Samuel L. Jackson to appear in Apple’s ‘The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey’
Jackson will also serve as an executive producer
This week, it was confirmed that Samuel L. Jackson will be starring in the limited series The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey at Apple.
According to Variety, “The six-episode series is based on the novel of the same name by Walter Mosley, who will adapt the book for the screen. Jackson stars as the titular Ptolemy Grey, a 91-year-old man forgotten by his family, by his friends, by even himself. On the brink of sinking even deeper into lonely dementia, Ptolemy experiences a seismic shift when he’s given the tremendous opportunity to briefly regain his memories and uses this precious and fleeting lucidity to solve his nephew’s death and come to terms with his past.”
The Apple produced series will be executive produced by Jackson and Mosley along with David Levine and Eli Selden of Anonymous Content and Diane Houslin.
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As we previously reported, Jackson’s docuseries of the retraced path of human trafficking has also found a global audience as Enslaved: The Lost History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade will be shown worldwide.
Enslaved: The Lost History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade was sold to 130 territories after its US premiere in September according to The Hollywood Reporter. Jackson pulls double duty as an executive producer and hosts of the series that traces the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Historians Afua Hirsch and Simcha Jacobovic, a director of the documentary, accompany Jackson as he makes the journey on the various sites the trafficking occurred in the six-part series.
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Jackson has long expressed a desire to have been the Black Jacques Cousteau and was drawn to this project because of its focus on sunken slave ships.
“The director told us that they had identified these ships that had gone down and started telling me where they were and what it meant, that some of them had enslaved people on them,” the prolific actor recently told THR. “And one in Michigan was a liberation ship that was taking people from some point here in the U.S. to Canada. I wanted to be a part of that of course.”
Fremantle, which is handling international sales, closed the deal on the Epix docuseries. It premiered in the states on Sept. 14.
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