Taron Egerton’s AppleTV+ drama ‘Smoke’ drops huge reveal in episode 2: creator Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane knows his way around a crime drama. 

The prolific author’s novels were the basis for several star-studded movies, including Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River” starring Sean Penn, Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” with Leonardo DiCaprio, and Ben Affleck’s directorial debut “Gone Baby Gone.” (Affleck also revisited Lehane’s work in his 2016 movie “Live By Night”).

Now, Lehane, 59, is the creator, exec producer, and writer of the AppleTV+ drama “Smoke” starring Taron Egerton, premiering Friday, June 27. 

The story follows a detective and an arson investigator who are on the trail of serial arsonists. 

It’s loosely based on a true story of John Leonard Orr, a serial arsonist from the 1980s who was the subject of the podcast “Firebug,” but Lehane exclusively told the Post, “I don’t want to tell a story set in the 1980s. I don’t want to be locked down in the past again, like I was with ‘Black Bird,’” he said, citing his previous Emmy-winning Apple show, also starring Egerton. 

“But, I love the pathology of this guy – it’s crazy,” Lehane said about Orr.

“He sees himself as a hero, and he cuts off one part of his mind from the part of him that knows he’s a villain…There’s something particularly American about it, too. It’s like the need for celebrity trumps your own self-preservation since it was [something attention-grabbing he did] that, in the end, got everyone super suspicious about him.” 

Lehane borrowed elements of Orr’s “pathology” he said, but set the story in the present day, as well as changed character names and many details. 

“Smoke” is a darker role for Egerton, who has done more zany action flicks, like the “Kingsman” franchise and playing Elton John in the 2019 biopic “Rocketman.” 

“I think he has infinite levels of depth and range, and I like to exploit it,” Lehane said about Egerton. “I don’t think it’s been exploited as much as it could be.” 

The plot of “Smoke” isn’t much of a “whodunit” since it reveals who the arsonist is by the end of the second episode. 

Lehane explained that he initially wrote a version that revealed it in the pilot. 

“Then I thought we didn’t have enough time to get to know the people. So then we tried three episodes, and that was too much. So then we said two episodes because the audiences now are always looking for the twist. So, why not respect their intelligence and get it out of the way as early as possible? And that’s what I did. Because we knew there were so many more surprises coming down the pike.” 

Lehane published his most recent novel in 2023 and said it might be his last as he moves more into TV. He said he took some lessons from watching Hollywood giants adapt his work. 

“I took a lot of pointers from watching Clint Eastwood work,” he shared.

“Clint runs a very polite, low-drama, low-tension set. I thought that’s the type of leader I wanna be when I finally get there. And that’s what I do. I don’t think you need to have chaos and conflict to create art. Ben Affleck runs his sets much like Clint Eastwood. Ben gets it. He’s from the area,” Lehane said, referring to how they both grew up in Boston, where the author set many of his novels.

As for what he observed watching Scorsese on “Shutter Island,” he said, “He’s so far beyond what I think anybody could learn from because you’re watching a genius. And he doesn’t direct his actors in front of anybody. He comes up very close and speaks to them in low tones, so you never know what he’s saying.” 

Lehane said that he likes crime stories, “because they’re what Cormac McCarthy called ‘fiction of mortal events.’ Big things happen. I like things where big things happen. I’m not good at doing the polite comedy of manners. That’s not my jam. There was enough blood and guts and fury in this story – and comedy, I thought it got funny in places – that it just felt really rich.” 

As for whether he’s truly done writing books, he said, “If an idea strikes me like lightning, then I’ll do it. I love writing novels. I just felt like the tank ran dry, and it was like pulling teeth for me to write prose.”

Since his 2023 book “Small Mercies,” Lehane’s only written scripts, the New York Times bestselling author said.

“That’s two years – I’ve never gone two years since I was nineteen years old. It’s a very long time to not write prose, and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything… yet.”