"Deadly Class" Turns Teenage Angst Into Matters of Life and Death at the "Hogwarts for Assassins"
Most people who have survived high school know a thing or two about being stabbed in the back. But for the students at Kings Dominion in Syfy’s Deadly Class, they have to quite literally worry about a possible dagger to the rear. Or a katana. Or a baseball bat. Essentially whatever else their fellow assassins-in-training classmates might prefer when it comes to getting their dirty work done. Because at Kings Dominion, Master Lin isn’t concerned about raising the next generation of bright minds. He’s focused on grooming his students to be the best killers possible.
Deadly Class centers on Marcus (Benjamin Wadsworth), a homeless teen in ‘87 San Francisco who is recruited by Master Lin (Benedict Wong) to enroll at his assassin academy. And while death is constantly on the minds of students at Kings Dominion, they also experience the same angst and adolescent challenges that any normal high schooler faces. There are still cliques, homework assignments, parties, and the lot. The school is largely divided into different crime groups, including the Yakuza, Los Angeles gangsters, and Cartel Kids. All this is set up with the backdrop of the late ‘80s, with plenty of punk music being played during chase scenes and lots of fly fashion when the characters are out of their school uniforms.
The series, which is an adaptation of the original 2014 comic by Rick Remender and Wes Craig, showcases all these social anxieties through Marcus’s eyes. He’s a newcomer to the school who doesn’t exactly fit in with any of the groups and whose mysterious history about why he was admitted by Master Lin follows him like a dark cloud. But there’s also a number of other students that round out the show’s main cast: Lana Condor is a total 180 from her To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before character, playing the katana-wielding, motorcycle-riding, assassin-in-training Saya. She’s King Dominion’s most prized student, often sent on tasks by Master Lin.
Then there’s Maria, a young girl who was taken in by a Mexican crime family after her own was killed and is now deadly with a set of fans outfitted with blades, played by María Gabriela de Faría. Former Psych child star Liam James now takes on the role of Billy, who uses his skateboard both as a mode of transportation and a blunt object. Relative newcomer Luke Tennie portrays Willie, the son of one of LA’s most influential gangsters and who gets stuck with Marcus in the first episode for what every high schooler truly detests: a group project.
“One of the most fun things about this show is how high school feels. Everything just matters so much,” Luke says. “Deadly Class is taking how high school felt and making that feeling a reality. It's really heightened.”
And the actor has the perfect way to describe the show and Kings Dominion: “Hogwarts for assassins.”
Translating a comic book from 2014 entailed its own set of challenges. Rick also works as the showrunner and executive producer, so when it came to taking these characters and stories from pages to the screen, he was able to flesh out some of their backstories a bit more. The first season of Deadly Class is a translation of the first two graphic novels in the series. While parts of the show stay fairly close to the source material, other tweaks were made considering the world we live in today. One major one is that the show’s creative team decided that they would bar guns from the school.
“The world is also changing,” Rick says, “So when I first cooked this up six, seven years ago, the amount of school shootings, whatever is going on in our society, whatever this f*cking meltdown is, makes it abundantly clear to me as we're developing this that I don't want to see a gun in a school.” (There are still guns in the series, including within the first few minutes of the series.)
And it’s likely that some viewers will also call into question some other aspects of the show, as others already have. Some of the cliques feel a bit reductive, relying on racial stereotypes. In addition, there are white supremacist groups at Kings Dominion; in fact, the school’s head cheerleader is a neo-Nazi named Brandy. But Rick saw it necessary to portray these racists because they exist in the world.
“In the case of Brandy, she's just the ugly racist like the people that I was growing up with,” the showrunner says. “She's a personification of them and so we're going to keep her that way. I think that the responsibility comes into not making it a Saturday afternoon special where you have a clean little moral and everybody learns a lesson. I think that the responsibility is to show the reality as the reality exists.”
And while Deadly Class has those depictions of reality, a major part of enjoying the show is in the suspense of belief. Assassin academies might not exist, but people can relate to that time in life when everything feels like it’s a matter of life and death. Survival at Kings Dominion means you can only trust yourself — but what if all you want is to be able to confide in someone?
“Maria and Saya are friends, but at the same time, although you have the desire for friendship you know you can’t really trust them,” María says. “It's a very lonely world. You can't have personal relationships, because it would get in your way, and you will develop feelings and an assassin cannot have feelings.”
It’s something that all the characters grapple with, and it’s especially hard for someone like Marcus, who had been on his own until getting scooped up into the world of lethal poison and mind games.
“Marcus, I think he's just glad he's in a bed, you know? He really wants friends and a family, that's what he's creating over here, but he does not like violence,” Ben says. “He's forced to get in these violent situations, and he personally gets to feel the ramifications of violence. There are ramifications and it kind of teaches everyone at the school when we do this stuff, it's going to affect us physically and mentally.”
We’ve seen angsty teen after angsty teen throughout pop culture. And while sometimes the Deadly Class teens can wax dramatic for what feels like an eternity, those scenes do reflect the stage in life when everything is so dramatic — like when you’re writing 2,000 word blog posts about being slighted in AP Bio or locking yourself in your room with the radio turned to maximum volume. And even beyond adolescence, Deadly Class also touches on what it’s like to feel threatened in today’s society.
“It's the perfect show to watch right now because a lot of people right now can relate to feeling misunderstood or isolated,” Lana says. “I think that with all the craziness that is going on in the world, this show will provide support; that your isolation that you feel, you're not alone.”
What ultimately makes Deadly Class is that the cast seems like they had a blast making the show, and learned a little bit about themselves along the journey. María cites that her character struggles with mental illness and can often feel suffocated by the world around her. That, in turn, has helped the actor be a little more honest about her own anxieties.
“It's so important to normalize that,” she says. “Expectations nowadays are so freaking high that we cannot live up to them.”
And if you follow Lana on Instagram, you’ve surely seen all the training she’s been doing to get in assassin shape. It’s an achievement that she’s proud of because it also means that she’s able to really bring to life just how much Saya kicks ass.
“One of the coolest parts is learning how to defend yourself. Just as Lana, being able to now have the tools and training to know how to defend myself if ever I get into a situation, God forbid if I had to, that is one of the greatest parts,” Lana says. “And I think the women on the show are so bad*ss and the show has really given all the women on the show this sense of power they maybe didn't have prior going into this. So I quite like being at a school for assassins.”
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