Thuso Mbedu has no words when asked to describe what it felt like to be cast by Barry Jenkins: over Zoom, she makes the kind of indecipherable gestures and exclamations that register as an implosion. Sporting a braid-out in two bunches and a black ‘MLK’ basketball t-shirt, the South African actress’s Martin Luther King Day is just kicking off in LA while mine is drawing to a close half a world away. She made the move Stateside last year, after wrapping on the Moonlight director’s forthcoming adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad – an American-lead debut that feels as urgent as it does reflective.
The story of Cora Randall is one of stark contrast to Mbedu’s own sunny demeanour. It’s at once a heart-wrenchingly thorough account of slavery and an allegorical sci-fi voyage through time, with Whitehead – and subsequently Jenkins – reimagining the secret network of safe houses and routes established to help enslaved people flee to free states in America. In this tale, it’s a literal subterranean railroad as well as a metaphorical one.
Though Cora’s story is framed by ahistorical fictions, it’s telling that the most chilling aspects are still those firmly rooted in fact. From the cruelty of the plantations to the sterilising and brutalising of men and women, Whitehead drew upon oral history and first-person accounts of slavery archived by organisations such as the Federal Writers’ Project
