New Teaser Trailer For THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD About a Runaway Slave Train Station
Writer and director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk) has released another teaser trailer for his upcoming historical fiction miniseries, The Underground Railroad.
You’ve all heard the true stories of the Underground Railroad in school, which was a network of secret routes and safe houses used in the mid-19th century to help slaves escape out of slavery into the free states. This story is set in an alternate timeline and imagines the Underground Railroad as an actual railroad beneath the southern soil, taking slaves on the first journey of their free life.
The show is based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, and the story follows Cora, “a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia who is an outcast even amongst her fellow Africans and is struggling coming into womanhood when she meets Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia who informs her of the Underground Railroad, inspiring them both to take the risk and escape to freedom.”
These events lead Cora on a journey “as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. 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.”
This trailer offers us our first look at the main character Cora, who is played by Thuso Mbedu. The series also stars Chase W. Dillon, Aaron Pierre, Joel Edgerton, Damon Herriman, William Jackson Harper, Amber Gray, Jim Klock, Lily Rabe, Fred Hechinger, and Owen Harn.
The 11-episode limited series has been in development for a long time. There’s no release date yet, but it’s expected to debut on Amazon Prime.