Sterling K. Brown leads 'a tale of mentorship' in 'Washington Black' first look (exclusive) (2025)

Washington Black (Ernest Kingsley Jr.) is ready to turn the world upside down.

The titular character of Washington Black is at the heart of a new Hulu series, coming to the streaming platform on July 23. Based on a novel of the same name by Esi Edugyan, it follows Barbados-born George Washington Black (Eddie Karanja), who is raised under the shadow of slavery.

Enslaved and working in the fields, young Wash is also possessed by a keen scientific curiosity, which catches the attention of the sugar plantation owner's brother, Christopher "Titch" Wilde (Tom Ellis). Titch mentors Wash, recruiting him to help with his research. And when a horrible accident endangers Wash's life, Titch helps him escape and the two go on an adventure traversing the world.

Ultimately, Wash ends up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he is taken under the wing of town leader Medwin Harris (Sterling K. Brown).

The story splits its time between young Wash's misadventures and the older, adult Wash's tale of first love with a biracial woman, Tanna (Iola Evans), and a brush with danger in the form of bounty hunter, Willard (Billy Boyd).

If it feels like an old-fashioned adventure yarn and coming-of-age story, that's precisely by design. "I've never seen the story being told through the lens of a young enslaved boy," says executive producer and showrunner Kimberly Ann Harrison. "To be in the lens of that child and dreaming, I have two young boys, and that idea of dreaming and following through on those dreams was so amazing to me. You haven't seen something like this. I'm really excited for the world to go on this grand adventure with Washington Black."

Selwyn Seyfu Hinds came on board as executive producer and showrunner after Brown had already signed on to producer and star. For him, the story and the chance to show audiences something both new and familiar was extremely personal. "I too am an immigrant from the Caribbean," says Hinds. "My family's roots are in Guyana, but also Barbados, where the character's roots are."

"When I read the book Wash's journey felt a lot like my own," he continues. "I left the Caribbean as a young boy and found my way to agency and manhood through traveling. There was something about that that felt really familiar and personal, and I tried to inscribe that into the writing of the story."

The series largely takes its lead from the novel, but it does make several changes, including expanding Brown's role and creating a dual timeline as opposed to the linear, chronological narrative of the book.

The timeline was shifted to create a stronger dramatic arc. "The book is written in Wash's first person, recollective voice," says Hinds. "When I first read the book and started thinking about how to adapt it, the structure that I really thought about was The Canterbury Tales and this voyage of this boy who becomes a man through all these characters who affect him and who he affects."

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Not to mention the more practical reason. "If we told the story linearly, we wouldn't get to adult Wash until episode 7," Hinds quips (the show is 8 episodes). "So the structure suggested itself."

Adds Harrison: "We wanted to show Wash's origin story because that is really important. So those two timelines of showing the boy that he was, and then, the man he grows into were really important to us."

Hinds also wants to make sure audiences are aware that Brown's part wasn't enlarged at the actor's behest (even though he is also an executive producer on the show). Instead, it was about emphasizing the larger theme at the center of the work.

"The thing about Sterling is he's not some kind of diva movie star who's like, 'Write me a gigantic role,'" Hinds explains. "It was what's going to serve the story best. It took me a couple of months to really figure out that so much of this tale is about mentorship, who you mentor and who you're mentored by. I realized that we needed a counterpoint to Titch's relationship with Wash for the adult version of Wash. We already had that character in the book in Medwin, so from there it was just building it out."

Brown adds: "There’s something really lovely about the question, 'Am I my brother’s keeper?' and 'Who is your brother?' And Black folks looking out across the diaspora looking out for one another in a climate that wasn’t the most receptive to us as a whole, finding community, finding family, finding a sense of purpose and agency amongst ourselves that is quite lovely and maybe strangely applicable to today, even though the story takes place in the 1800s."

That sense of community extended to Brown's approach to producing the series as well. "He was in Video Village, he was giving notes to the actors," says Harrison. "I had never really encountered that — to see an actor really step into that producer role the way that he did with problem solving, budget talk. it was great to work with him as both an actor and on the producer level."

Hinds also found the mentorship of Medwin extending into Brown's role on set. "Sterling was his character in real life," he gushes. "He was the mentor, uncle, big brother. Sterling didn't get to set until seven weeks in. And the day he got there I said, 'I got so much to do, can you please just wrap your arms around these kids?' He would go to lunch with them, he'd have dinner with them."

"Plus, everything Sterling does on set is just captivating," Hinds adds. "It pushes the level of the entire production to feel that we can all live up to that. There wouldn't be a Washington Black without Sterling."

Additionally, while the novel is told entirely from Wash's point of view, the show allows us to get inside the heads of Wash's love interest, Tanna, the young daughter of an aristocrat straining against her father's insistence that she hide her identity as a half-Black woman.

"Tanna came from a place with her mother of wanting to dream and not letting anyone put a roadblock up," teases Harrison. "It was all about searching for who she's supposed to be versus who others want her to be."

Washington Black is coming into the world in a moment where questions of identity and community are once more at the forefront of conversation. It was a central theme in spring box office hit Sinners, and Washington Black just furthers the discussion. Though that wasn't by design.

"I don't think we can take claim to being prescient prophets," jokes Hinds. "A lot of these conversations around identity, around race, around tribalism, they're always here. It is just a matter of sometimes there's a piece of art that brings them up to the volume where we all hear them and are aware of them."

Adds Harrison: "There's who people think you're supposed to be and who, when you question your own identity, you choose to be. We're in a place where people are starting to question and ask those questions where they might not have before."