Barry Jenkins has shared a teaser trailer for his forthcoming Amazon show The Underground Railroad, scored by Nicholas Britell.
Jenkins’ new limited series, which is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same, follows a young girl named Cora (Thuso Mbedu) who “makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South,” according to Amazon’s synopsis. “After escaping her Georgia plantation for the rumored Underground Railroad, Cora discovers no mere metaphor, but an actual railroad full of engineers and conductors, and a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil.”
Whitehead is set to be an executive producer, and Jenkins will direct all nine episodes. The main cast is rounded out with Chase W. Dillon as Homer and Joel Edgerton as Ridgeway. Jenkins revealed in September that production on The Underground Railroad had ended after a 116-day shoot.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe the show, and I think you can’t describe all of it in one, because from state to state, the tone of the show and the journey shift,” Jenkins told IndieWire. “I think it’s one of the beautiful things about Cora in the book; from Georgia, to South Carolina, to North Carolina, to Tennessee, to Indiana. It’s almost as though Cora is manifesting each new world she’s entering. We always talk about world building. And I love that in this show, we have all these different worlds that are built out of the consciousness of this character, of this Black woman.”
Jenkins is known for directing and co-writing Moonlight, and directing and writing If Beale Street Could Talk. Prior to the teaser’s arrival, he also shared some stills from the series.
Watch the teaser trailer at the top.
