‘We had a therapist on set’ – William Jackson Harper on The Underground Railroad | Television

When he was a little one rising up in Texas within the Eighties, William Jackson Harper went to a present on the Cotton Bowl stadium in Dallas. “There was some a part of the programme the place some man, someplace within the stands, screams out, ‘The south will rise once more!’ Issues like that simply got here up that I didn’t clock as main moments. However as I obtained older I used to be like, ‘Oh, that was tousled.’”

He continues: “There’s a level in a lot of black individuals’s lives the place, particularly if you happen to’re round a lot of white individuals, all of a sudden your race turns into a factor. For me, it was center college. It makes the whole lot that’s taking place now look like, ‘Oh nicely, nothing ever actually modified. It simply went underground and now it’s again on the floor.’”

Within the post-Trump age of resurgent white nationalism, racist police violence and Black Lives Matter, there was a reckoning about US historical past, particularly by way of race: what must be delivered to gentle and what ought to keep buried? Simply final week, a Louisiana Republican recommended colleges ought to train “the great” about slavery. And there was uproar over the elimination of Accomplice symbols, with accusations of “erasing historical past”, at the same time as a Accomplice flag and a mock gallows featured within the January storming of the Capitol, in a “south will rise once more” spirit.

All of which makes this an attention-grabbing second to launch an epic drama revisiting the darkest days of American slavery. The Underground Railroad is probably the highest-profile examination of the topic since 12 Years A Slave. The 10-part collection is guided by Barry Jenkins, director of Moonlight, and tailored from the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead. The story follows an enslaved lady named Cora, performed by South African actor Thuso Mbedu, who escapes from her Georgia plantation and journeys throughout the mid-Nineteenth-century south.

Regardless of its ravishing cinematography and status manufacturing values, the collection doesn’t flinch from portraying the cruelty and violence of the time. Within the first episode, a black man is viciously flogged then burned alive. Worse issues occur later. Cora does discover pockets of happiness, which is the place Harper’s character is available in, however by way of America’s ongoing tradition conflict, it appears certain to impress the “erasing our historical past” brigade.

“I believe it’s simply being trustworthy about what the historical past really is,” says Harper from his Brooklyn residence, the place he has spent many of the previous yr locked down together with his girlfriend and his canine. “Who can we need to elevate? And who can we need to expose? That’s the factor individuals are having a arduous time with: the heroes we have been all raised with, typically they have been really … not.”

Railroad sees Harper in a very completely different mode. Finest recognized for portraying Chidi Anagonye, the quizzical, terminally indecisive philosophy professor from hit sitcom The Good Place, he has carved out a area as the kind of clever, metropolitan, mild-mannered black man who barely existed in widespread tradition till not too long ago. He performed a related character, to fish-out-of-water impact, in horror shocker Midsommar, and does so once more in his latest romcom We Broke Up. He was nearly in peril of turning into typecast, though followers’ response when Harper took off his shirt in a single Good Place episode recommended he all the time had romantic lead potential.

“I didn’t suppose I had a snowball’s likelihood in hell of getting this position,” he laughs. Harper had no inside connections. Like everybody else, he despatched in an audition tape and hoped. “I began actually proper after we wrapped the US capturing of The Good Place. The day we completed, I obtained on a airplane and went to the set for The Underground Railroad.” The transition was one thing of a lurch: “I believe that, as a result of I’ve completed a lot of comedy, I’ve this inside ticking clock. I had to let go of that. It was extra about ensuring that this world breathes and feels actual and visceral.”

The Underground Railroad shouldn’t be strictly historical past. Its most fanciful flourish is to think about an precise railroad, with tracks and steam engines, serving to enslaved individuals escape to the north when in actuality it was a community of activists and secure homes. However a lot of the story is impressed by, or near, precise occasions. Harper’s character, Royal, is a delicate motion hero: a freed man who fights to liberate different enslaved individuals. His house is an nearly utopian black-run neighborhood winery in Indiana.

There was no direct historic precedent for the character, however Harper drew on figures akin to John Mercer Langston, whom he additionally portrayed within the podcast collection 1865. Langston is strictly the kind of determine American historical past normally leaves out – an activist, one of many first black members of congress, US minister to Haiti and a founding father of Howard College in Washington DC. “It blew my thoughts that I by no means knew something about him,” says Harper. “I used to be like, ‘Oh, wow, individuals did this stuff, even at a time when it appears unattainable.’”

The Underground Railroad was psychologically difficult, says Harper, on condition that the solid have been successfully re-enacting traumas skilled by their ancestors, solely a few generations in the past. This may be traumatic in itself. “Barry’s unbelievable at creating an surroundings the place you are feeling secure,” says Harper. “We had a therapist on set. If issues obtained to be an excessive amount of, we might speak to that particular person. I by no means did however Barry undoubtedly did. He did it whereas taking good care of the remainder of us.”

This brings us to a different difficult concern: alongside requires a extra thorough understanding of US historical past, there have been debates in regards to the depiction, and potential fetishisation, of slavery as what has been labelled “black trauma”. The Underground Railroad follows within the tracks of not simply 12 Years A Slave however a run of latest choices akin to Antebellum, Harriet, Nate Parker’s The Delivery of a Nation and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, in addition to the Amazon collection Them. Many of those have been criticised for nearly revelling in scenes of cruelty, horror and sexual violence in opposition to black individuals, particularly girls.

Jenkins has written about his reluctance so as to add to this, however in the end he argued: “If not now, when? As a pupil on this nation – educated within the public establishments created by the nation to coach and kind its residents – the imagery I converse of, if introduced in any respect, is abridged, amended, curtailed and coded to guard the legacy that results in the siren name of ‘Making America nice once more’.”

Harper additionally is aware of these risks, he says. Travisville, the primary play he wrote, handled civil rights points in Sixties Texas. When it was staged off-Broadway in 2018, he recollects: “A good friend of mine after the present got here up, and she or he stated, ‘Nice job. I’m actually uninterested in listening to about black trauma, although.’ After fascinated with it for a whereas, I got here to know her standpoint.”