‘The Gray House’ Stars on Bringing the Little-Known Heroes of the Civil War to Screen Life
Preview
The Gray House lifts the veil on a set of historical figures that many may not have known about before absorbing the story… including several of the actors portraying them.
The series centers on the Van Lew women — Eliza (Mary-Louise Parker) and Elizabeth (Grace Van Patten) — who ran a secret pro-Union spy ring, along with Richmond’s segment of the Underground Railroad, changing the course of the Civil War and, thus, American history forevermore.
While the pair pretended to be part of the slave-owning aristocracy by innocently batting their lashes, curtsying, and throwing lavish balls for the upper crust, they secretly freed their own slaves and conspired with others in town to help facilitate escapes and undermine the Confederacy’s war efforts.
They weren’t always successful, though, and experienced multiple devastating tragedies along the way, which made their story all the more inspiring and, unfortunately, still quite relevant to this day.
Before the series premieres in full on MGM+ on Thursday, February 26, the stars of The Gray House talked to TV Insider about the weight they felt in bringing their real-life historical counterparts to the screen — sometimes for the very first time.
The Gray House, Series Premiere, February 26, MGM+
Mary-Louise Parker (Eliza Van Lew)
The widow of a well-to-do gentleman and mother of two, Eliza used her substantial resources to hide in plain sight, charming the Confederate faithful by day and furiously working against them at night.
Mary-Louise Parker wasn’t familiar with Van Lew before literally breaking her back to walk a mile in her giant hoop skirt, but said she was “amazed” to learn of the story, “not only that it was women, but it was a mother and daughter. That just made it all the more powerful.”
The Emmy winner was also pleased to shed light on a little-known triumph of morals at such a complicated time in America’s history when those values seem to be in question again.
“Any truthful rendering of history, I feel, now is incredibly useful and valuable when we have mentions of slavery and Black servicemen in the military, things like that being taken down,” she said. “We need to keep reminding ourselves of history and need to go back, and it needs to be examined and presented in a much more holistic way. I mean, I went to crappy public school, but there … were so many holes in my education, so we can’t afford to lose anything like that. And it’s curious to me, because I feel like it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s a source of shame’ … No, that’s how you learn, that’s how you go forward, is by acknowledging and by understanding and being accountable for things that there can never be actual reparations for.”
Daisy Head (Elizabeth Van Lew)
Like mother, like daughter when it came to Elizabeth, who was just as ferocious a champion for the cause — at great cost to her mental well-being and social life.
“I definitely felt the weight of it in terms of I, ashamedly, was not aware of this woman and Mary Jane either. It was a part of history that I wasn’t aware of, and I’m very humbled to have learned about them, and they are extraordinary examples of the most brave, courageous, and fiercely tenacious women and spirits,” Daisy Head said of taking on the role.
“I was remarkably inspired by each of their stories and everything that they endured and risked and sacrificed in their quest for freedom and preservation of American democracy. It was, yeah, a remarkable learning curve for me, and I’m very grateful and privileged to be able to bring their story to more people and tell the world about their extraordinary existence.”
For Head, the power of the role wasn’t just in Elizabeth’s defiant spirit, but also the chance to bring heart and even moments of humor to the story, as the Van Lew women navigated uncharted waters with the help of their own wits.
“The duplicity that Elizabeth has and how she’s forced to be a chameleon in so many different settings … playing with that, it was just an incredibly unique and enjoyable thing to play with as an actor,” she explained. “And then the moments where we see the true Elizabeth break through, that was kind of exhilarating because I feel like a lot of time, we had to kind of keep the lid on who she was in order to achieve what they were trying to achieve. And then those moments by herself, where she’s able to just kind of break through the mold, as it were, was cathartic for me, for sure, but was also just a testament to the person that she was, where she just had a façade, and she had so much bravery and courage to be out in plain sight and be all of these kind of… She was multitudinous, and I just think that was a testament to her, that she was able to keep it up for so long and do it so well to achieve all that she achieves.”
Amethyst Davis (Mary Jane Richards)
Like her costars, Davis wasn’t familiar with her counterpart’s history before taking on the role but was delighted to learn of the real-life Mary Jane Richards’ very hard-won achievements in the war, as she infiltrated the Confederate White House to secure critical information for the Union army at a key moment.
“I think sometimes if we just rely on what we’re taught in in school, we only will learn about… one or two ladies from this time period. And I think it’s beautiful that you’re able to highlight, ‘Oh, it’s not just one person.’ Everyone knows about the Underground Railroad, but you don’t think about how many people had to be working on it. It couldn’t have just been Harriet Tubman by herself,” she remembered.
