Where can a man of Ghanian heritage from upstate New York go to fit in?
Outer space is one option.
That’s the path actor Ato Essandoh took, leading him to the new series “Away,” a space drama from Netflix out Saturday.
“In upstate New York, not only are there not many Ghanians, but not many Black people,” the 48-year-old actor told the Daily News. “I had this dislocated feeling of being part of a group where I’m still an exotic foreigner. And then my Ghanian relatives look at me like a big, bumbling American.”
Then he found “Away,” in which he plays an astronaut and scientist, a role tailored to Essandoh’s own life story.
The character, Kwesi, was originally supposed to be Nigerian until executive producers Andrew Hinderaker and Jessica Goldberg shifted the narrative to make him more like Essandoh; the actor’s parents even got to help pick Kwesi’s name.
In space, Essandoh said, you can be anyone you want to be.
“Away” stars Hilary Swank as Emma Green, the American leader of an international space crew on a three-year mission to become the first humans to step foot on Mars. Green’s cohorts span the globe: veteran Russian cosmonaut Misha (Mark Ivanir), Indian Air Force pilot Ram (Ray Panthaki), Chinese chemist Lu (Vivian Wu) and Kwesi, born in Ghana and raised in England by adoptive parents.
The eight-episode season rarely rests, scuttling between catastrophes in space and tragedies on earth, whether with Emma’s husband (Josh Charles) and 15-year-old daughter (Talitha Bateman) or in the personal lives of her colleagues. Some drama is life-threatening, some as insignificant as a schoolyard crush. But from 47 million miles away, everything seems to mean more.
“What is extraordinary about Mars and going to Mars is not so much about the ability to go somewhere, plant the flag and say we did it,” creator Hinderaker, who was inspired by a 2014 Esquire article, told The News.
“It’s about what is required to get there, the ways in which humankind has to be better than it often is in order to achieve something so difficult.”
Long Island-born NASA astronaut Mike Massimino helped the cast adjust to what reality looks like in space, from the food to the feeling of being “disconnected from everything that you know about humanity.”
“Don’t get it twisted,” Essandoh said he was told, “everything you do in space is really hard.”
Elsewhere, the writers talked to astronauts and their spouses, people at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
“We got a small appreciation for the science but also for the human experience…of being in space,” Hinderaker told The News.
Essandoh joked that the threat of being isolated from friends and relatives may seem less daunting in the age of coronavirus, but the idea of “Away” was always about making a new family. In space, passports don’t matter.
“Humanity has this layer of imaginative reality that we all live in: borders and religions and countries. This piece of dirt is America versus that piece of dirt is Russia. But the 200 years that America has been America is nothing,” Essandoh told The News.
“What’s to stop this land from being something else? Because that’s what we all agree on as humans. If we realize that we’re making up this game, we can make up a better game.
“If we started really understanding that we are the ones creating this imaginary reality, then we can do it better.”
“Away,” more inspirational than scientific, constantly puts its characters in danger and then pulls them out by force of will and determination and sometimes death-defying space walks. Hinderaker said it was all about hope.
“I wanted to write about small, flickering lights surrounded by darkness,” he told The News.
“It’s the hope of what humanity can accomplish when they work with an open mind and open heart and transcend politics and national borders.”
