Black Cake showrunner: 'It's time for us to have our Big Little Lies'

The decades-spanning show unfolds across Jamaica, Italy, Scotland, England, Wales and Southern California.

It tells the story of a runaway bride named Covey and a present-day widow in California named Eleanor Bennett, who leaves previously untold stories to her two children - enabling them to piece together the strands of their mother's life they never knew about.

When asked by RadioTimes.com about what made her want to bring Black Cake to life on the screen, Cerar said: "A lot of people think that this book was brought to me by all of these very big people, and I said, 'Oh, can I please have this job?'

"The truth is, I read this manuscript when I did not need a job - I was about to film my first TV show - and I just said, 'I have to adapt this.'

"I said, 'No one else can do it,' I loved it so much. It has so many personal connections and parallels to my own life – I’m adopted, my birth mum has a son and a daughter who don’t know I exist. There’s so many things."

Cerar continued: "But I just loved the nuanced, elevated people of colour as the main characters in this stunning character drama that was also a murder mystery. I just thought that this is the time for us to have our Big Little Lies, our big splashy streaming series.

"I just fell in love with it. Charmaine’s writing is just so beautiful, and I cried every five pages, like a gut punch - but there’s so much joy in it.

"It just had so much, and it also took us on this amazing rollercoaster of mystery and all over the world. There was just everything as a TV writer and producer, all the things that you want, it was just there."

The new drama certainly has very similar undertones to the Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman-led Big Little Lies, in the way the murder mystery unravels and secrets and lies come to the fore.

Talking about why a show like Black Cake is an important one, Cerar added: "For me, the ensemble of people of colour in a series that is aspirational but deep, it’s about many things.

"We have a Black ocean scientist in Southern California, when have I ever seen that character on television or in a movie? We have a half Jamaican, half Chinese protagonist and we see her entire life, we’re in a world that many of us haven’t been.

"That they are the main characters, they’re not the supporting characters in white women’s stories like we often are, that was, to me, so exciting. And that it wasn’t a story that was about the typical subject matters that we get when we’re the main characters of the story."

Read more:

• Mr & Mrs Smith showrunner on how show was inspired by Love Is Blind
• Reacher confirms which Lee Child book season 3 will be based on

The series is led by Mia Isaac (Not Okay) as Covey and Chipo Chung (Silo) as Eleanor, but also includes British actor Ashley Thomas (The Ipcress File) and Tony award-winning Adrienne Warren (Rustin).

According to the official synopsis: "In the late 1960s, a runaway bride named Covey disappears into the surf off the coast of Jamaica, and is feared drowned or a fugitive on the run for her husband’s murder.

"In present-day California, a widow named Eleanor Bennett loses her battle with cancer, leaving her two estranged children, Byron and Benny, a flash drive that holds previously untold stories of her journey from the Caribbean to America.

"These stories, narrated by Eleanor, shock her children and challenge everything they thought they knew about their family’s origin."

Black Cake will premiere on Disney Plus on Wednesday 31st January. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight.

Try Radio Times magazine today and get 10 issues for only £10 – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.