On May 10, Amazon Prime Video in partnership with Film at Lincoln Center and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights hosted a private virtual event in support of the streamer’s new series The Underground Railroad. It featured Oscar winner Barry Jenkins and his star Thuso Mbedu in a conversation moderated by best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who ended the 60-minute chat with niceties that typically close such an event.
“I want to congratulate you both,” offered Coates, “as I said, this is going to ignite a discussion that is, honestly, going to go past the moment. I really believe that you guys are going to be onto your next projects and your projects after that and you will still hear about this.”
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The Underground Railroad is based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and it follows a woman named Cora (Mbedu) as she seeks to free herself from slavery on a Georgia plantation through the Underground Railroad. After Coates’ compliments, Jenkins returned the favor.
“By the way, for the people watching, I gotta show Ta-Nehisi some love,” he said, adding that the author was the “original Medicine for Melancholy stan,” which was his debut feature film. Not long after the 2008 release, Coates happened to be speaking at a university in San Francisco. “This was before he was the Ta-Nehisi Coates and [writer, actor, comedian] Wyatt Cenac put us together. We got a drink in a bar and it was Ta-Nehisi who told me, ‘Barry, what are you doing, man? You got to get out of the country and you got to go write something.”
Jenkins took the advice to heart and went to Brussels where he wrote a script called Moonlight; then he went to Berlin and wrote If Beale Street Could Talk. “I want to thank you for that, man, because I could tell you meant it and I could tell that when you said it, it was because you cared about me.”
It was sage advice: Moonlight won three Oscars including best picture and best adapted screenplay for Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney.
This story first appeared in the May 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
