In Amazon Prime Video’s new series The Underground Railroad, Joel Edgerton plays Ridgeway, a fugitive slave hunter with a sadistic soul and an addled worldview. He’s got few if any redeeming qualities, and yet he also occupies a lot of both story and screen time and, frankly, carries a lot of parallels to people still operating in the world today. The A.V. Club talked to Edgerton about his approach to the character and how he used Ridgeway’s upbringing and self-esteem to find a way into the role. We also talked about the role of good parents in raising good citizens.
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There’s something particularly intimate about that. Key has noted in the past that taking a guaranteed job offer on the L.A.-based
SNL challenger
MadTV represented a pragmatic choice for a young Second City sketch performer, and he certainly made the most of the opportunity offered, especially in his friendship and partnership with Jordan Peele. Their subsequent series,
Key & Peele, was a revelation and a liberation, allowing two of the most fertilely original comic minds in sketch history free rein to express things neither
MadTV nor
SNL would have known what to do with. Not just because of race although, yeah but simply because Key and Peele’s sensibilities were uniquely their own. As accomplished as each is in various fields (Key pretended to be offended when an audience plant asked about his Oscar for
Photo: ABC/Pamela Littky
Say what you like about ABC as a network: When it reaches for the axe, it does so with pure and unquestionable killing intent. Over the years, we’ve gotten a sense for when the bloodlust is about to fall over the Disney-owned network usually around the second week of May, when it gets ready to show off its new slate of shows to advertisers at its annual upfronts presentation, realizes there’s a bunch of dead weight still hanging out on its schedule, and, whoops, there goes the axe.
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If Bloodbath Day 2021 really is upon us, though, it’s looking to be a fairly light one. Coming down immediately in the wake of it handing out four series orders to new shows (including the Don Cheadle-fronted