The Underground Railroad Teaser: All Aboard Barry Jenkins's Long-Awaited Series

Well, Happy Black History Month to this. Barry Jenkins’s long-awaited adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Underground Railroad finally has a premiere date. In the official teaser trailer, Jenkins’s watchful lens focuses on Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu), a young woman chasing freedom in the antebellum South on the near-mythical Underground Railroad. What she finds is “no mere metaphor, but an actual railroad full of engineers and conductors, and a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil,” a release explains. As she travels from state to state, Cora is relentlessly pursued by a bounty hunter (Joel Edgerton) who was never able to capture her mother when she left Cora behind years earlier. The ten-episode limited series also stars Chase W. Dillon, Aaron Pierre, William Jackson Harper, Sheila Atim, Amber Gray, Peter De Jersey, Chukwudi Iwuji, Damon Herriman, Lily Rabe, Irone Singleton, Mychal-Bella Bowman, Marcus “MJ” Gladney Jr., Will Poulter, and Peter Mullan. Barry Jenkins serves as showrunner and directs all ten episodes. The Moonlight visionary has been sharing hints for months on his Vimeo, each one paired with Nicholas Britell’s soul-gripping score. The Underground Railroad premieres May 14 on Amazon Prime Video. Until then, watch the latest…
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