Exclusive | Taron Egertons new AppleTV+ drama Smoke is already revealing a huge spoiler

Dennis Lehane knows his way around a crime drama. The prolific author’s novels were the basis for several star-studded movies, including Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River” starring Sean Penn, Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” with Leonardo DiCaprio, and Ben Affleck’s directorial debut “Gone Baby Gone.” (Affleck also revisited Lehane’s work in his 2016 movie “Live By Night”).Now, Lehane, 59, is the creator, exec producer, and writer of the AppleTV+ drama “Smoke” starring Taron Egerton, premiering Friday, June 27. The story follows a detective and an arson investigator who are on the trail of serial arsonists. It’s loosely based on a true story of John Leonard Orr, a serial arsonist from the 1980s who was the subject of the podcast “Firebug,” but Lehane exclusively told the Post, “I don’t want to tell a story set in the 1980s.I don’t want to be locked down in the past again, like I was with ‘Black Bird,’” he said, citing his previous Emmy-winning Apple show, also starring Egerton. “But, I love the pathology of this guy – it’s crazy,” Lehane said about Orr.

“He sees himself as a hero, and he cuts off one part of his mind from the part of him that knows he’s a villain…There’s something particularly American about it, too.It’s like the need for celebrity trumps your own self-preservation since it was [something attention-grabbing he did] that, in the end, got everyone super suspicious about him.” Lehane borrowed elements of Orr’s “pathology” he said, but set the story in the present day, as well as changed character names and many details. “Smoke” is a darker role for Egerton, who has done more zany action flicks, like the “Kingsman” franchise and playing Elton John in the 2019 biopic “Rocketman.” “I think he has infinite levels of depth and range, and I like to exploit it,” Lehane said about Egerton.

“I don’t think it’s been exploited as much as it could be.” The ...