Simone Smith
BET+ and CBC series THE PORTER (8×60), from Inferno Pictures and Sienna Films (a Sphere Media company) announces the addition of multiple award-winning actor Alfre Woodard to their first season as part of the cast and as executive producer. THE PORTER is currently shooting in Winnipeg, Canada.
Woodard will play the role of ‘Fay’, who runs the local brothel in St. Antoine – she’s sexy, direct and takes great pride in living life on her own terms. She joins Aml Ameen (I May Destroy You, Yardie), Ronnie Rowe Jr. (Star Trek: Discovery, Pretty Hard Cases), Mouna Traoré (Self Made, The Umbrella Academy), Oluniké Adeliyi (Titans, American Gods) and Loren Lott (American Idol, Tag).
Set in the early 1920s, THE PORTER offers a dramatic and compelling look at the Black community in St. Antoine, Montreal — known, at the time, as the “Harlem of the North”. The story is told through the eyes of two Black train porters taking very different paths to liberation. One pushes to create the first Black union in existence, the other chases power on the wrong side of the law, but both have the same goal: to free themselves and their families from oppression. They’re young, gifted and Black, from Canada, the Caribbean, and the U.S., and over the course of the series they find themselves thrown together north and south of the color line. In an era that boasts anything is possible, if change isn’t coming for them, they will come for it.
From Montreal to Chicago and at every stop in between, in a time of extraordinary social and political change, THE PORTER tells the story of the people who fought to ignite the civil rights movement in North America.
