A couple things you should know about Snowfall star Angela Lewis, who plays the once-kind, now sinister auntie to drug boss Franklin Saint (Damson Idris). First and foremost, she is not Louie, which seems to be a point of confusion for the manySnowfall viewers in her DMs telling her how awful she is. Secondly, about those nasty DMs: Lewis doesn’t care if y’all hate her or Louie because, third and most important, Louie is doing what Louie needs to do for Louie. Periodt.
“Look at it like this,” she tells Bet.com, speaking on the phone shortly after Episode 7 (“Charnel House”) had aired. “In any given business, whatever business, if your boss is messy, always screaming on you, not recognizing the fact that ninety percent of the profits come through you, anybody would be reassessing their life, right? She’s like, ‘Listen, I’m going to take my chances out on my own. We’re going to do this our way.’ Who wouldn’t?”
She’s got a point, even if being right has come with enormous costs. With just a few episodes left in FX’s exceptional drug/crime drama from the late, great John Singleton, there are a lot of questions left to be answered and, from the looks of it, a lot more blood to be shed as well. As the lights dim on the series, viewers are nervously waiting to see how it all concludes, particularly the fate of Franklin as his empire and personal life are spiraling downward fast. Short on money, paranoid, and furious over slights by former CIA Agent Teddy McDonald (Carter Hudson) and slights from Louie, Franklin is more dangerous than ever. But then, so is Louie.
“Louie has amazing vision,” Lewis says. “She has the ability to see people and things for who and what they are, and understand how to maneuver with and around them.”
When we last saw Louie, she was battered and bruised both metaphorically and literally. The shocking death of her husband and fan favorite Jerome (Amin Joseph) sent her into a spiral of her own; Louie not only witnessed his demise in real time but suffered extreme torture in a warehouse, enduring beating, burning, degredation, and sexual assault at the hands of competitor and nemesis Kane (DeVaughn Nixon). Lewis, who is very visibly and very adorably pregnant right now, says she was pregnant during filming of those intense torture scenes, although she didn’t know it at the time. Fortunately she’d done some spiritual work beforehand to protect her energy––and the baby.
“I prepared with deep meditation,” she says. “I started with a covering of white light to cover my energetic body; a visualization. All the way down to my toes. And I made sure to cover my heart and my liver and my ovaries and all those things, all the organs that keep the body working and that are so important to protect from trauma despite all the crazy that was happening. Because I didn’t find out I was pregnant till episode eight, and I just think, wow, how incredible I was able to protect this new life that was happening.”
And despite how terrible her relationship with her nephew is at the moment, Lewis says she and Idris are cool off-screen, even if on-screen, there is likely no turning back from their all-out war. Though Franklin admitted that he’d basically saved Louie’s life, that gesture is probably too little too late; she’s already struck another deal with Franklin’s archnemesis Teddy to deliver Franklin to Teddy and anyway, there’s so much bad blood between them even saving her life isn’t enough to stop what’s coming.
You know what they say: Hell hath no fury like a bad b*tch scorned.
“Louie came from nothing. Now she has what she’s always dreamt of, and she doesn’t take that lightly,” Lewis says. “There are lots of paths Louie could take moving forward, and she is internally exploring all of those paths. She’s heartbroken. She has nobody, no one. And she is very angry.”
Snowfall airs on FX Wednesdays and Hulu on Thursdays.