What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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T10 WHATS UP! February 20 - 26, 2022 road and through the Great Mi- gration." While the cast of characters in "The Porter" may come from di- verse backgrounds, it was not difficult to find the perfect ac- tors for each part, according to series director Charles Officer. The "Akilla's Escape" (2020) director told Radheyan Simon- pillai for NOW Magazine that in order to find their cast, he and fellow series director R.T. Thorne ("Utopia Falls") simply travelled across Canada, noting, "there's unbelievable talent here." Officer went on to say that "anyone who is looking for Black actors and saying they can't find somebody, well, here you have it." In that same interview, Thorne also shared the impor- tance of porters in Black com- munities that were just a few generations removed from slav- ery by the time they were unionizing in the 1920s. He not- ed they "were able to utilize that network and spread some of their ideas and learn, and take that information back into their communities" for added bene- fit. Annmarie Morais ("Kill- joys"), Marsha Greene ("Coro- ner") and Aubrey Nealon ("Snowpiercer") all write for "The Porter," with Morais and Greene also wearing producer hats for the series. Morais shared with NOW Magazine the broader mission behind the show: "The struggles within ourselves, the struggles beyond ourselves and the struggles of the world at large." Like a lot of passion projects, "The Porter" has been many years in the making. It started over a decade ago in 2010 when Pinnock and Ramsay began pitching the project as a movie. When it was eventually picked up by CBC as a series, it was soon dropped when additional funding fell through. Through its ever-developing lifetime, Mo- rais and Greene moved from writers to showrunners while original creators resisted sug- gestions from executives to bring on white showrunners. In the same NOW Magazine interview, Greene said of the long road to the premiere of "The Porter": "It's taken a lot of time for Black creators to break through and get to the level where we're allowed to tell our stories." Morais added, "we all spent a lot of years working and doing our own thing separately to get to this moment where we're all poised and ready to be showrunners and executive pro- ducers. … We really feel like we are the people to tell this story." Get ready to travel back in time and experience history when "The Porter" premieres Monday, Feb. 21, on BET+. continued from page T2 Band together: Premiering drama explores founding of world's first Black-led union TV FEATURE 5 x 5 Aml Ameen as seen in "The Porter"