With her bombshell blowout, fur coats and stiletto boots, Patina Miller’s Raquel Thomas takes the air out of every room she enters. The hardened matriarch and mother to Kanan in Starz’s “Raising Kanan” has had to work twice as hard to earn her stripes in the drug game in Queens and gain the respect of the men around her.
“Raq is the type of woman that will put her head down. She is always two to three steps ahead of everyone,” Miller told TheWrap for our latest digital cover story. “She goes into fix it mode. She is not one to wallow in any given situation.”
Set in the 1990s, the spinoff of 50 Cent’s Starz series “Power” chronicles a young Kanan Stark (Mekai Curtis), played by the rapper in the original series, as he helps his mother’s growing business and navigates the drug world on his own. Miller’s Raquel attempts to protect her teenage son from the cutthroat industry, but Kanan insists on following in his mother’s footsteps.
Raq isn’t like any other mother. She raises her son with tough love — the kind she received from her own mother — and teaches Kanan to ultimately fend for himself as he enters the high-stakes drug realm.
To compete with her male competitors, Raq has no choice but to stick her nose to the grind and work harder, though Miller said deep down she wants to pull back.
“There are a lot of things that excite her about this [lifestyle], but there’s a part of her that doesn’t want any of it,” Miller said. “She just wants to live a soft life, have a husband, a nice house in another neighborhood, and a family that all works together.”
Though Raq did not want her son to get involved with her business at first, she eventually relented and taught him how to be the best at the game. The queenpin toughened Kanan up to ensure his survival. In Season 4, her relationship with her son has leveled out as they learn to respect one another, but the matriarch now has to face the reality of being a woman in this industry, while thriving amidst the chaos.
“All of the men always get what they want,” Miller said of Raq’s drug lord competitors. “She’s going to do the work — fight tooth and nail — to get everything that she deserves in this man’s world.”
She learned this tenacity and grit from her mother, Miller said. “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay” actress said that though she luxuriates in her power as a drug dealer, Raq is still a little girl on the inside, “wounded, who just wanted her mom to be there for her.”
“Raquel loves her mother so much but hates her too,” Miller said. “But because she hates her so much, under that is so much love.”
While Raq’s relationship with her own mother was contested, she tries to pour love into her son even though she struggles with confessing her true emotions. Miller said that “hardness” comes from her upbringing.
Over the past four seasons, Miller had the opportunity to collaborate with her costume designers to align Raq’s wardrobe with her character.
“The clothing for Raq is like her armor,” Miller said.
Raq’s appearance is not an afterthought. How she looks helps her make more money to provide for her family and earn her place at the table. Each clothing piece she wears tells a story and helps her achieve her goals.
Set in Queens, Miller and the wardrobe department sourced materials that authentically represented the period and also how Raq carried herself through the world.
“Her choices in what she wears are very thought out,” Miller added. “The clothing should make Raq feel dangerous, sexy, interesting. You don’t want to take your eyes off of her, and I feel like Tsigie [White] and myself and the whole team has really done that with the colors, not just what types of clothing.”
Miller began her career in the theater, winning a Tony Award for her leading performance in the 2013 Broadway revival of “Pippin.” The Broadway star said that being a singer and stage actress prepared her for this role.
Though the Starz series does not require her to show off her vocal talents, Miller said that she constantly asked her collaborators how she could “make the scene sing.”
“I wanted her voice to be very musical and rhythmic,” Miller said. “Just even looking at dialogue and going through a scene, the crescendos, the highs and the lows of a scene, I was able to get into that from my musical background.”
Miller even noted that for her the best scene work happens when she and her scene partners are working almost in harmony — “It literally is like a song, right?” — allowing them to lean into specificity of the characters and their circumstances in the crime drama.
“Raising Kanan” was renewed for a fifth season in 2024 and airs its season finale May 16. As she looks towards the future for Raq, Miller said she hopes she can find some peace, but she’s not certain she will get it.
For Season 5, however, she wants to continue to dive deeper into her relationships between her family members, with Kanan and her competitors. Miller also said that Raq dreams for something more for her son, wishing that maybe he can find a way out of the life that she is stuck in.
“As a mother, you never stop dreaming for your kid. You never give up on your kids,” Miller said. “Raq has a lot of hope and dreams. Dreams still that Kanan will wake up and say that ‘I don’t want this life and I want to go do something else.’”
The “Raising Kanan” Season 4 finale airs Friday May 16 on Starz.
“I would love for her to be able to smile and have fun, but that’s not the world that our show is set in,” Miller said. “There is no peace. There is no rest there.”
