Following on from the Oscar-winning Moonlight and the excellent if under-appreciated If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins is headed to the small screen for his next major project. He's adapted Colson Whitehead’s award-winning novel The Underground Railroad for Amazon, and the director put a first teaser online.
An alternate history novel focusing on two slaves in the 19th Century South who escape and attempt to make their way north following an actual rail system that runs underground, Whitehead’s novel became the first novel in two decades to win both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction.
The show's story follows Cora (Thuso Mbedu), a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar (Aaron Pierre), a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape...
Chase W. Dillon, Joel Edgerton and Amber Gray are also among the cast for the show, which has yet to announce a launch date on Amazon.