For Davis, the familial bond that Mary Jane developed with the Van Lews echoed what she experienced with her costars. “Daisy and everyone always showed up to set very prepared. So it wasn’t like we had to fumble around with that part of it. And also, they were so open and giving. So it was easy for me to think of them, ‘Oh, Elizabeth is like Mary Jane’s older sister.’ That’s just kind of how I thought of it. And because this is my first time being a lead character, I felt like Daisy and Mary-Louise were taking me under their wing a little bit. If I had a question, they’d just answer it. So it was easy to form that dynamic,” she said.
Christopher McDonald (Thomas McNiven)
Thomas McNiven’s writings were some of the few firsthand sources for the story of the Van Lews and Mary Jane Richards, even if some have cast doubts on the accuracy of his own accounts of heroism in them. In The Gray House, Thomas is portrayed as a dutiful participant in the resistance efforts, using his bakery as a satellite for the entire operation.
Though Christopher McDonald agreed the character had “the Blarney Stone thing going at the time,” he still regarded McNiven as an “extraordinary human being who helped change the whole American war.” The actor found the experience of researching and ultimately portraying him to be “amazing.”
“Pretty interesting thing to go and do something, jump into someone’s shoes that is a real person,” he said. “It was a really, really amazing experience, because you have to do the research. You also have to meet with other people and see if they’re on the same page. Then you have Roland Joffé, our director, putting everything together and giving us these wonderful choices to make… It was a chance to go and work in Europe, and I just love jumping the pond, as they say, and going to different cultures.”
Hannah James (Clara Parish)
Hannah James had some experience playing a character in a Virginia-set Civil War-era story, thanks to Mercy Street, but she found the experience of portraying the quietly grieving courtesan-turned-hero to be a unique one all the same.
“When I did Mercy Street, I was 22 years old, never stepped onto a film set in my life. I was sort of deer in the headlights. … I mean, I didn’t even know what a mark was when I got to that film set,” she remembered. “Coming into The Gray House, I was definitely more versed. And Emma on Mercy Street is wide-eyed, naive, fresh-faced, first love, first real encounter with grief and blood and gore and war. Clara is very seasoned. She’s experienced grief, and this is her second [time] — well, probably more — falling in love, but she’s also very versed in the hard life, and that’s not Emma at all in Mercy Street. So they have a through line of period piece in the same time of the Civil War, but very different in terms of who they are, what they come from.”
Keith David (Henry H. Garnet)
The Gray House also brings a sampling of the oratory magic of Henry H. Garnet, noted abolitionist and minister, in a brief but impactful appearance by Keith David.
Unlike some in the series’ cast, David was previously familiar with the work of his character, thanks to his own education.
“I love studying about Frederick Douglass. I had known about him before, and I had known that he had also had impactful speeches because many of them were a different caliber than Douglass’ speeches,” he said. “Frederick Douglass was the Dr. King of his day, and Garnett was the Malcolm X of his day.”
Davis, who gets to deliver a show-stopping soliloquy that comes as a balm after some difficult moments in the story, felt the weight of his words as he said them, too.
“I didn’t feel any pressure of having to imagine the weight of what he’s talking about because as a black man in America, I could say those words today, right now, and mean it… That was a kind of a wonderful thing, but at the same time, it’s like, ‘Damn, are we still having this conversation?'” the actor explained. “But it’s also encouraging in a way because, just like his words were impactful at the time and made a difference, so it can make a difference once again, when we face incredible times like these, when we need these conversations, we need the encouragement of somebody like Garnett to be able to speak truth to power and to encourage you as an individual to know that you can make a difference. You’re not alone, and you don’t have to be alone.”
Sam Trammell (Jefferson Davis)
To prepare to play the president of the Confederacy, essentially the face of the pro-slavery movement, Sam Trammell had to learn to empathize with his position at the time.
“These characters certainly were on the wrong side of history, but they were, in our show, really presented in three dimensions and shown why their impulses were the way they were, why their perspectives were the way they were, and it was a different time,” he explained. “Not to excuse a lot of their behavior, but I really enjoyed diving in and learning.”
So what did he learn that surprised him the most? A lot. “He didn’t want to be president. When he left the Senate, once Mississippi had seceded, he wanted to just go and be a planter again,” Trammell continued. “He had grown up on his brother’s farm a lot of his life, and then he got pulled in to be the president of the Confederacy, which is crazy. He had a rough life. He lost four of his six kids at young ages. He lost his first wife to malaria after three months. They moved to this little swamp area in the Mississippi-Louisiana area, and he had all kinds of ailments. He had neuralgia, which is swelling of the nervous system. He had like a blurry eye and malaria. It was rough living back then.”
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