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The series adapts Esi Edugyan's 2018 novel Washington Black, which won Canada's prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, bringing a celebrated work of literary fiction to the screen as a big-canvas adventure.
Sterling K. Brown both stars and serves as an executive producer, and his character, the Halifax community leader Medwin, was substantially expanded for the television adaptation into a larger role than he occupies in the source novel.
The production was mounted on an ambitious global scale to match the novel's continent-spanning story, staging Wash's journey from a Barbados plantation across the ocean and as far as the frozen Arctic, with two actors — Eddie Karanja and Ernest Kingsley Jr. — sharing the role across the character's younger and older years.

Washington Black is a sweeping Hulu limited series adapted from Esi Edugyan's acclaimed 2018 novel, a coming-of-age adventure that carries its hero from bondage to the far corners of the globe. Ernest Kingsley Jr. stars as the adult George Washington “Wash” Black, a boy born into slavery on a Barbados sugar plantation whose prodigious scientific gifts are recognized by an eccentric abolitionist inventor. When a death forces him to flee, Wash embarks on an odyssey across oceans and continents that transforms him from fugitive to scientist, artist, and explorer.
Sterling K. Brown, who also executive produces, plays Medwin Harris, a charismatic community leader in Halifax whose role is expanded from the novel, while Eddie Karanja plays the younger Wash and Tom Ellis, Iola Evans, and Sharon Duncan-Brewster fill out the cast. Told across dual timelines and multiple continents, the series pairs the propulsive momentum of a nineteenth-century adventure yarn with a thoughtful meditation on freedom, identity, and who gets to author their own story.
Adapting a novel that won Canada's Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker, the series reaches for the grandeur of classic adventure storytelling while centering a Black hero's journey toward self-invention. Lavishly mounted and spanning locations from the Caribbean to the Arctic, Washington Black streams on Hulu.
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