Deadline reports, Rupert Graves has joined Hulu’s anticipated limited series Washington Black as a series regular, with Shaunette Renée Wilson signing on to a recurring role.
What’s Happening:
- Selwyn Seyfu Hinds is adapting the nine-episode drama series based on Esi Edugyan’s international bestselling novel of the same name. It will follow the extraordinary 19th-century adventures of George Washington Black (Ernest Kingsley Jr.)—an 11-year-old boy on a Barbados sugar plantation who must flee after a shocking death threatens to upend his life.
- Graves and Wilson join a previously announced series regular ensemble led by Ernest Kingsley Jr. and Sterling K. Brown, which also includes Eddie Karanja, Tom Ellis, Iola Evans, Edward Bluemel and Sharon Duncan-Brewster.
- Graves will play Mr. Goff, a British scientist who travels to Nova Scotia with his daughter, Tanna (Evans), after fleeing social stain, the dwindling of fortunes in London, and lessened influence with the Crown.
- As previously announced, Brown is playing the gregarious, larger-than-life Medwin Harris, who traveled the world after a traumatic childhood as a Black refugee in Nova Scotia as the de facto Mayor of Black Halifax prioritizes the community over everything except Black, his young protégé. Meeting Wash sends him down a challenging path of self-discovery. And as the barricades around his heart start to fall, Medwin will learn to dream again.
- Brown is exec producing the series from 20th Television under his Indian Meadows Productions banner, alongside Hinds, The Gotham Group’s Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Jeremy Bell, Lindsay Williams and DJ Goldberg, and series writer Jennifer Johnson. Series directors Wanuri Kahiu and Mo Marable also serve as executive producers, along with Anthony Hemingway. Esi Edugyan is co-producing, with Hinds also serving as showrunner.