Director Barry Jenkins Says Maybe America Never Has Been Great

The director of Moonlight took on a 10-part adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad partly because it was such a wellspring of fear. “Jenkins was surprised, he says, of the extent to which the retelling of that history affected him. ‘There’s no blood, there’s no fire on set,’ he says. ‘And yet, we were on an actual plantation in Georgia. And as we’re recreating some of these moments, this feeling seeps into your body that things