Barry Jenkins Shares Chilling New Trailer for ‘Underground Railroad’ Series

The Barry Jenkins-directed show is an adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel of the same name.

On Monday, Academy Award-winning director Barry Jenkins shared a sneak peek at his latest work. The Underground Railroad, an Amazon Prime Video-exclusive, has no release date yet. However, Jenkins announced in September that shooting had wrapped after 116 straight days.

The limited series is an adaption of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The novel is an alternate history story of Cora and Caesar, two slaves in the American South who make an attempt at freedom through the Underground Railroad, in this case a literal rail transport system in addition to a series of safe houses and secret routes.

View all four teaser trailers for the series on Barry Jenkins’ Vimeo page.

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe the show,” Jenkins told IndieWire. “I think you can’t describe all of it in one, because from state to state, the tone of the show and the journey shift. I think it’s one of the beautiful things about Cora in the book; from Georgia, to South Carolina, to North Carolina, to Tennessee, to Indiana. It’s almost as though Cora is manifesting each new world she’s entering. We always talk about world building. And I love that in this show, we have all these different worlds that are built out of the consciousness of this character, of this Black woman.”

Jenkins called the series the toughest thing he’s ever done. “Not because it was difficult to make physically,” he said, “but just emotionally. I’ve never cried on set with anything I’ve made. On this one, at least once every two weeks somebody would be like ‘you alright man?’ I would have to walk… off the set for 10 or 15 minutes because I was just distraught. Our guidance counselor pulled me off set one day and would not let me continue to direct.”

Stay tuned for further updates regarding The Underground Railroad.