Sterling K. Brown’s ‘Washington Black’ Dares to Dream in Globe-Trotting Adventure

It was the joy. That’s what attracted three-time Emmy winner Sterling K. Brown to this thrilling, globe-trotting adventure story of George Washington “Wash” Black, who escaped from a childhood of enslavement on a 19th-century Barbados sugar plantation and grew up yearning for true love, scientific prospects, and success.

“It was the opportunity to tell a slave narrative through the eyes of a young, innocent boy who dares to dream of a life that is better than his circumstances,” says the This Is Us and Paradise star, an executive producer of Selwyn Seyfu Hinds’ adaptation of the novel by Esi Edugyan. “The story highlights Wash’s ability to dream rather than the trauma. In conversations that I’ve had with the community of the melanated,” he adds, referring to the wide spectrum of people with darker skin tones, “they’re like, ‘There’s more to us than just our pain.’”

Brown plays Medwin Harris, the de facto mayor of a Nova Scotia Black township, a safe harbor for the adult Wash and others, such as shopkeeper Miss Angie (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), whose friendship with Medwin is infused with romantic tension.

Disney / Chris Reardon

Tensions of all kinds enliven these eight episodes that alternate between two timelines, depicting Wash as a precocious 11-year-old orphan (Eddie Karanja) and a 19-year-old (Ernest Kingsley Jr.).

Young Wash is taken under the wing of a scientist and father figure, Christopher “Titch” Wilde (Tom Ellis), the plantation owner’s abolitionist brother, who discovers the child’s genius early. The production design brilliantly creates an early 1800s laboratory chock-full of fascinating equipment, and the pair work there happily until a horrific incident forces them to flee. Luckily, they have Titch’s creation, a magnificent flying machine called the “cloud cutter,” which looks like something straight out of Jules Verne.

Disney/James Van Evers

The misery they leave behind is countered by Wash’s delight at the big, wide world, whose sights and people he takes in hungrily. “Young Wash is brave,” says Karanja (The Sandman). “He’s not scared to be vulnerable.” The production used locations in Mexico for the Caribbean, where the pair tangle with pirates, and Iceland subbed for the freezing Arctic. Says showrunner Kimberly Ann Harrison, “Every location was a character. The terrain gave us a different story.”

The older Wash, his awe undiminished, is on another quest, to re-create Titch’s flying machine. “Wash has this gift of imagination, and it reels off the page in this wondrous human who can find the wonder and the curiosity in the world,” Kingsley says. The heartbreaking reason Wash and Titch are no longer together is slowly revealed, as is the truth of the gruesome Barbados incident.

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Sparks fly when Wash meets a young, like-minded woman, Tanna Goff (Iola Evans). She’s the ambitious research and laboratory assistant to her father (Rupert Graves), a renowned scientist. Her late mother was from the Solomon Islands. “Tanna’s character explores some of the challenges and privileges that come with being a racially ambiguous, white-passing person,” Evans says.

Tanna has been promised in marriage to McGee (Edward Bluemel), a rich businessman with a dark secret. “McGee represents obligation,” Evans says. “Wash is the first person in her young adult life who sees her for who she is. It’s a coming home to more parts of herself, but also represents greater risk.”

Disney/Chris Reardon

Threats come from bounty hunter Willard (Billy Boyd), who’s been chasing Wash for years. He’s not the only one. After a night of innocent rowing on a lake, the couple is harassed by a disapproving passerby. “We are constantly reminded that they are living in a society where these things aren’t allowed and are dangerous,” Brown says. Wash wants to walk away from their love because society presents so many obstacles, but “Tanna looks Wash in the eye after that event and says, ‘Can’t we dream up a new world?’”

When dreamers meet dreamers in this story, they amplify the joy in this world. Tanna gets her dad to hire Wash as an assistant, and his experience during a dive inspires an invention that will be familiar to present-day viewers. The wondrous creation changes his life.

Says EP Hinds, “The show is about finding the wings that we all have, about not letting the world give you permission as to whether you can fly, but to find your path to what flying might mean to you.”

Washington Black, Series Premiere, Wednesday, July 23, Hulu