendous career.

They had big shoes to fill, in terms of leaping onto a moving train that had been moving already for six seasons at full speed. They had to jump onto that moving train and take over driving it, and they did. Truthfully, to me, that’s harder to come into a legacy show like that and really carve out a space for yourself. I’m really proud of them for what they did.

Can you talk about the ICE storyline with Amina. Why was taking a stand with ICE the right thing to do for the story?

That is also something that’s always been part of the show. It was interesting reading some people’s reaction to this [storyline] because some people were like, all of a sudden now they’re taking a stance on things, and not sticking to just football. I wanted to be like, Have you watched the series? Because it is something that has always been a fabric of the show. That has been very important to me: reflecting the reality of what our teens deal with in real life.

That’s why we had the “Justice for Tamika Pratt” storyline. It is why there were so many of the mental health storylines we did with Layla. It is all grounded in what our teenagers today are dealing with so that it also feels like when they’re watching the show, they feel like, “I can relate to those issues. I can relate to what Layla’s going through. I can relate to Liv wanting to take a stand on justice for Tamika Pratt and police brutality and what was happening. I could understand Amina wanting to protect her teacher and her fellow classmates.”

This year the ICE of it all was because that was prevalently what we were seeing affecting our communities. Graduation. Again, I speak about the fact that my son was leaving for college. During his graduation, and as other graduation ceremonies were happening, I was seeing teens have to deal with the fact that there was an ICE presence off campus, or were worried about going to school because on their way home from school they might not make it home because of ICE stops. ICE wasn’t just something that was affecting the grown ups [and what] the adults are dealing with, and the kids don’t know what was happening. It was very much affecting teenagers in this country.

It was hard for me to tell a story that’s taken place in current day and not incorporate the reality that our teens don’t just get to be teens. That has never been our reality, and so there’s always part of what is happening in the bigger world. And usually, it’s also the youth that are leading the movement. It was important to me to continue to honor that legacy of the show, so this season, it was ICE.

Talk about connecting the two generations through Khalil helping Liv so that she would not miscarry her twins.

We knew we had to give birth to the James twins. There was no way I was ending the show without Spencer and Olivia’s family being complete. It really was the ultimate thing that brought both generations of the shows together. Even last season, Spencer and Darnell all came back and shout out to Da’Vinchi, he’s amazing, and were really sort of part of KJ and Khalil’s story, and [played a part in] really sort of bringing Jordan and Cassius together and all of that stuff. It was very important to us that it not just be the new generation and now it’s just its own thing, but that it was continually part of the ongoing legacy of the show and the ongoing relationships and characters we’ve fallen in love with over the years.

Nothing brings families together more than birth and death. Knowing we were going to do the birth of the twins, how do we bring those back together in a way that truly has an impact, not just on Spencer and Olivia and Jordan, that’s his twin sister going through this, and his best friend’s children, and Layla and Coop, but also the new generation who don’t know Liv as well because she’d already moved to New York by the time they were really ensconced as part of the vortex and part of the family? It was a no-brainer. For it to be Khalil, because the Bakers had given him so much; Jordan has sacrificed so much for him, and they’re the reason why he has a step forward in life. There was no way he was not going to honor that by making sure that the next generation of the Bakers made it into the world.

It was a nice way to bring him and his mom together too.

Absolutely. To truly start to mend that fence, his mother had a unique set of skills he needed at the time, and it gave her an opportunity to finally show up for him in a way that she hadn’t prior to this in his life, and it was the bridge that began their journey to healing their relationship.

The way All American empowered all the athletes, the young athletes with the showcase and Spencer James in the end, is such an important narrative in sports right now.

The show is about football, and so much of football isn’t just about the game being played on the field, it’s about all of it, right? It’s why we had Billy doing financial literacy courses for his football players in high school so that they would understand their contracts when they were older. This was another part of it, wanting to be traded, wanting to come home and play. The business side of professional football is also part of the story, and this just felt like a really great way to honor the football legacy of the show, while also bringing it back to these characters and what’s important to them, which is family.

Catch season eight of All American on The CW app or watch all eight seasons on Netflix when the final season drops October 6.