‘Kaos’ Star Says Show’s Mood Board Featured Dad Harold Perrineau’s ’90s ‘Romeo + Juliet’ Character

September 7, 2024 @ 6:03 PM

Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” was a big influence on the Netflix series “Kaos,” the show’s star Aurora Perrineau said, and “Mercutio was prominent” on the show’s mood board. The biggest surprise, she added via X: “It wasn’t until partway through filming that the creators found out he is my dad.”

Perrineau’s father Harold chimed in, quoting his daughter’s story on the social media platform mand adding, “This is a true story!”

The elder Perrineau was credited with making Shakespearean language easy to comprehend in the 1996 take on the classic story of teen love gone horribly wrong. In 2015, he explained that he had to shed any previous ideas about how Shakespeare should be performed when he got the part.

“When we did ‘Romeo + Juliet,’ I had only done [Shakespeare] in school, so I had a very particular idea of how to do it, which is from studying it. Very classical. So when I got the job … everything I learned, we threw away. We wouldn’t do anything, not the big speech things I learned, none of my diction, none of the iambic pentameter. All of it was thrown away,” Perrineau said.

In 2020, the actor explained of Mercutio, Romeo and the latter’s cousins, “The way they came out, anybody in America could completely understand who these guys were and what they were looking for. The only thing that was ambiguous was the relationships: love or lust. That was left up for interpretation.”

Aurora Perrineau plays Riddy on the dark comedy series “Kaos.” The cast also includes Jeff Goldblum, Janet McTeer, Cliff Curtis, David Thewlis, Killian Scott, Misia Butler, Leila Farzad, Nabhaan Rizwan, Rakie Ayola and Stanley Townsend.