Diarra Kilpatrick Used a Piece of Her Childhood to Inspire Clara

Chris Chalk has spoken about how Clara was the one character that kept Drake going after he hit a turning point in episode 4 of season 2. As the actor put it, “It’s Clara that gets Paul to get his s*** together.” And Clara has been that way since the first season, where she stood by her husband as he endured a crisis of conscience while investigating a case and being pressured by corrupt cops to change his reports — not to mention the pervasive racism he had to endure throughout.

Diarra Kilpatrick recently spoke to /Film, where she reflected on how Clara has, “grown in the universe and how she’s become such a bedrock of support for her husband.” But Clara is much more than a steadfast partner, and Kilpatrick found it exciting to explore more of her character this season. The actress explained how she’d conceived of a whole backstory for Clara. And, asked if there was anything from her personal history that she incorporated into her backstory, she remembered a family reunion in South Carolina where her aunt recalled burying her mother before moving the family to Detroit:

“We spent a long time in the heat looking for this marker, this gravestone of [her aunt’s] mother. She’s like 90-something and she’s like, ‘I know we put the marker down. I know we did. It was the last thing we did before we left.’ And everybody’s out there, and finally, we found it. Her mother, Mary Campbell. So I did borrow that piece of burying my mother and that being the last thing that was keeping her there and then moving on to what was hoped to be a better life.”