CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster, and BET+ have begun casting on its drama series The Porter.
Aml Ameen will lead the series about a group of 1920s railway workers who unite to form the world’s first Black union. Ronnie Rowe Jr. and Mouna Traoré are also cast.
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.
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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 and Ramsay are co-executive producers.⠀
‘The Porter’ has been greenlit for 2021/22.