Alfre Woodard joins the cast of BET+/CBC’s The Porter, an upcoming drama series about a group of 1920s railway workers who unite to form the world’s first Black union.
Woodard, who is also executive producing the series joins previously cast Aml Ameen, Ronnie Rowe Jr., Mouna Traoré, Oluniké Adeliyim and Loren Lott.
The series was created by Arnold Pinnock, Annmarie Morais, Marsha Greene, Bruce Ramsay, and Aubrey Nealon.
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The original drama is set primarily in Montreal, Chicago and Detroit as the world rebuilds after the First World War. ‘The Porter’ depicts the Black community in St. Antoine, Montreal — known, at the time, as the “Harlem of the North.” They’re young, gifted and Black, from Canada, the Caribbean, and the U.S. via the Underground Railroad and through the Great Migration, and they find themselves thrown together north and south of the color line, in an era that boasts anything is possible — but if change isn’t coming for them, they will come for it. By any means necessary.
Woodard will play Fay, who runs the local brothel in St. Antoine – she’s sexy, direct and takes great pride in living life on her own terms.
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Aml Ameen stars as Junior Massey, an intelligent, smooth, ambitious, and fearless risk-taker and war veteran employed as a porter with the transcontinental railroad. Traoré is cast as Massey’s wife Marlene, a worker with the Black Cross Nurses, an offshoot of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Rowe Jr will play Massey’s war buddy Zeke Garrett
Morais and Greene are writers/showrunners on the eight-part series, with Charles Officer and R.T. Thorne set to executive produce and direct. Pinnock also serves as an executive producer, and Ramsay a co-executive producer. Jennifer Kawaja serves as Executive Producer for Sienna Films and Ian Dimerman as Executive Producer for Inferno Pictures. The series is written by Morais, Greene, Andrew Burrows-Trotman, Priscilla White, Pinnock and Ramsay, with Thorne participating in the writers’ room.
The series comes from Inferno Pictures and Sienna Films, a Sphere Media company. Shooting is currently underway in Winnipeg, Canada.