Harper admits that Noah is "pushing some things down" but "he is comfortable in this relationship, as well, even if he's not necessarily happy, and I feel like that's a place that a lot of relationships wind up in, especially over the course of a decade or longer." He's gotten what he's supposed to get out of his life, and even if he's not necessarily 100-percent satisfied with where it is, and where his relationship is and all that stuff, it's OK it could be a hell of a lot worse." This is because, according to Harper, "he's in a place where he's reached his allotment of happiness. When we meet Emma and Noah on their anniversary trip, it is very clear that she is unhappy, but he seems more content, despite having experienced hardships in their shared past and not being oblivious to his wife's own unhappiness. Barry yelled ‘cut,’ and we all shook it off and I was reminded, in that moment, that we’re all on the same team telling this story because we think it needs to be told.The key to playing any stage of a romantic relationship, no matter the setting, Harper knows, is keeping it grounded. “Maybe I should have gone and cleared my head. But I was angry and I felt like I was going to lose control,” he adds. “The actor was outfitted and he felt totally safe that my little ass couldn’t really hurt him. When I run out the front door of that church and I attack one of the marauders, I remember going out of my head for a second. “I found myself almost blacking out with anger. “I never talked to the on-site therapist, but I did find it really triggering when we were doing the assault on the church,” Harper divulges. However, he hopes that the discourse the drama inspires outweighs the trauma that is depicted. Given the subject matter and the way it impacted even him, Harper says he understands why some viewers are reluctant to watch The Underground Railroad. The person is here, and then they’re not.” It hits in a different way when you don’t have a drawn-out goodbye. There is no closure and he’s just gone, and there’s something about the brutality and the flipness of it that feels like real life. It’s the most effective way to bring his story to a close, and it’s the way it unfolds in the book, too. “The effect of Cora not really having any time to mourn is realistic because life feels like that sometimes. “There’s something really truthful about the way Royal’s death unfolds,” he reflects. But because Cora and Royal had been planning a future together, the loss of his life is also painfully convincing, Harper says. Royal’s murder, which takes place when the farm is ambushed, is tragic. It was really useful to make sure I landed on something that Barry and I were really comfortable with doing.” “In a lot of the narration in the book, Royal is described as being something that Cora hadn’t seen before and having an easy way about him - that really told me how to approach the character. “I wasn’t too mad about where his story goes,” Harper says. That’s when Harper learned that although Royal is an amazing man who helps the story’s protagonist (played by Thuso Mbedu), Cora, love herself and others more, he is also a Black man in pre-Civil War America who dies violently at the hands of insecure white supremacists. “And then I got the part and realized I should read it.” “I’d known about the book for a while but I sort of avoided it because these types of stories affect me,” Harper confesses. Royal, whom Harper plays, is a free-born Black man who helps get passengers to and from the train and as far North as possible. And there’s an actual subterranean train system that mystifyingly helps the enslaved escape to freedom. It’s a narrative journey that boldly breaks down all the horrors of slavery while also intertwining the self-liberation of enslaved Black people. Once he secured the gig, Harper read Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which Jenkins adapted, and readied himself for the journey. “And I was like, ‘Y’all, I just booked The Underground Railroad.’ And everyone was like, ‘Whoa! Yo! Oh, wow!’ It was a whole thing.” But once the whole bus saw that I was getting on my phone, everyone went silent,” he adds. “Usually I don’t take calls in front of people just because it’s rude. Barry Jenkins on How The Underground Railroad Counters the Black Trauma Debate: 'These Things Happened'īarry Jenkins Breaks Down How The Underground Railroad's Music Connects Black People to Their Ancestors
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