How Joel Edgertonâs cruellest role turned into a blessing
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How Joel Edgertonâs cruellest role turned into a blessing
The 46-year-old actor was driven to play a ruthless slave catcher in the yearâs most anticipated TV series. It may be his defining moment.
May 12, 2021
Joel Edgerton asked to be considered for the role of slave catcher Arnold Ridgeway in The Underground Railroad.
Credit:Nic Walker
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Joel Edgerton knows how to find his way. Put the Australian actor behind the wheel of a car in a city for a few weeks and he gets âa blueprintâ of the streets in his head. Place him at the start of his career as a young Sydney drama school graduate and 25 years later Edgertonâs a leading Hollywood star and an accomplished writer and director. Whatever their form, the paths he forges are unique.
Review: âThe Underground Railroadâ Weaves an Epic Vision
In Barry Jenkinsâs dreamlike adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel, the railway is real and so is the pain.
Thuso Mbedu is a woman on the run in an alternative antebellum America in “The Underground Railroad,” arriving Friday on Amazon.Credit.Kyle Kaplan/Amazon Studios
The Underground Railroad
NYT Critic s Pick
In Barry Jenkinsâs transfixing adaptation of Colson Whiteheadâs âThe Underground Railroad,â Martin (Damon Herriman), a white man smuggling Cora (Thuso Mbedu) as she escapes slavery, rouses her before dawn to witness something ghastly. Along the road theyâre traveling, grimly called âThe Freedom Trail,â the trees are hung with lynched corpses. âYou need to see this,â he tells her.
Underground Railroad tells an unflinching story of slavery nydailynews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nydailynews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Jessica Zack May 13, 2021Updated: May 16, 2021, 10:42 am
Barry Jenkins on the set of “The Underground Railroad.” Photo: Atsushi Nishijima / Amazon Studios, Cr. Atsushi Nishijima/Amazon Prime Video
When Barry Jenkins read an early copy of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel “The Underground Railroad,” which would go on to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, he knew two things right away: that he desperately wanted to adapt to the screen the potent, inherently cinematic story of an enslaved teenager who flees a Georgia plantation, and that a multipart television series would be “the best way to capture the full spectrum of Cora’s experience.”
Rolling Stone ‘The Underground Railroad’: Barry Jenkins’ Gorgeous Journey Into American Darkness
The director’s 10-part adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an escaped slave is visually stunning and emotionally wrenching
By Kyle Kaplan/Amazon Studios
Moonlight director will pause the story to present a tableau of his huge cast of black characters. These shots are stunning in their composition, as if Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton are painting an entirely different vision of American history than the one you most commonly find in textbooks and on museum walls. It’s an appropriate touch for a story that weaves in agonizingly real details from our horrible past of racist injustice with Whitehead’s rewriting of yesterday so that, for instance, the titular “underground” is a literal network of subterranean train tunnels that enslaved people like Cora (Thuso Mbedu) and Caesar (Aaron Pierre) use to escape the horrors of a lif